The great millennial garbage gyre
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Millennial here. Have recently dabbled with the apps. Honestly the guys I was shown were not objectively bad looking. Many of them were pretty attractive. But not my type at all. My interests were books and video games and nerdy sweetness…and it kept recommending me muscle gym divorced military dads. So I gave up.
Most likely, this is because the nerds who know how to present themselves have already gotten nabbed by some girl. Nerds who are unable to present themselves well are relegated to the bottom of the pile, since nearly all women will swipe left on them. Jacked, divorced military dads are at least jacked, which is something many women find appealing, so they end up higher on the stack.
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What kind of nerd stuff? You like Pokemon? 3D printers? D&D?
After the third/fourth gen of Pokémon I kinda lost interest. Whenever it was they started being jet skis.
Add tower defense and sim games to the list though. DnD based games, although I’ve played tabletop from time to time, just too much of an introvert to join a random group.
Anyways, when you’re swiping in my age range there aren’t a lot of folks with these interests in my area. Maybe I’m too old and get shown whatever.
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Here's the great part; you don't! (I am American and only going outside for vital activities anymore)
Talking to aomeone might get you mugged
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I'm just confused as to how there isn't a dating app that is better.
wrote last edited by [email protected]short answer:
Dating Apps/Sites are basically social media sites, they only really work via the network effect, by being so huge that they necessitate significant financial investment.
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long answer:
A dating app is only broadly, mass appeal successful if it can scale to have a wide selection of people, users, ideally, in as many places as possible.
This requires a large amount of servers.
A large amount of servers requires a large amount of money.
A large amount of money requires investors.
Investors require as much profit as possible.
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A conventional dating site/app, as we think of the big ones today... its a social media platform.
Just with a different, more constrained feature set, a different UI... but roughly similar levels of network infrastructure and overhead.
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You could actually make a reasonable argument for running a non profit, or ... some kind of collectively owned and operated dating service that is restricted to say a city or small region, or maybe a neighborhood in a larger city.
(Indeed, many of the older ones kind of began this way, pitched more like a ... a club that you join and pay membership dues for, thats how they were marketed in the late 90s / early 00s... though these of course were largely actually privately owned, but the marketing angle was that of 'exclusive community')
The technicals of exactly how to do that, legally and financially, might end up being impractical though... and if the government is directly involved, well... 10, 20 years ago I would say thats a rather serious privacy problem, but at least in the US right now, I am sure Tinder will sell your info to a data broker who sells it to the FBI if they want to investigate you, so.... yeah.
The other obvious problem is that the best dating app is the one you use the least... so... some kind of unconventional payment structure would have to be figured out, to counteract this massive and glaring incentive conflict between app and user.
Maybe high upfront fixed costs to the user, but if you don't find a good match after a year, 75% gets refunded to you?
Not sure. Could be legal nightmare.
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Other than that, privately owned and operated dating communities can work fairly well without huge server overhead... if they are precisely targeted at a pretty specific kind of people, be it a religion, or a bdsm community, or a specific ethnicity, who knows... those can at least theoretically work at a larger geographic scale, because that kind of scale doesn't also massively ramp up user count.
But there's nothing stopping them from being bought out if they get too big.
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Bonus!
Job application / recruiting sites are also basically dating apps/sites.
Its just person vs job instead of person vs person.
Broadly, guys on dating sites have been flooding women with match requests for years now, women have been overwhelmed by the volume and believe they can be very picky.
Now replace 'guys' with 'job seekers', 'match requests' with 'applications' and 'women' with 'companies'.
Both scenarios result in wasteful amounts of energy going into 'match-making', which is horrendously inefficient.
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If I ended up single again at my age, I don't think I would try again. Not due to difficulty, but just apathy. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. I'm my own human now, doing my own stuff.
It would definitely suck to be single again, and I'd mourn what I lost, but there's more to life
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yeah same. For one thing the odds - what am I, Roy Sullivan? - but real talk, I only had lightning strike that time by not dating, having a multi-year dry spell in my twenties, and only pursuing someone I knew was special and spending ages talking to them. If that's going to ever happen again, it won't be because I forced anything.
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Most likely, this is because the nerds who know how to present themselves have already gotten nabbed by some girl. Nerds who are unable to present themselves well are relegated to the bottom of the pile, since nearly all women will swipe left on them. Jacked, divorced military dads are at least jacked, which is something many women find appealing, so they end up higher on the stack.
