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So much clueless discourse and blathering on here really makes me think that a lot of people here have rather interestingly false conceptions of the gap between them and an attractive man in terms of dating success. That's not to speak of the absolutely massive gap between the average man and the average woman that I think could do with some amount of rectification though the use of a couple particularly pertinent examples. In short-- the average man i.e a guy who would probably get rated a 6 or 7 by most people is virtually invisible to women online to a degree that's frankly quite horrific when you compare it to the experience of an attractive man. The average guy could probably expect to reasonably manage about 5 to 10 likes a day, probably dropping off to less than that after the first week, with maybe a couple matches a week and perhaps 1 out of 50 matches actually converting to a date and an even smaller proportion converting to anything more significant than that. That doesn't sound too bad, right?
The thing is, an attractive man isn't just getting say 10% more matches, or even just doubling their matches. The amount of attention they get from women usually dwarfs the average male by several orders of magnitude. The top profiles on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, are maxing out the like counter in give or take under an hour, the rungs below that with ease in under a day and so on and so forth. There are plenty of men who are not rich, not famous, not exceptional in any way really other than the face God gave them and perhaps the muscles Trenbolone gave them (though if you're thinking steroids alone will make you one of these men, you're living in a world of delusion-- women want the complete package) breaking 20,000 matches in relatively modest sized metro areas like Copenhagen, Stockholm or Denver. I should probably note that these profiles are typically white men though, as funnily enough even here racial gaps manifest, though this is frankly a matter of degrees, as even these disadvantaged attractive men of color are usually not lacking for women-- but it's going to be generally significantly less attractive and desirable women and they'll have to be a point or two better than their white counterpart to compete. These men have such an abundance of choice and easy access to women that they effectively dwell in a completely separate reality when compared to the average man-- they are the pickers and choosers and have no desperate need to compromise or settle down with one woman. Think of the gap between a man with 70 IQ and a man with 160 IQ in terms of capacity for intellectual output and perhaps multiply that gap a few times and you'll have a somewhat decent grasp of the dynamic in play here.
No amount of game or self improvement will ever get you close to that if you lack the genetic basis for it. It's like thinking a 70 IQ man can become a world class physicist and win the Nobel prize if he just tried hard enough-- the world doesn't work that way.
It's well known that attractive women have their pick of the litter, but I'll just add in that a woman need not be particularly attractive to be bombarded with options. The average girl you see on the street could open any dating app and find literal thousands of men throwing themselves at her within a day, maybe two or three if she's a bit ungifted in the face. Though as with attractive men, there's a pretty big gap between the kinds and amount of attention that white women get, and every other race of woman, including Asian women (of the northeastern and southern varieties) and having blue or green eyes supercharges this a surprising amount.
Here's an album of proof
This was originally intended to be a response to a post by @faceh below where he links to an article that contains the oft-quoted statistic that the top 80% of women are contending for the top 20% of men and the bottom 80% of men are contending for the bottom 80% of women, or some similar numbers that are eerily close to the Pareto distribution. I've heard this mentioned a lot, particularly in the context of people complaining about dating apps, but it seemed a bit suspicious since approximately 100% of the friends I've know who have used them with the goal of landing a long-term partner have found one, and several of those friends are nowhere near the to 20% of guys using whatever metric you want to use to rate desirability. Not to mention that the app companies themselves are notoriously tight-lipped about their user data. So I decided to trace the source of this, and post it here so it won't get buried.
It turns out the statistic is incredibly dubious. The quote comes from a [Medium post from 2015] in which a blogger named worst-online-dater attempts to come up with the Gini Coefficient to prove how unfair Tinder is. This blog has 6 total posts, four of which weren't posted until seven years after the initial two posts (which include the post that contains the statistic) and were only created to address the increased attention he had been getting in the wake of his study being quoted online and occasionally in mainstream media. There is no biographical information provided for the author of this "study", so at best it can be said that it comes from the very definition of an "online rando", and at that, one who seems to have an axe to grind.
The actual study the guy conducted was a very informal one where he used pictures of a male model to attract likes from women on Tinder, and used his chatting privileges to ask them questions about their usage. He doesn't say what questions he asked or how many women actually answered, but he says that the women reported, on average, to liking approximately 12% of the profiles they looked at. I could comment on how the sample size is small and the methodology dubious, but that's neither here nor there because the actual research he did doesn't factor at all into the whole 80/20 statement. That seems to just come out of nowhere, without explanation as to how he extrapolated it from data he collected or attribution from another source. It's collateral to the point of the study anyway, as he's trying to calculate a Gini coefficient and uses it as a number he plugs in somewhere along the way.
