Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one".
From speaking to people who use Tinder (I settled down some years ago, so my experience of online dating was limited to OKCupid and PoF which were big back then), that the traditional route of finding a future spouse is still open, and Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships.
None of them are thinking they're going to find their future spouse on Tinder, that would be a nice bonus. Tinder is an app for getting laid.
When I was single and I went to a bar because I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion), my search parameters were very, very different than when I decided I wanted to settle down and find somebody to share my life with.
I don't think I'm unusual in this.
This article takes a slim premise and develops a hypothesis as fact that is too large a burden for it: that because on Tinder people are making flash judgements based on attractiveness, long-term relationships will change in their fundamental structural nature as relates to attractiveness.
This is nonsense. Tinder is an asynchronous singles bar.
It's the same behaviour that has been going on for hundreds - perhaps thousands - of years, but you can raise the bar of what you're looking for in terms of attractiveness if you yourself are attractive because you are not time-bound to last orders at the bar, and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it.
Sure, people might get married after meeting on Tinder, just as they do after a hook-up from meeting drunk in a bar. But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder.
If you haven't been in the dating pool for a long time, this is sort of like someone in Duluth making sweeping statements about Silicon Valley culture. Sex is undeniably part of Tinder's allure, but consider that the lascivious media stories and coworker jokes make it a lot less likely that couples that met through Tinder are going to volunteer the information. You're going to be misled by quite a bit of sampling bias if you just go by what you've heard.
As someone engaged to someone I met on Tinder, and I met a lot of attractive, relationship-minded women, Tinder is just far and away the most efficient way to meet attractive women. Even if you're looking for a relationship, the idea of placing any weight in elaborately written profile statements (which often tell you far less than 10 seconds in front of a person) and sending messages to random women on OK Cupid seems like a waste of time. Tinder takes all of the most awkward "breaking the ice" parts of looking for a hook-up OR a partner and turns them into a fun little swipe game.
I'll also add that most women I met on Tinder weren't above a hook-up but not-so-subtly had a relationship on the agenda, and that this affects guys behavior. If you sleep with an attractive, compatible woman a few times, it's not unheard of to start to form a friendship, at which point most (not all) guys in our society start to blanche at the idea of her doing the same with other partners. There's also the fact that for many of us, hook-up sex isn't even the best sex. So there's a natural draw to exclusivity.
'Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one".'
I think this is both true and not true. A suspicion I have (and I'm sure there's got to be research on this) is that a lot of people interested in casual dating/hooking up on Tinder and/or in bars are unconsciously looking for a long term mate. In some ways this is a very effective strategy, since you're cycling through a large number of potential mates to find one who meets some kind of acceptability threshold. I read somewhere (sorry can't find the reference), that extroverted, high frequency daters ended up in happier long term relationships simply because they had more selection, which on the face of it seems to make sense.
This is such bullshit. Every time I hear an explanation of Tinder like this, it's from someone who isn't even using Tinder and only reads about it vicariously through the people who brag about Tinder dating. The rest of us, men and women, use Tinder as an extra dating pool to add to Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid. They all have pros and cons. Hinge was great until they gave me 24 hours to respond to woman; sometimes I'm busy. Bumble requires the woman to message me first which is very nice as it takes that awkward "don't blow the first communication" line out of my hands.
Yes, there are people who use Tinder for hookups. People use OKCupid for hookups. Match for hookups. That has not even remotely been the desire of the women I've met on Tinder.
This seems to be less true outside the US. I've seen Tinder pick up a lot in Vietnam in the last two years but people use it to find more traditional dates or just to network or make new friends. It's not a hookup app here.
Since many people disagree with you, I'm going to chime in and say that I agree with you 100% when it comes to Tinder being used for hookups, at least where I live. I am a 25 year old male in South Jersey (near Philadelphia), and Tinder is primarily used for hookups here. I think it varies a lot based on where you live though.