Yeah, I think you make a great point here. Most of my gamer friends are couples with children. Unfortunately, I have no interest in jacked dudes at all, but I think most people probably do lean into that on dating sites. I figure at this point and age if I meet someone, great. If not, I’ll be fine.
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I’ve been curious if a government-run dating app could do better - if its goal is to achieve genuine engagement, not cycles of frustration that boost subscription rates.
This is one of many subjects where capitalist concern ruins the product (and that’s not even something I say as often as others on Lenny)
I run a social club for gay men, and we've talked about coming up with an app that's run by a non-profit, with social workers on the board, that's designed to actually connect people, not keep them glued to the app. Friendship, dates, activity partners, whatever.
I don't know why no one has come up with the non-profit model here but if I can get enough steam, we're doing it.
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You think all the hot, sane, independent women in their 30s and 40s are strugging for options?
You'd be surprised..... My wife is in a professional dance company full of single ladies ranging in age from 20s to late 30's. Most of them are on the struggle bus when it comes to finding a decent partner who isn't a lazy bum or a rampant misogynist.
Tbh most of the dudes in long term relationships with the dancers are just regular everyday dudes. Imo the bar is pretty low nowadays considering that like 1/3 of dudes have been brain poisoned by Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson.
Married dude here who has a lot of single dude friends. 1/3 is accurate.
And if it's not Rogan, it's some other right-adjacent influencer. It's fucking weird too. They're regular dudes, helping old ladies on the street and supporting a neighbor. Then suddenly, they crack and share how terrible women are.
Then you got women who are on the other side, complaining about how terrible men are.
I don't understand it.
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Why are you expecting conversations to be otherworldly?
How many conversations in real life with people you like start with something akin to "hey"? I'm gunna bet most but I suppose I could be wrong.
From what I saw, it wasn't just "hey". Hey was the yellow flag.
It was all the one word responses. To everything. It was the job of the guy to be entertaining on the app to barely any response.
That takes its toll on men, especially when there were women who used it as a source of free entertainment.
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I wondered about that too. I certainly didn’t see any profiles to match my interests. I wondered if “my type” just didn’t use the apps at all.
It's all conjecture. I suspect the algorithm puts it towards the bottom of the stack because there's more money in casting a conventional net.
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Is it really in the apps interest to find your perfect partner or just ones that bring you back to the app again and again?
I'm not convinced they're looking out for your best interests.
It may be more profitable to have regular success stories getting churned. The algo looks out for the best interests of the company's profit. Sometimes things line up.
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I read this first as "it's all circumcision and luck". lmao
Free circumcison for the first guy to date! 🥳
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I run a social club for gay men, and we've talked about coming up with an app that's run by a non-profit, with social workers on the board, that's designed to actually connect people, not keep them glued to the app. Friendship, dates, activity partners, whatever.
I don't know why no one has come up with the non-profit model here but if I can get enough steam, we're doing it.
wrote last edited by [email protected]But even non-profits need to pay for operating costs like salary and cloud fees. Where would you get the funding for that?
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You think all the hot, sane, independent women in their 30s and 40s are strugging for options?
You'd be surprised..... My wife is in a professional dance company full of single ladies ranging in age from 20s to late 30's. Most of them are on the struggle bus when it comes to finding a decent partner who isn't a lazy bum or a rampant misogynist.
Tbh most of the dudes in long term relationships with the dancers are just regular everyday dudes. Imo the bar is pretty low nowadays considering that like 1/3 of dudes have been brain poisoned by Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson.
The bar isn't low. Not being a lazy bum or misogonyst is the bare minimum (as it should be). The real bar is multiple bars in form of a 110 meters hurdles. You have to jump over all of them. Everything below that and the other person will feel as if they are settling.
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I’ve been curious if a government-run dating app could do better - if its goal is to achieve genuine engagement, not cycles of frustration that boost subscription rates.
This is one of many subjects where capitalist concern ruins the product (and that’s not even something I say as often as others on Lenny)
I can't wait for TRUMPDate. Make America Date Again. Can't go wrong.
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I think we should make dating apps even worse, and just let humanity die out naturally.
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I can't wait for TRUMPDate. Make America Date Again. Can't go wrong.
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The 17yo... at work?? I wonder what's the minimum working age in memeland.
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The 17yo... at work?? I wonder what's the minimum working age in memeland.
When did you start working? Here in the states its pretty normal to have teenagers work part time after school. I did so I would have money to spend on doing stupid stuff with friends haha
