faceh
17d ago
Making a dating app that works isn't an unsolvable problem, OKCupid was pretty effective back in the day.
They abandoned the hell out of that though.
If it would cost them more money and make it less likely people stay on the apps indefinitely, I can't see why they'd implement the feature.
faceh
17d ago
That's about it.
Even bringing up the relationship recession to make the complaint marks you as lower status. "Lol this guy can't get dates!"
And yet, if the problem doesn't get acknowledged, it all just stays in the 'positivity' loop. "You'll find someone eventually, just make yourself better and it'll get easier" even as the objective facts show this is simply untrue.
And finally, people who won already and have committed relationships have less reason to pay attention to this issue, and are more likely to assume the complaints are overblown, and so join the chorus of voices dismissing the speakers sounding the alarm.
Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are still billionaires, btw.
Yep.
You can either be rich enough to just absorb the hit, or so destitute you have nothing to lose.
For guys in the middle (i.e. WHERE MOST GUYS ARE), its just financial devastation.
Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.
Women aren't owed men's attention and support, by the same token.
And if men are making the logical decision that the prize they get for supporting and paying attention to women is not appealing, why SHOULDN'T they just ignore them?
What's the point of taming wilderness if you aren't then allowed to build a society in it?
What's the point of taming the ocean if you can't go fishing in it.
Why explore the universe if you are not given the credit for your efforts and risks?
You're basically characterizing women as a ENEMY, or possibly just a natural force that men must overcome.
In other words, as a force against ongoing maintenance of civilization.
Makes little sense to give such a dangerous presence much control of your civilization.
faceh
17d ago
I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
We've run this experiment for about 30 or so years.
That is, we tore up any laws or social norms that might be considered restrictions on women's liberty (Even WITHIN the marital relationship!), gave them 'equal rights' to every legal benefit they could want, we have every single cultural institution, Academia, Corporations, Social Media, Hollywood, all telling them they never have to settle.
Then the few guardrails that remained (i.e. religion) have been pushed aside, so that women genuinely do not have ANY pressure on them to live up to ANY standards, whatsoever.
And what we see is that women have more mental illness, are more medicated than ever, have more radical politics than ever, are less healthy than ever, they have more sex partners yet fewer children, and self reported happiness is lower than ever.
Don't know what to tell you man, women are miserable under this current state of affairs, too. And they tend to blame men, despite having been given all the agency they could possibly want.
Solutions that DON'T directly restrict sexual liberties could involve removing the direct incentives to put off relationship formation and simply reinstate the cultural 'guardrails' that at least give them a path they can follow that tends to create healthy outcomes.
Surely we can put some 'pressure' on women to settle down earlier without making it a legal mandate?
faceh
17d ago
Because they still largely hold the reins of power, which at a bare minimum means they can stop solutions from being implemented.
Other solution, aside from outright revolution, is to wait patiently for them to die.
faceh
17d ago
There's a lot of room for profile optimization to allow men of average looks to get into the top 20% of profiles, or
You see how this is a Red Queen's race, though, do you not?
If every guy puts in incredible effort to up his game, to make his profile as slick and impressive as possible... then NOBODY actually improves their status relative to the others much. Its a lot of effort burnt for no real improvement in the overall situation.
Well, women get a bit of a benefit, but they're still given dozens of options with no pressure to settle so its not like it'll encourage them to actually CHOOSE the guy in front of them.
And on the flip side... the quality of the women they're in competition for is lower than before, so what exactly is the MOTIVATION to put in all this effort, to try to win the race for her affections...
For a woman who already thinks you're unattractive:
https://x.com/whatever/status/1927741663054553242
This is a massive genre of video, I could pull dozens of examples of women openly declaring they don't find average men attractive. Despite not being very hot themselves. The toxicity is not just a small subset of them.
Even obese women won't settle for an obese man, although an obese man is willing to have an obese woman. this is quite the asymetry... and its not solved by men 'getting better.'
This is my point with my earlier post. The Pool of women who are actually appealing to marry is small, compared to the vast number of single guys fighting for their attention.
The only way this resolves favorably is to increase the pool of women who are marriageable.
But nobody will even broach that topic... except Andrew Tate.
faceh
17d ago
Yes.
But this is my point. Yelling at men to 'get better' is not a viable solution when the reason they're not putting in the effort are mostly attributable to FACTORS BEYOND THEIR CONTROL.
faceh
18d ago
I think there's an empathy gap, men know how much effort it takes to create good results, AND how few compliments a man gets, so men are more prone to give 'em when justified.
faceh
18d ago
I knew this meme for years, but when I started lifting in earnest about a year ago, I was still quite tickled when literally the only people paying me compliments were dudes. "Arms looking thick!" "Great work on that bench PR!" "I see those biceps!"
Nary a peep from any woman, friend or otherwise.
That said, at least I can be pretty secure in the knowledge that if the guys are noticing it, then there are visible improvements that the women will notice too, even if they say nothing.
faceh
18d ago
I literally just want to figure out the most most efficient way to show the Boomers pushing the "just improve yourself and then women will flock to you" advice that this is horribly insufficient and increasingly divorced from reality, so that they can be convinced to either start helping with the problem or, preferably, stand aside to let others fix it rather than just interfering with anybody who tries so NOBODY can fix it.
The fact that they don't let any 'serious' guy talk about the problem or take genuine actions is why Andrew Tate is the main voice men get to hear about this from.
Couple the fact that Gen Z was raised with phones in their hand and thus don't remember a time before dating apps, and Covid demolishing the in-person social scene for a year or two... and arguably it never came back, as it got replaced with digital interactions.
