‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is the gist of college student qualms with dating apps. Hook-up culture declines while young people search for genuine connection.
how are you supposed to connect with anyone if you don’t have an app that makes no sense
I remember back in the day if people found out you were on a dating website, you were basically totally ostracized. Then people realized, well shit, if I’m going to be ostracized for looking for love online, I might as well do it on the free website (POF). But POF basically became the “drug addict and single mom machine”. Then dating apps came out and it became trendy and cool because you didn’t have to actually connect with anyone and you could be aloof and detached and have NSA sex with strangers. Now everyone hates dating apps again. Normalize talking to people about real things in public!
I’m not sure if this applies where you are but since covid it is HARD to talk to people irl. I’m chatty and will strike up conversations everywhere I go. Before covid most people engaged. Since they look at me like I’m grow>ng a second head. Dating apps have always worked well for me though. Damn well.
I remember people would lie about how they met because they didn’t want to say they met online. Oh how the times have been-a-changing
Depending on the context, my partner and I don’t like sharing that we met on an app either.
If y’all met at a brothel or while at the Jan 6th rally, I’d get it. I don’t get it for most other things though.
Well, I like to say me and my partner met online, then add it was actually a music sharing site. If I decide to troll a little, I change the last part to “a BDSM forum”.
I had a girlfriend that I met on a dating app and her mother was really hung up on the whole dating app thing. She never liked it if we told people that we met on a dating app.
So we both started coming up with ridiculous stories about how we met. I think at one point we claimed that my girlfriend was a Chinese mail ordered bride despite her not being Chinese and having red hair. Used to do it with a straight face too, used to really confuse people.
The only app that people have been hesitant to tell me they met is PoF. Although I’ve never met anyone who’s volunteered that they met on fetlife and you know, statistically speaking, some people must have.
Some coincidence
Yeah wtf with this “it’s not you, it’s me.” It’s 100 fucking percent them.
I’ve been on and off dating sites for over a decade. I watched them all turn to complete shit because Tinder got successful with the swipe only b.s and Business Educated People said “oooo, money! Let’s just completely copy that and even remove useful features we once had to keep people stuck on the sites longer!” and they’ve completely failed at, or don’t care to, address the bot/scammer problem.
Fuck, POF turned into fucking TWITCH for christs sake… They have a streaming function now where people specifically state they are not looking for anything they’re just there to stream and take peoples money…
Probably never should have tried to make money off hook up apps in the first place. When you have a rotten business idea, eventually the house of cards come tumbling down. I’m surprised it took this long.
Investors made bank either way. Same shit with Airbnb. It doesn’t have to be a sustainable business if you can make a shit ton of money in a short amount of time.
Welcome to capitalism. It may not be the best system…but the oligarchs say it’s the only one we can have (until NeoFeudalism).
So pump n dump has more than one meaning here.
Grindr was fine from what I hear. But it had a unique way to succeed. Horny men want horny men right now. It was an evolution of cruising not of dating.
The rest? Yeah I meet people in person for a reason.
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Yeah and honestly ironically I think such an app could also have success with lesbians if it wasn’t for the fact that it would include a lot of “surprise my boyfriend wants to join/watch”. I know plenty of women who want casual sex with men but decide that the risks aren’t worth rushing in.
And yeah not all or even most gay men are the grindr audience, but their casual sex scene is an enduring part of their culture. And it’s because horny dumbass 21 year old men who are attracted to men can just fuck other horny dumbass 21 year old men.
Though I do think there’s been interesting cultural shifts they’ve developed due to grindr. Namely many have begun employing safety techniques traditionally used by women on dates.
And I’ve noticed that part of the queer backlash against grindr and the like is that it doesn’t build culture or community like the things it replaced. You go to a gay bar, get irresponsibly drunk looking for a casual lay, maybe you find it, maybe you find someone who isn’t your type that you chat with all night, maybe you find friends old or new. I hate that our and their in particular main cultural hub is bars, but that’s something really important for community building that living on the apps will cost you.
Grindr went through a period where it was really shit, but in the last two years or so it has gotten a lot better.