I mean if you think about it, it's an online dating platform that provides nothing more than a few pictures and a sentence as a basis for decision making. It's designed to allow for fast selection of people based solely on appearance. This is backed up by the fact that there's no profile text displayed when you're swiping...all you see is a picture of the person. If you want to view their actual profile, you need to click their picture, which hardly anyone does.
This is unlike other dating sites where you have to take a personality test, provide a detailed description of your interestest, etc...
However, like someone else said, many people go there for hookups, but they are actually seeking a longer term relationship whether they like to admit it or not. Some are probably looking for hookups maybe with the possibility of a longer term relationship. Additionally, this is going to come off as sexist, but I feel that there's a large percentage of girls on there who aren't looking for anything at all other than attention. This is particularly true for attractive girls. Hell, who wouldn't love to have people constantly telling them they're beautiful? I've even talked to a few attractive girls who use Tinder "because it's funny". For guys, I will go out on a limb and say that 90% of guys on Tinder are looking for some action.
EDIT: Just to add, keep in mind that age plays a huge role here. I am 25 years old, and many of my friends are in the 20-23 year old range. I have a feeling that the average age of the commenters here is slightly higher, which could explain why so many people don't agree with Tinder being used for hookups. There's a big difference between a 35 year old and a 21 year old when it comes to maturity in dating.
> Dating Site OKCupid, for example, has shown that its users routinely rate members of their own race as more attractive.
> In this case, the data is clear that men’s preferences are much more homogenous than women’s. “There are women who 95% of men say yes to, and there’s nothing like that for men,” says McLeod. “A man is really attractive if 40% of women say yes.”
So women have more complicated taste than men. But there are probably certain clusters of women (based on demographics, location, etc.) who'd find a specific look attractive at a rate higher than 40%.
There'd be a "George Clooney cluster" and a "Leonardo DiCaprio cluster". I just need to find the sndean cluster.
That's been my experience. I appeal to a relatively small subset of women, but using OKC in a major city I was able to meet plenty of women in that subset.
I remember another study (but cannot find it) that women are more influenced by their peers opinion than men. Weird that this does not lead to more homogenous preferences. Must be clusters for women instead. It makes sense for men though. No need to ask your buddys opinion, if he most certainly agrees anyways.
Women like funny men. That's been my experience. Funny is attractive.
Self confidence plays a big role too, which goes with funny. Not "jerk self confidence", but "talk to you comfortably self confidence".
Also, I don't rely on online dating. I'm not a "player" by any stretch of the imagination, but life is too short to wonder what a woman would have said, so if I see a woman I like, I talk to her and ask her out if its appropriate. Politely and unintrusively. You risk nothing except rejection and stand to gain a whole lot more. Life gives to people who ask.
This being the internet you may believe or ignore the following:
I am a funny guy. I have been told multiple times by different people that I am the funniest person they have ever met. I have been told several times by different people in different contexts that I should be a stand-up comedian. All these were spontaneous and not said by anyone who wanted or needed anything from me.
I also used to be morbidly obese. Now I am in good shape.
The idea that funny is attractive in isolation (in the same way that a pretty face is on a woman) is, based on my experience, entirely, hilariously untrue.
A small off topic point based on the article, it's not "ELO" or "elo" it's "Elo" as in Mr. Arpad Elo, the Hungarian-American mathematician and chess player.
Attractiveness is, as everyone should recognize, subjective. Some people are very sensitive to height and some are very sensitive to intelligence and so forth.
After being married for the period when most people were finding partners, I divorced and started dating again. I realized that I wasn't very good at small-talk, and I was having trouble meeting women.
The HN comments here are full of suggestions, but they are isolated and not systematic. By now I'm sure that everyone is aware of the "pick-up artist" community on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of learning how to impress as many women as one can in order to have sex with someone you really don't care about, but while that almost underground community was still nascent I read about it and decided that it was something interesting enough to investigate. I traveled to southern California and met Mystery, the person described in Neil Strauss's (at the time) new book, The Game.