Of course, that was the takeaway from the article, and not what he was even trying to say, which is that dating inequality on the apps is worse than economic inequality in all but a handful of countries. Years later, after the statistic began to gain traction, he addressed it in a followup post in which he responded to criticism of the original article. Someone sent him a link to an article that pointed out that the whole 80/20 thing was a lie. He responded to the criticisms that were leveled at him in the article, but he never adequately explained where he was getting the whole 80/20 thing from. As far as I can tell, at best he's getting it through an uncertain derivation based on data from a highly flawed study. At worst, he just made it up.
That isn't the end of it, though. Another of the responses to his original post was a separate study of Hinge data based on actual comprehensive data that was conducted by an employee of the company. He doesn't discuss the results of this study in the same terms as the 80/20 thing, but the results are similarly dramatic: Men as a whole only receive 14% of the likes sent out on Hinge. This breaks down further to 9% for the top 20% of men, 4% for men in the 50%–80% range, and just 1% for the bottom 50% of men. By contrast, the bottom 50% of women receive 18% of total likes. He claims that this Hinge data basically confirms the conclusions he drew from his Tinder data. It certainly makes it seem like even attractive guys have no chance if they're not even getting the same amount of action as below-average women.
There's one huge problem here, though, in that it takes two to Tango. I can't comment too much on the Tinder stuff because I never used Tinder and am therefore unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies. I have used Hinge, however, and basing success on likes received is enough to make me discount the study before I even look at the data. It's my understanding that unless you're in a paid tier, with Tinder you just swipe on profiles you like with limited personal information and match with people who happen to swipe on you as well. In other words, everyone has to swipe, and there's no guarantee that someone you swiped right on will even see your profile. On Hinge, however, you can like a profile and even send a brief message, and you're like will always show up on the person's queue. So there are two ways to match: You can send out a like and hope the other person matches, or you can automatically match with one of your incoming likes.
And, like in the real world, while either sex is free to initiate, the way it usually works is that men get matches by sending out likes and women get matches by choosing from their incoming likes. While the opposite can happen, most women only send out likes because they aren't getting enough incoming likes, so it's rare for men to get likes, and when they do it usually isn't from anyone they're interested in actually dating. Likes received is a bad barometer for determining success on Hinge, and given that the author seems to have no grasp on how Hinge actually works, it leads me to question whether he understands how tinder actually works, and whether the data he is purportedly measuring is actually a reasonable proxy for dating success.
I tried to come up with some ideas on how to accurately measure success on Hinge but I came up short each time. the experience of men and women on these apps seems to be so different that it would be difficult to quantify who has it "easier". Part of the problem is that while the whole thing is seen as a grind, the statistics we use to determine success tend to celebrate the grindy aspects of it. Someone who is on for a month and only matches with one person is seen as a failure compared to someone who matches with a couple dozen people, but if the former finds a long-term partner and the latter goes on a string of boring dates, we all know who was more successful. Until we figure out exactly what we're measuring, these "studies" are all useless. It's all bogus information based on proxies for other proxies, and a set of assumptions that amount to nothing more than a house of cards. And with no shortage of people willing to complain about online dating, I don't think these dubious statistics are going away any time soon.
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:
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:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=77vmhSwDBds
The point of my post was to point out that there's no statistical basis for believing the 80/20 thing. I'm not saying it isn't true, just that we don't know. Either way, even if I assume that it is true, one of the following things must also be true:
Like I said, I've never used Tinder, but I've had no problems on Hinge. And this is with me selecting for attractive, non-obese women with professional jobs that usually involve advanced degrees. I match on about 20–25% of likes, on average, and even then I occasionally get into trouble where I have more matches than I can handle from swiping 4 or 5 days a month. I suspect that I could probably do "better" if I were swiping more and started going after the hairdressers and phlebotomists of the world, but I'm trying to find a girlfriend, not farm matches.
I was around for both eras; when I was in college, online dating had about as much social cachet as taking out personal ads in the paper, and I exclusively dated women I met IRL until relatively recently, but now that it's mainstream, I can confidently say that the women I'm meeting now are in a similar class to those I was meeting before, there's just more of them.
You have to keep in mind that if you set up a dating profile, that's you as far as women on the app are concerned. You know that there's more to you than that, but out there people are dealing with limited information. Too many guys half-ass their profiles and wonder why they aren't getting any attention. You've got one chance to make a good first impression, and so many guys waste it. Either that or they send out likes with messages that don't have any substance to them and don't give the girl much to work with in terms of a response. At worst, they suggest that the guy didn't even bother reading the profile and just clicked on a pretty face. Trust me, if some of my friends can find wives on here anyone can. Nobody wants to hear this because it means ditching the defeatist attitude and requires putting in some actual work, but if you can't put the work in for a fucking dating profile, what does that say about the kind of work you'll put into an actual relationship?