The dating apps are just a symptom of the disease, to be completely honest. The hook-up culture isn’t going anywhere, because despite what people say, that’s what continues to happen. Anyone longing for a genuine connection are wasting their time on these apps, especially if you’re guy. People need to work on the impossible standards, on the constant approval-seeking/instant gratification, and set their priorities straight
I’ve found several long term relationships off tinder as a WLW. It seems to work pretty well for me. The system doesn’t seem to be working for guys, and that’s unfortunate. But a lot of the pressure on women to settle for any man has gone away as women have become more self reliant. The whole thing has become far more consensual and less mandatory for survival. That’s going to influence men’s dating success no matter what medium people use to find matches.
My personal experience with these has been even worse than the average, because my demi ass just doesn’t find most of the people on those apps interesting.
After half a year of some activity, I got maybe 2 likes, and 0 matches. Obviously I don’t even know who those people are, because the app doesn’t show me until I pay. Issue is, if I didn’t already swipe on those people, I don’t care who they are anymore.
Ironically, when I checked out the BFF section, I got several pings within a few days
If you’re demi how are you judging people based on images?
I obviously I can’t speak for the OP you are questioning but I’m also on that demi spectrum, if you want my two cents.
It’s not that I can’t see that someone is attractive, it’s just that I don’t find them sexually attractive. I’m sure there are a lot of het men that would agree that Timothée Chalamet or Chris Evans are very attractive and handsome men but that doesn’t mean that they want to have sex with them. It’s not like people go around looking at beautiful art or gorgeous sunsets and think “man, I’d really like to fuck that” lol
I believe they also mentioned that they didn’t find them interesting, not that they found them unattractive. I have the same issue. When these apps are set up for looks first no one really bothers to sound overly interesting, they just want to come off as fuckable and not a murder.
I think I might also be demi and I don’t know what to go after with these apps. I try to talk to anyone who doesn’t look like a serial killer but it feels like I’m supposed to make a sexual impression of some kind to get them interested in talking to me. So if it’s an app where you swipe I’m basically swiping yes on everybody and I’m completely rudderless.
There are some dating apps/services that don’t use images until you’ve agreed to like each other but I live in Canada and the nearest other users are either from Europe or South America (the continent) on all of them.
That’s pretty much how I’d describe it too. In my own words, I basically just don’t connect to people how someone normally would. Someone would first experience lust, and then build an emotional connection, once they get through the rest, but I don’t really experience any romantic feelings towards a person until that connection had already been built.
Maybe choosing an attractive photo at a beach, with a drink, at the same place as the next 100 girls, would work for someone else, but for me it’s pretty much an instant no. I’m looking for a person to share future experiences with, not a picture that has been purposefully selected to win a popularity contest
This is ultimately a big part of it, and it’s universal, not just in dating. Most friendships are “friendships of convenience” and the other types of relationships typically progress from there. But in western culture, we don’t have any third places, and so we just plain don’t make friendships of convenience anymore.
What does WLW mean?
probably Woman Looking for Woman
I was guessing White Lesbian Woman
ye that works too
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I married a smoke show I met on Bumble.
I gotta be real: you’re all doing it wrong.
It’s a sea of people’s assumed personas. Being genuine actually makes you stand out.
Feel like you’re pressured to be or act a certain way in order to get matches? And then you’re sad that they’re of low quality? While you are actively misrepresenting yourselves? Wtf did you think was going to happen?
If you’re approaching it like you’re trying to get a high score, you aren’t going to be yourself, and you and the people you match with are going to be disappointed. Faithfully represent yourself and what you want. Accept you’ll get even less attention than you already are. Get much fewer but higher quality connections.
Every online dating forum’s advice is incredibly terrible, and people failing to realize that they don’t HAVE to treat the platforms as a Skinner Box are what I think the root causes of the decline of online dating.
Which, isn’t to say the industry doesn’t bear most of the responsibility. If people treating your platform as a Skinner box decimates the value of your platform, maybe you shouldn’t go to such great lengths to make your platform such a box.
I married a smoke show I met on Bumble.
I gotta be real: you’re all doing it wrong.