I hung out with them for two days and was invited to go out one evening with them. There were around a dozen guys in the group and it was a very fascinating evening. No, I didn't pick up a girl in a club and get laid, but talking to the guys was very interesting it did change things for me. Most of the guys I met were like me. They were lonely and wanted a serious girlfriend and had always had trouble approaching and striking up conversations with stangers.
I was always able to talk to people from my field or other academically inclined people, but I learned to be more interesting to others and to understand attraction from both sides. It helped my confidence tremendously and consequently I found more women attracted to me.
That's a long introduction to my recommendations:
- don't get caught up in the manipulative techniques being promulgated by the recent pick-up experts
- learn more about attraction by reading some of the early stuff talked about by, say, Mystery
- approach more strangers and stike up conversations (you don't need to be online to meet people)
- develop a wider circle of friends
- get out and make your life itself more interesting by finding new interests, this make you interesting to others
- take your company public! Success helps.
Generally, I've found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process. It's much better to simple strike up conversations with people that you find attractive. The time to line up dates online and exchange information and then discover that the person is nothing like their old high school photos is disheartening.
> Attractiveness is, as everyone should recognize, subjective. Some people are very sensitive to height and some are very sensitive to intelligence and so forth.
While it's subjective, there are stats from MANY dating sites that show having certain traits (e.g. tall black guy or short Asian woman) will give you an advantage in dating over others (short Asian guy or tall black woman).
Oktrends showed tall guys unequivocally have more sexual partners than short men.
I am married, but was given a pass to use Tinder while researching a dating app. One of the most interesting things that came from it is that I saw a definite pattern in the women who swiped right on me. Dating apps are markets where we are the commodity. If I were to assign a number to my matches, they would've all been in the same range. From that I extrapolate that I must be in that same number range to the opposite sex. I got true "price discovery" for myself.
That's interesting. I'd be very interested in determining my "market value". So on the app you can tell which women swiped right on you and which didn't? I am going to install Tinder tonight to check it out then.
I've had some interesting experiences here. I live a little over an hour outside of a major metro area that has a lot of single women. Sitting at home swiping, I get almost no matches, and when I tried swiping right on everyone once, the results weren't great, making it seem like my "number" isn't as high as I thought.
But then when I go into the city on the weekend and start swiping, I get a boatload of matches from much more attractive women, the kind I really do want to date.
It's just like they say in real estate: location, location, location. If you're not a good match or cultural fit for the single women in your area (I'm not), and you're a bit too far for a lot of people to want to bother dating you, the "market" is going to look really bad.
In the chart of trends in how people meet, there is a suspicious uptick in "at a restaurant/bar" in the last few years... that is totally just a cover for people who met on Tinder and then got serious.
I think online dating has killed the culture of courtship. It makes it too easy to reject people for the most superficial reasons, and gives the illusion that the dating pool is much, much larger than it really is.
I've long thought that in being able to instantly compare someone visually to countless alternatives, online dating makes people overly picky. As such, I've always wanted to build a dating site/app that rate-limited the number of people shown so viewers would be encouraged to read profiles and consider things a bit more.
I met someone online who had an absolutely fascinating (to me) profile she listed a bunch of authors I liked, my opening message was a question of which protagonist she preferred from the two sets of books and she was also also into a lot of the same stuff as me (politics and history) but didn't have a profile picture.
We had long conversations and I had no idea what she looked like for the first month or so, she commented that I hadn't asked for a picture which men normally do straight away, my response was "I enjoy talking to you".
She eventually sent a picture when we arrange to go on a date last week, turns out she is absolutely stunning (not I find her attractive, I mean objectively stunning) and the reason she took her picture off was all the "Hey baby, want sum fuk?" messages she was getting.