And its not surprising that Gen Z is basically relegated to the apps for meeting new people to date.
But the bigger point is that literally any app where you users can interact with each other can become a de-facto dating app.
So the same rules are in play on Instagram, tiktok, twitch... take your pick.
faceh
18d ago
The fact that none of the dating apps will release good information on how successful their users are at getting matches, much less getting relationships, is already a tell for how abysmal it is.
This guy did a pretty good analysis with about the most reliable dataset available.
Here it is in text form.
https://www.swipestats.io/blog/tinder-statistics
Here's the crux:
Match Rates Women's average match rate: 30.7% (median: 32.96%)
Men's average match rate: 2.63% (median: 2.14%)
Women are 11-15 times more likely to match than men
Add in that there's a 2:1 ratio men to women in there, and this looks an AWFUL LOT like women matching exclusively with the 'top' 20% of men.
And here's a song that accurately reflects my feelings about the apps:
Yep.
The whole problem with apps is they've all converged on the "Swipe through cards endlessly" model rather than letting you target in on people you actually think would be a good match (how OKCupid used to work). Plus gamification algorithms.
My last foray into the apps, I FELT myself dehumanizing the people in the photos more as I went. You see 150 different profiles in like an hour, and you get very critical of even small flaws.
There's also the argument that men look better in motion since women like seeing men do things. So a dating app that let men post 5-10 second videos of themselves, e.g. playing guitar, rock climbing, playing tennis to showcase a skill would probably even things out a bit in the attractiveness field.
Have to assume the app companies don't want to deal with policing the content of millions of videos, though.
faceh
19d ago
faceh
19d ago
...
Is your belief that out of nowhere, for no reason at all, young people, around the planet, have chosen to 'stop trying', unlike every other generation that came before them?
Does that pass muster to you?
Or is it just possible that it got HARDER, (and/or the rewards have diminished) which made it much less appealing to try?
Anyway, here you go:
Tons of analysis of the issue.
A decent summation:
If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.
I've spent inordinate amounts of time researching this stuff. I'm not 'proud' of that, but I can provide you just about whatever form of evidence you want.
Here, check out how dating apps work in South Korea, which is even worse off than the U.S.:
https://instagram.com/reel/DFyqCOmz-LM/
Does that seem 'reasonable' to you, or is it maybe a lot more competitive than it used to be?
faceh
19d ago
I saw someone recently point out that bodybuilders are rarely with conventionally 'hot' women.
It seems likely that the time commitment required for being serious about bodybuilding and the lifestyle changes for diet and such would actually make it VERY HARD to date seriously, that's time, money, and effort that takes away from your fitness goals.
And of course there's evidence that women don't find the roided-out look very appealing anyway.
faceh
19d ago
Although her first relationship was... interesting and unique to say the least.
That's becoming less true every single year. In every single country.
Call it dooming or blackpilling if you want, it is happening. It is observable.
If it were just some smallish subset of people experiencing it then we could say its something you can change individually.
When it is happening everywhere to everyone at the same time, that reads as a systemic/societal issue that no individual can change.
South Korea shows just how bad it can get.
We in the U.S. can fall even further if the course isn't changed.
faceh
19d ago
Its one of those things that DOESN'T work when a bunch start doing it at once.
Too many men simping and a woman can simply bask in the attention whilst giving nothing back to any individual one.
Information asymetries also make it possible to condemn simping whilst continuing to do it on the downlow.
faceh
19d ago
Nearly half of Gen Z guys say they're not dating at all.
You're SEEING some of them out, but how many of them are you just not seeing because they're not visible.
faceh
19d ago
That's about how it works when men rate women.
I think people don't get how Power Law distributions dominate on dating apps.
So they think an "average" guy is doing okay on the apps, even if he is jealous of the more attractive guys who have it easier.
When in reality, the Average guy is barely scraping by, as virtually all serious female attention flows to a handful of Top Tier guys, so the mismatch is SEVERE.
Top tier guys obviously have no incentive to change this. Dating apps don't have much incentive either, since they can sell the lower tier guys various products that they imply will help, and those guys don't have many other options.
And of course these dating apps keep their data secret so we can't even look and judge how well they work for their stated purposes (not well).
So average guys are getting quietly more desperate but can't do anything about it or even talk about it because talking about it marks you as a loser and further lowers your status.
faceh
19d ago
Yep.
Dating apps have made everyone so flighty that the OPTIMAL strategy is to try to have like 3-5 on the line at any given time, as most won't even lead to a date, so you run up the numbers as best you can.
But if you get a string of luck (if you're a dude) and actually GET 3 women to go on dates... suddenly your incentive changes to keep this bounty going and drag that out as long as possible.
faceh
19d ago
Meet girls IRL
That's not how couples meet anymore. Especially among young people, who don't get out much anyway, they grew up in the digital world, and Covid made this even sharper. You can't meet Gen Z girls by just 'going out.'
The gender ratios in most public spaces are skewed towards men, which also makes women more averse to being approached over and over agan.
Women can get on the dating apps or any social media site and get all the attention she wants, so there's no need for her to entertain IRL offers.
Is it THAT hard?
Now what.
I was going to call you out for glossing over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, where Starlord and Gamora have a truly interesting romantic dynamic across the first couple movies, which is SO emphasized that it is the entire reason the heroes 'lose' the Infinity War.
But then I remembered they turned it into a joke for the third film.
So this might just prove the point.
Although James Gunn's NEXT film, this time with a more well known hero looks like it will lean heavily on the Lois Lane romance.
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