My ex was on bumble and she had over 4000+ likes. She was too anxious to even open the app by the time we had met. I deleted it for her.
You can have the greatest profile in the world as a dude, it just dosent matter statistically speaking if you’re not perceived as attractive/ have shitty photos.
If you married a smokeshow you met off of bumble, you could have probably had the same or better luck in real life. I’m not saying boo hoo poor boys but at the same time most of the guys desperately hoping for a connection on these apps won’t be able to get a date. Guys outnumber women on these apps something like 4 - 1.
The monetization of the apps are no good. I’m not agaisnt online dating but at the same time the status quo is pretty shitty, espcially if you fall into categories of people who are viewed as less desirable on these apps; ie Asian men and Black women.
I can’t stress enough that I understand the mechanics at play. I am a software engineer. It’s literally my job to step back and understand how systems work.
I’m saying my initial failure, and the failure of most users, is choosing to compromise their authenticity for short term gains, if long term connections are your objective.
Look at any dating app forum. They’re all obsessed about min-maxing your profiles. They’ve got repositories of pickup lines. They’re all running under the faulty premise that you want to maximize the number of matches.
That is a great strategy if you are looking for a hookup. That is a great strategy if you’re looking to maximize dopamine hits.
It is an intrinsically self-defeating approach if you’re looking for a steady long term relationship.
If you’re looking for a steady long-term relationship, there are a few factors that have to align, and one of them is you. If you’re not getting matches at all, it’s discouraging.
And my understanding is that the algorithm for apps like Tinder (as opposed to apps with compatibility algorithms, like OkCupid) make it less likely that you’ll be shown to a given person the more that you’ve been swiped left on. That means there’s a good chance you won’t be mutually shown to someone who would be a great match because your profile (including your pictures) isn’t broadly appealing.
When dealing with an app like this, if you have no quality matches, working to improve the appeal of your profile and get more right swipes, even by people you aren’t interested in, is actually your best strategy to get more quality matches.
My personal experience anecdotally confirmed this, though I haven’t used Tinder in over 5 years, so maybe they’ve improved. But back then if I put something in my profile designed to weed out bad matches, I got fewer matches, period - including of the people I wanted to match with. And I’m not talking lines that are generally looked down on, anyway, like “swipe left if X.” Specifying the kind of dating I was looking for meant I got fewer matches from people who were also looking for that.
What worked for me was to figure out how to signal to the people I wanted to match without being unappealing to the people I didn’t, to swipe left on any obvious bad matches, and to try to have organic, authentic conversations with as many matches as I could, even if those conversations didn’t go anywhere, because Tinder rewarded that kind of engagement.
I guess I can still only speak anecdotally, but the moment I stopped trying to be broadly appealing, my matches tanked by like 50x.
But the quality of the matches from that point on skyrocketed. Basically every match turned into a LTR. Then a marriage in the ultimate case.
But maybe I’m just good looking enough that despite my best efforts, the floor on my appeal was still high. (/s)
Anyhow, if you’re planning on completely abandoning the platform anyhow… Why NOT change the approach? What is the worst that could happen? Meeting people IRL and on an app have never been mutually exclusive endeavours. Shackling yourself to a modality if interacting with the service because someone told you it was the best way of doing things or that you’re gaming the system is some kind of Andrew Tate Neil Strauss thinking. If it isn’t serving you: change it. Don’t double-down on a losing strategy.
And, sure, “abandon apps completely” is A way to change things up… but I hope people could learn to incrementally experiment and innovate rather than have step 1 just be burn it down and walk away.
Still a valuable anecdote IMO. But a 50x decrease is substantial, especially for guys. Some guys might not have ever had 50 matches. More importantly, do you think you wouldn’t have had, or noticed, your high quality matches if your profile had stayed more broadly appealing?
The impact depends on the app, too. OkCupid has different algorithms than Tinder, and those might punish a particular person less. So switching apps up might work really well for some people.
But it’s also an unfortunate reality that dating apps are less useful than they used to be, largely because the companies are more focused on monetizing them than on providing the best experience possible. If you’ve tried a few apps, a few different approaches on each app, have had people review your profile and so on, and it’s still not working, then you should definitely focus your efforts elsewhere.