Date went well and we are going out again soon, I'm not handsome, I'm pretty average looking except for been in decent physical shape (swimming, cycling and dropping 60lbs will do that), frankly if I'd known what she looks like first I probably wouldn't have sent her a message in the first place figuring I didn't have a chance.
I've always thought there's a need for a Tinder with an OKC match % running in the background. If someone is similar enough, they're suggested to you, with a few of your physical preferences taken into account. The interface, though, is Tinder-like.
Or, in the least, Tinder could just create a basic setting for only showing "def not looking for a hook-up" profiles.
About 3 weeks ago, I was having dinner with my 15 yo daughter at a restaurant in a very high traffic area. We were people-watching and we came to the conclusion that people very rarely chose a mate outside of their own appearance level. If the woman is unattractive, then her mate is unattractive, and the converse. We did our little experiment for about 30 minutes, and did not see any couple where one was significantly more/less attractive than the other.
This certainly does not seem to apply in Japan where women who look for mariage are far more interested in status and money than the guy's age or looks. I see that constantly.
I'd say it's not that people don't want to date people that are far apart in attractiveness, but rather that everyone wants to date "up" or "across". And since if you go "up" the other goes "down", it tends to be "across".
Of course this assumes that attractiveness is objective, and purely physical. Which is false in both counts, but it's a simplification as we all know.
I found the referenced article to OkCupid rather interesting. It seems that if you can block people from visually seeing each other, until the actual blind date, then even very attractive women report having a great time with very plain men. So it seems that while people will almost invariably filter and match each other on looks if that option is open (which it usually is these days), but at the end of the day, looks are not important if you can meet in person first.
The output is clear: even random matching has a higher score than all girls (or boys) liking the same boys (or girls).
This is, indeed, a serious problem if you take that people nowadays have access to:
1. An enormous pool of potential partners
2. A lot more information
The .2 is particularly worrisome. It is clear that too much information early in the interaction can actually bring to suboptimal equilibrium. The thing is, when you know everything about somebody you tend to act on your most superficial preferences, getting to know gives you access to a much deeper connection (and a much better choice).
People are underestimating the importance of smell in the equation.
I want a smell-based Tinder. Seriously, most of the girls I met online seemed to have incompatible pheromones.
Unfortunately, specifying smell is not possible, I suppose because of the huge gap in science w.r.t. the olfactory system. This is curious because from an evolutionary perspective smell is the sense that developed before the other senses.
Idea that people make logical choices when it comes to dating is nonsense. Most people when looking for a long-term relationship are more set on being in control than finding the right person. Beyond that, most people end up in a relationship not by choice, but out of habit.
Ran into a guy joining Tinder the other day, he said they were saying the valuation for the company was a billion... :-)
Looks like HN is obssessed with physical attractiveness. Humans are interested in other things about their mate as well: intelligence, for example. In surveys, nearly everyone reports that they would like a mate at least as or more intelligent than them. And we rarely have good, direct signs of intelligence, so we use things like language, humor, &c. People also care about in-group membership, social class, and many other things. There is some correlation of physical attractiveness to income &c., in that more attractive people do make more money than less attractive people on average, but I would need more evidence to say this correlation is strong.
Look at that chart: the main way straight people meet their partners is through friends. In-person meeting pairings vastly outweigh online meeting pairings. Back in the 1940s, people meet through friends, through family, in elementary or high school, or by being neighbors. I shudder to see the rise of "at a bar", but online dating is a huge, huge improvement.
They are... but isn't something like Tinder essentially just showing you a photo and letting you decide? That would encourage the opposite behavior... which is what the article says.
I don't believe Tinder's elo ranking is used in any sort of significant manner within the app. Maybe it influences the order in which profiles are displayed but you can easily exhaust an geographical location of users. I'd be terrified if some of the women I'mean shown on there have elo rankings comparable to mine, not so much if the results are comprehensive.
This article outright says that women still don't agree on attractiveness while men largely do. So, it doesn't bear out its own conclusion. It just goes round and round with different side points.