Then again, there's the possibility that you weren't dating much before the whole online thing took off, in which case, you can't expect women who wouldn't date you in real life to suddenly become attracted to your digital persona.
Sure you do. Why don't you export your Hinge data and just show us your actual matches? Somehow I doubt you're doing better on Hinge than signed models-- but that's just kind of a hunch you know? If you're really a 6 or 7 to women, you should have upwards of a few thousand matches after a month or so. That's even if you only swipe a couple days a month, it's just not that hard to rack them up if you're truly good looking. I expect I'll be waiting for a very, very, very long time though. People just loove spinning absurdly fantastical tales to anyone with a modicum of experience in this to try and inflate their credentials.
Hinge example
Data example 1
Data example 2
Data example 3
You keep making this very interesting assumption that putting work into a dating profile meaningfully changes your results. If you're not good looking it won't. Full stop.
I don't know if you know how Hinge actually works , but you can only send out about five likes a day, so even if I were swiping every day and getting 100% matches I wouldn't be able to get anywhere near a couple thousand. But anyway, I'm not trying to claim I'm exceptionally good looking or exceptionally successful, just that I'm getting enough good matches that I'm getting satisfactory results. Honestly, having more than three active matches is a waste of time, since it's hard to keep up with that many conversations in any meaningful way, let alone schedule dates if you're a reasonably busy person with an actual life. So yeah, I'm sure there's some super users out there with thousands of matches , but it's a pointless comparison. These guys don't "have their pick" because there's no possible way to even make that selection. So fine, I'm probably in the bottom ten percent of users and doing terribly, but if this is what doing terribly is like, then nobody has any reason to complain.
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Advice columnist Carolyn Hax once wrote something to the effect of, "We have five senses for a reason. How smart is it to look for a romantic partner without using any of them?", referring to the fact that photos are often old or complete fakes.
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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.
Maybe in an ideal world where nobody does stupid shit and then complains about the consequences of their actions,but if we ever get there, then the fact that it may make online dating slightly harder would only be a minor downside.
Isn't this woman doing exactly what you suggest women should be doing, i.e. settling for men she doesn't find attractive?
As for the second two videos, yeah, some women shallow, self-centered, high maintenance bitches. That isn't exactly a groundbreaking revelation. I don't see the point in cherry-picking the worst of Tik-Tok and acting like its representative of half the population. And as for the second one, when exactly does she suggest that she doesn't find average men attractive. She's obviously high maintenance due to her attitude, but the substance of what she's suggesting isn't even controversial. If you want a world where women settle for you out of necessity, you're going to have to pay for a lot more than flowers and dinner.
As @FiveHourMarathon and others pointed out, to which you didn't respond, the vast number of men fighting for their attention is only a problem if you don't apply ridiculous nine-point tests to determine whether any "reasonable" woman would want to date them. It's ridiculous that you're complaining that women won't lower their standards when it comes to looks (which is a dubious assertion to begin with) and with a straight face point to your own set of criteria that excludes 99% of the female population.
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Never have I seen the 80/20 rule stated that way in the context of the mating market anywhere. What I can surely state is that the rule was originally popularized (in the online space, that is) on Manosphere sites sometime around 2008 or 2009 (definitely not 2015). I can’t cite sources because those sites disappeared a long time ago due to various reasons (doxxing etc.). It’s a simple interpretation of the Pareto effect (i.e. that 80% of the consequences/results come from 20% of the causes/effort) applied to the mating market, and was usually stated as “20% of the men attract 80% of the women” or “20% of all men have 80% of all the sex” etc. I’m aware that those statements are rather different but that doesn’t matter because all of them assume the same Pareto effect. (Some detractors even came up with the argument that what’s actually happening is that 20% of all men engage in 80% of all sex acts with 20% of all women, which’d still be an example of the Pareto effect/distribution). Again, the fundamental intent behind the whole argument is to differentiate the current society of unrestrained female hypergamy from the bygone society of enforced monogamy, because a lot of people were unaware of this distinction, especially back then.
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Although the Hinge post that included their top line numbers has been scrubbed, it's still available on Wayback. They address your point directly:
That, arguably, supports your point (things are substantially less dire than looking at raw likes), though I think the credibility depends on how the junior data analyst defined "forming a connection."
What I'd love to see is the Gini coefficients of mutual matches for different dating apps in 2025.
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