More importantly, do you think you wouldn’t have had, or noticed, your high quality matches if your profile had stayed more broadly appealing?
It was my goal to arrange an in person date pretty much ASAP assuming there weren’t any massive red flags in chat. And, I certainly wasn’t drowning in matches with my initial approach either, I absolutely had the time to go on a date with every match I got… Not like anyone was in danger of falling through the cracks. So, I don’t think there was any danger that I wouldn’t have noticed good matches.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m also burying the hook here but I’m NOT college aged anymore. I was in my early 30s when I switched it up. There is a pretty big demographic shift of singles in that age range that makes it less unfavorable for men. Maybe it had nothing to do with my approach and I just coasted to greater success on the prevailing winds and have been wrongly taking credit for it. I dunno.
Without a doubt though, my own relationship with the apps themselves improved significantly when I stopped treating it like a game to win. It’s so much easier on your mental state to stop micromanaging your image and just faithfully represent yourself knowing and coming to peace with the fact that a lot of people won’t like you. Maybe it was age, but maybe it was just the maturity that came with age. Maybe you can get that maturity without necessarily having the age. I don’t know. I don’t have enough lives to do a properly controlled experiment.
Dating sucks, though. I don’t ever miss being single. My heart goes out to all y’all.
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How about a fediverse dating service? 😏
But I’m looking for a woman…
There’s plenty of trans women lol
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I was just playing around, of course haha
But it would be good to have a way to develop services like this but don’t get corrupted by money so easily
short answer: not possible without real moderation by people who are getting paid for that.
Yeah, I was daring my luck, in case someone had enough motivation to implement it technically. With so many good social apps in the fediverse.
If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail
So basically a MTG convention with the expectation that there’d be sex at the end?
Ewwwww
Hello there. 👋
That is an awful idea
Match Group deserves to collapse. Online dating has never been fun, but since Match Group bought up nearly every dating app, they’ve all become very homogeneous and outrageously more expensive.
Seriously it’s all just carbon copies of each other.
I said it in a different thread.
I think dating apps were an important tool for women to assert control of their dating lives, ten years ago. And I think for the new generation of young women, a total wall between their daily life and dating life, is less necessary.
My two cents.
Why is that wall needed? Can you expand on this more?
You don’t know what I am talking about?
There was a big trend, and it still exists to an extent today, that many woman do not want to be approached at the gym, etc.
I feel men have finally started adapting to how shitty their behavior was, meaning women are relying less on online dating as a way to stop the feeling of daily irl harassment.
How exactly does an app help to stop the feeling of daily irl harassment? Do you seriously believe those problems have now been solved? If so, how did apps bring this about.
Men weren’t keeping women from taking the initiative, so it’s not like these apps gave women a power they previously had no control over. Yes they felt far safer but walking away from these apps just reintroduces that inherent risk.
I’m pretty sure there is about the same amount of shitty behavior, just look at where we are with abortion in the US. One party out of two is mask off sexist against women.
But dating apps cleaned up societies shitty behavior toward women?
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That’s not what I said
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I wish dating apps were more tailored towards longer term connections. It’s hard to meet people, but I don’t want to go on tinder to meet people either.
I sometimes think they might be intentionally steering people away from longer term connections because the core model of app development teams nowadays is constantly driving engagement. A long term connection means (hopefully) no more engagement.
This is silly to me for dating apps cuz there are literally always new customers entering the market every single day. It’s not like ppl stopped turning into adults suddenly.
Yes but why stop to the new adults when you can keep your user base? More growth more money.
That is the end of the reflexion for companies.
That’s almost precisely their business model.
Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.
Dating apps don’t exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They’ll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they’re viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they’d bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.
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For what it’s worth that’s been my experience on Hinge.
Apps are difficult since it’s such a lean form of media. Hard to really connect over texts. It’s more fun to meet people through biking groups or camping adventures imo. When I stopped trying to actively seek out love via apps or in general, it also made it easier to date because there was zero stress and zero expectations.
She’s succeeded by Lidiane Jones, a former CEO of Slack, who’s looking for opportunities to use artificial intelligence in dating app algorithms.