As long as there remains a degree of wealth inequality and as long as wealth attracts -- the "mixed-attractiveness" couple will probably remain. Online dating maybe an influencing factor in peoples choice of partner but it isn't the only one.
[+] [-] PaulRobinson|10 years ago|reply
From speaking to people who use Tinder (I settled down some years ago, so my experience of online dating was limited to OKCupid and PoF which were big back then), that the traditional route of finding a future spouse is still open, and Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships.
None of them are thinking they're going to find their future spouse on Tinder, that would be a nice bonus. Tinder is an app for getting laid.
When I was single and I went to a bar because I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion), my search parameters were very, very different than when I decided I wanted to settle down and find somebody to share my life with.
I don't think I'm unusual in this.
This article takes a slim premise and develops a hypothesis as fact that is too large a burden for it: that because on Tinder people are making flash judgements based on attractiveness, long-term relationships will change in their fundamental structural nature as relates to attractiveness.
This is nonsense. Tinder is an asynchronous singles bar.
It's the same behaviour that has been going on for hundreds - perhaps thousands - of years, but you can raise the bar of what you're looking for in terms of attractiveness if you yourself are attractive because you are not time-bound to last orders at the bar, and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it.
Sure, people might get married after meeting on Tinder, just as they do after a hook-up from meeting drunk in a bar. But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder.
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|10 years ago|reply
As someone engaged to someone I met on Tinder, and I met a lot of attractive, relationship-minded women, Tinder is just far and away the most efficient way to meet attractive women. Even if you're looking for a relationship, the idea of placing any weight in elaborately written profile statements (which often tell you far less than 10 seconds in front of a person) and sending messages to random women on OK Cupid seems like a waste of time. Tinder takes all of the most awkward "breaking the ice" parts of looking for a hook-up OR a partner and turns them into a fun little swipe game.
I'll also add that most women I met on Tinder weren't above a hook-up but not-so-subtly had a relationship on the agenda, and that this affects guys behavior. If you sleep with an attractive, compatible woman a few times, it's not unheard of to start to form a friendship, at which point most (not all) guys in our society start to blanche at the idea of her doing the same with other partners. There's also the fact that for many of us, hook-up sex isn't even the best sex. So there's a natural draw to exclusivity.
[+] [-] n72|10 years ago|reply
I think this is both true and not true. A suspicion I have (and I'm sure there's got to be research on this) is that a lot of people interested in casual dating/hooking up on Tinder and/or in bars are unconsciously looking for a long term mate. In some ways this is a very effective strategy, since you're cycling through a large number of potential mates to find one who meets some kind of acceptability threshold. I read somewhere (sorry can't find the reference), that extroverted, high frequency daters ended up in happier long term relationships simply because they had more selection, which on the face of it seems to make sense.
[+] [-] swozey|10 years ago|reply
Yes, there are people who use Tinder for hookups. People use OKCupid for hookups. Match for hookups. That has not even remotely been the desire of the women I've met on Tinder.
[+] [-] cageface|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Unklejoe|10 years ago|reply
I mean if you think about it, it's an online dating platform that provides nothing more than a few pictures and a sentence as a basis for decision making. It's designed to allow for fast selection of people based solely on appearance. This is backed up by the fact that there's no profile text displayed when you're swiping...all you see is a picture of the person. If you want to view their actual profile, you need to click their picture, which hardly anyone does.
This is unlike other dating sites where you have to take a personality test, provide a detailed description of your interestest, etc...
However, like someone else said, many people go there for hookups, but they are actually seeking a longer term relationship whether they like to admit it or not. Some are probably looking for hookups maybe with the possibility of a longer term relationship. Additionally, this is going to come off as sexist, but I feel that there's a large percentage of girls on there who aren't looking for anything at all other than attention. This is particularly true for attractive girls. Hell, who wouldn't love to have people constantly telling them they're beautiful? I've even talked to a few attractive girls who use Tinder "because it's funny". For guys, I will go out on a limb and say that 90% of guys on Tinder are looking for some action.
EDIT: Just to add, keep in mind that age plays a huge role here. I am 25 years old, and many of my friends are in the 20-23 year old range. I have a feeling that the average age of the commenters here is slightly higher, which could explain why so many people don't agree with Tinder being used for hookups. There's a big difference between a 35 year old and a 21 year old when it comes to maturity in dating.
[+] [-] sndean|10 years ago|reply
> In this case, the data is clear that men’s preferences are much more homogenous than women’s. “There are women who 95% of men say yes to, and there’s nothing like that for men,” says McLeod. “A man is really attractive if 40% of women say yes.”
So women have more complicated taste than men. But there are probably certain clusters of women (based on demographics, location, etc.) who'd find a specific look attractive at a rate higher than 40%.
There'd be a "George Clooney cluster" and a "Leonardo DiCaprio cluster". I just need to find the sndean cluster.
[+] [-] nroets|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheriot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|10 years ago|reply
The men that 95% of women would say yes to aren't available on dating apps, because they don't need to be - almost by definition.
[+] [-] qznc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodoof|10 years ago|reply
Self confidence plays a big role too, which goes with funny. Not "jerk self confidence", but "talk to you comfortably self confidence".
Also, I don't rely on online dating. I'm not a "player" by any stretch of the imagination, but life is too short to wonder what a woman would have said, so if I see a woman I like, I talk to her and ask her out if its appropriate. Politely and unintrusively. You risk nothing except rejection and stand to gain a whole lot more. Life gives to people who ask.
[+] [-] gmarx|10 years ago|reply
I am a funny guy. I have been told multiple times by different people that I am the funniest person they have ever met. I have been told several times by different people in different contexts that I should be a stand-up comedian. All these were spontaneous and not said by anyone who wanted or needed anything from me.
I also used to be morbidly obese. Now I am in good shape.
The idea that funny is attractive in isolation (in the same way that a pretty face is on a woman) is, based on my experience, entirely, hilariously untrue.
Just one man's life :)
[+] [-] losty|10 years ago|reply
People laugh together to show group bonding. Naturally you are more likely to laugh at the jokes of somebody you want to be close to.
[+] [-] rectify|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lio|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo
[+] [-] todd8|10 years ago|reply
After being married for the period when most people were finding partners, I divorced and started dating again. I realized that I wasn't very good at small-talk, and I was having trouble meeting women.
The HN comments here are full of suggestions, but they are isolated and not systematic. By now I'm sure that everyone is aware of the "pick-up artist" community on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of learning how to impress as many women as one can in order to have sex with someone you really don't care about, but while that almost underground community was still nascent I read about it and decided that it was something interesting enough to investigate. I traveled to southern California and met Mystery, the person described in Neil Strauss's (at the time) new book, The Game.
I hung out with them for two days and was invited to go out one evening with them. There were around a dozen guys in the group and it was a very fascinating evening. No, I didn't pick up a girl in a club and get laid, but talking to the guys was very interesting it did change things for me. Most of the guys I met were like me. They were lonely and wanted a serious girlfriend and had always had trouble approaching and striking up conversations with stangers.
I was always able to talk to people from my field or other academically inclined people, but I learned to be more interesting to others and to understand attraction from both sides. It helped my confidence tremendously and consequently I found more women attracted to me.
That's a long introduction to my recommendations:
- don't get caught up in the manipulative techniques being promulgated by the recent pick-up experts
- learn more about attraction by reading some of the early stuff talked about by, say, Mystery
- approach more strangers and stike up conversations (you don't need to be online to meet people)
- develop a wider circle of friends
- get out and make your life itself more interesting by finding new interests, this make you interesting to others
- take your company public! Success helps.