Oh great, just what we needed, app sponsored AI bots to lure people into paying premium
app sponsored AI bots to lure people into paying premium
sorry but what do you mean? Can you please explain?
The apps can literally just use AIs to pretend to be real people convincingly to get people to pay for a premium membership to presumably be able to arrange a meetup. After they pay for premium, they’re ghosted, and it’s too late to get their money back.
Among other things
yes, and how long until this be known? If the company self-sabotage itself so profoundly it will just be the end of the company. I’m not saying that their end goal is to survive forever, but this is incredibly shortsighted.
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Or have the AI pretend to be the other person for a pair it calculates to match. After the two meet they’ll figure out there was an AI middle man catfishing them both. They’ll have a laugh and live happily ever after.
lol or “pay to win”. Pay to have an AI reply for you that will guarantee to get the conversation going
Join blah you have 3 premium messages waiting…
still not get it. You imply that these “premium messages” will be messages by AI bot accounts ?
Yep
and what does it prevent them to do the same thing now? In both cases, sooner or later the real users will figure out they are bot accounts. I don’t get how the company will benefit if they have a series of angry users when they realize that the messages were from bots all along? Or are they gonna keep the bar so high that the end users will never realize that they were bot accounts.
Gets u to buy premium. That’s all they care about. They know many users will drop after a short time anyway. Get $15 from everyone while u can.
Pretty much what pinkdrunkenelephants said earlier, but more likely just fake profiles that are filled with “interesting” random tidbits. On the off case that they match, some conversation might happen and I’d actually bet on the bot eventually ghosting or coming up with an excuse to leave the person and wishing them luck, which more easily avoids being found out and also has a good chance of keeping the person in the app.
Wait are people using dating apps for dating? I thought they were for promoting Instagram profiles exclusively
Here’s why your apps are failing. You don’t have proper ratios. When women are outnumbered 2 to 1 that means about 33% of the user base can’t use the app as intended. That’s why you are losing users
Ehh. That would matter if it was. 1:1 ratio of people meet and leave the platform but it’s not. One girl can and will date multiple guys from the platform and vice versa.
100% can use the app as intended. 33% just don’t have a 1:1 match to rely on…but if we’re being honest no meeting spot ever has a 1:1 chance even if there are same number of men and women present. That’s how life works.There’s nothing they can do about that…
Monitoring for scams and bots should be something they can at least try to deal with directly to add some value to the database. Not just rely on users to do it for free.
They do, that comment was about there not being enough women on dating apps compared to men
2 to 1? Lol! I bet it’s more like 7 to 1.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A decline in interest from dating apps’ core demographic is wreaking havoc across the industry, as Bumble’s CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd steps down a day before the company reports earnings, says the Wall Street Journal Monday.
Tinder’s stock plummeted 15% last week after reporting a decline in paying users.
Wolfe Herd, who also cofounded Tinder, started Bumble to create an app where women could have more control by initiating conversations with men to reduce the unwanted and creepy messages that plague dating apps.
She’s succeeded by Lidiane Jones, a former CEO of Slack, who’s looking for opportunities to use artificial intelligence in dating app algorithms.
The resurgence of organic relationships deals a major blow to Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps that have profited off the boom of hook-up culture.
Though the company says this is not the case, frustrations with dating apps have percolated through user bases and many are opting for meeting partners the old-fashioned way.
The original article contains 382 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I doubt the core of this is any social awakening…the platforms are simply unusable due to the amount of scams, bots, and spam.
Also, paid models simply won’t work in this sector. Attractive people simply don’t need the apps.
Attractive ppl have their own app it’s called raya.
attractive people don’t need the apps
There’s more to this; attractive people also use the apps not to actually find partners but for entertainment and validation.
These apps are filled with shit like that meaning earnest users must wade through even more trash
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Attractive people simply don’t need the apps.
and funnily enough, attractive people are being “promoted” by the apps. By “promoted” I mean, that people who receive a lot of right-swipes are pushed higher in the stack of appearing to users because if users were seeing not-attractive users, they would ditch the app.