Generally, I've found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process. It's much better to simple strike up conversations with people that you find attractive. The time to line up dates online and exchange information and then discover that the person is nothing like their old high school photos is disheartening.
[+] [-] colmvp|10 years ago|reply
While it's subjective, there are stats from MANY dating sites that show having certain traits (e.g. tall black guy or short Asian woman) will give you an advantage in dating over others (short Asian guy or tall black woman).
Oktrends showed tall guys unequivocally have more sexual partners than short men.
[+] [-] mlrtime|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistproducer2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mod|10 years ago|reply
Or do women rated a 2 not select men rated a 5?
[+] [-] stuxnet79|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grishnakh|10 years ago|reply
But then when I go into the city on the weekend and start swiping, I get a boatload of matches from much more attractive women, the kind I really do want to date.
It's just like they say in real estate: location, location, location. If you're not a good match or cultural fit for the single women in your area (I'm not), and you're a bit too far for a lot of people to want to bother dating you, the "market" is going to look really bad.
[+] [-] tmsam|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|10 years ago|reply
Dating crossed with Deal of the Day.
[+] [-] noir_lord|10 years ago|reply
We had long conversations and I had no idea what she looked like for the first month or so, she commented that I hadn't asked for a picture which men normally do straight away, my response was "I enjoy talking to you".
She eventually sent a picture when we arrange to go on a date last week, turns out she is absolutely stunning (not I find her attractive, I mean objectively stunning) and the reason she took her picture off was all the "Hey baby, want sum fuk?" messages she was getting.
Date went well and we are going out again soon, I'm not handsome, I'm pretty average looking except for been in decent physical shape (swimming, cycling and dropping 60lbs will do that), frankly if I'd known what she looks like first I probably wouldn't have sent her a message in the first place figuring I didn't have a chance.
The world is a strange place sometimes.
[+] [-] personlurking|10 years ago|reply
Or, in the least, Tinder could just create a basic setting for only showing "def not looking for a hook-up" profiles.
[+] [-] Tenoke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] massysett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avereveard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImTalking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slazaro|10 years ago|reply
Of course this assumes that attractiveness is objective, and purely physical. Which is false in both counts, but it's a simplification as we all know.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SeanDav|10 years ago|reply
I found the referenced article to OkCupid rather interesting. It seems that if you can block people from visually seeing each other, until the actual blind date, then even very attractive women report having a great time with very plain men. So it seems that while people will almost invariably filter and match each other on looks if that option is open (which it usually is these days), but at the end of the day, looks are not important if you can meet in person first.
[+] [-] kfk|10 years ago|reply
The output is clear: even random matching has a higher score than all girls (or boys) liking the same boys (or girls).
This is, indeed, a serious problem if you take that people nowadays have access to: 1. An enormous pool of potential partners 2. A lot more information
The .2 is particularly worrisome. It is clear that too much information early in the interaction can actually bring to suboptimal equilibrium. The thing is, when you know everything about somebody you tend to act on your most superficial preferences, getting to know gives you access to a much deeper connection (and a much better choice).
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
I want a smell-based Tinder. Seriously, most of the girls I met online seemed to have incompatible pheromones.
Unfortunately, specifying smell is not possible, I suppose because of the huge gap in science w.r.t. the olfactory system. This is curious because from an evolutionary perspective smell is the sense that developed before the other senses.
[+] [-] nxzero|10 years ago|reply
Ran into a guy joining Tinder the other day, he said they were saying the valuation for the company was a billion... :-)
[+] [-] deadtofu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wonnk13|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|10 years ago|reply
Look at that chart: the main way straight people meet their partners is through friends. In-person meeting pairings vastly outweigh online meeting pairings. Back in the 1940s, people meet through friends, through family, in elementary or high school, or by being neighbors. I shudder to see the rise of "at a bar", but online dating is a huge, huge improvement.
[+] [-] nish1500|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iopuy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_dev|10 years ago|reply