site banner
PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   2494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The visible parts of the dating market are promiscuous women and women with low sex drive. In the past the concepts of "putting out", "marital duty" obscured this dynamic, but modern women have been brought up knowing they don't owe anyone sex and don't have to hide their (dis)interest.

Generalize that further.

The people who are visible on the dating market are often 'broken' in some way that makes their ability to maintain long-term relationships much more stunted (especially under modern conditions).

The ones who are capable of stable pair-bonding and are generally normal in terms of attractiveness, life-put-togetherness, from happy families, are by sheer definition, the ones most likely to get locked in to a stable relationship early and not leave. The pool, at any given time, is mostly inhabited by the broken and you have to get lucky to chance onto a viable partner in their brief period of availability.

It creates a double-sided Market for Lemons as people learn to expect the worst from each given encounter and thus are ever less willing to extend commitment or effort to the next person.

So don't limit it just to promiscuity and libido, include emotional stability and familial instincts and generally being 'sane' enough to envision a committed relationship with that person. If the person is aware that they're broken, they even have an incentive to hide that from potential matches, so there's already a layer of suspicion going in.

In terms of promiscuous women, I think that they get the focus because sexual availability is one of the few things that's relatively easy to sus out in short order, and if you've decided you're unlikely to find a life partner anytime soon, getting sex in the meantime is a consolation prize of sorts. Or a self-esteem booster.

This is an issue that the dating apps not only haven't solved, they've exacerbated.

They give you less up front information than you'd need to make a solid judgment, they disallow searching out specific characteristics and they show you people at seemingly random that you know almost nothing about other than they, too, have been unable to secure commitment.

It enrages me. I know with precision the qualities I'm looking for. I know what qualities I want to avoid. I'm acutely aware how rare these positive qualities are, DOUBLY so among those who are still single. So I want to be given tools to zero in on these people more directly, and not absorb the waste of time and additional risk of figuring out if this person who deigned to match with me is sane or not, whilst operating on the assumption they are not. When the person I'm searching for is so unique, the search tools need to be powerful. And search is, on the technology side, a solved problem, I should be able to pluck my potential partners out of the ether with ease.

But this is simply not a thing you are allowed to do in the current era.

Are you willing to expend resources? Matchmaker services still exist but are somewhat expensive. They seem to cater to careerists who missed their early window to find a mate, which may be what you're looking for.

I simply do not believe that most matchmakers are actually good at their jobs (especially given the larger culture they're working in) to give them money I could spend on either improving my status or actually taking out a woman I was interested in.

I stop short of calling them scams (they surely DO provide matches) but they're not solving the issue of women believing they have infinite optionality, which is simply a symptom of having access to dating apps at all.

The original way of doing this was to draw from your own peer group. At least that’s what we did back when I was growing up. Tech has likely permanently shifted the boundary away from the tried and true traditional paths, which is still probably the best route.

I read a book about attachment styles which made the more specific argument that securely attached people tend to pair off with other securely attached people early on, resulting in a dating pool made up primarily of insecurely attached people. This results in the "anxious-avoidant trap", a relationship made up of one anxiously attached person and one avoidant person, which is mutually unfulfilling.

I think this is true to a degree, but also the nature of online dating (which is getting to be a bigger and bigger percentage of relationship formation) means that it's very hard to be securely attached when people have a lot more scope to just vanish completely at any moment for any reason and for you to not even have any real social recourse. I managed to get off the apps and now have wife/kids, but I still occasionally get Vietnam flashbacks of the search period and how the whole thing had an eternal vibe of herding cats in which even something that's ostensibly going well can just die instantaneously for factors largely beyond your control.

Like even if you've got incredible game the sheer numbers involved and a lot of people dating many people in parallel means there's just a bunch of scope for getting blindsided by plot developments completely out of your control. I'm reminded of a first date I had once that I thought went incredibly, then the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months and that situation is unnavigable without somebody getting blindsided.

then the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months

Did she really call herself a 'they'? Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

Yep.

I've become ACUTELY prescient at noticing when someone is anxious-avoidant or worse, just straight up dismissive. Me, I'm mildly anxious (have gotten a lot better) and very secure once basic trust is established. It takes a lot of effort to maintain that, since one scary thing is that secure-attachment people can be shifted over to avoidant and anxious if they have enough bad experiences with the other types.

So the secure types become a rarer and rarer type to find because they're either pairing off or getting ruined by having a handful of bad relationships that failed on them.

I'm semi-comfortable with the anxious types, I don't mind giving reassurances to them that the relationship is strong... but there's always going to be some incident that 'confirms' their fears and causes them to cut it off when they think that things are about to go south.

The ones where the avoidant person is trying to withdraw and the other party is trying to chase and secure their commitment is maybe the worst dynamic on a meta level, because it can remain stable for quite a while but its burning out both parties as it continues. I remember straight up telling one girl "look, its one thing to want men to chase you... but you have to be willing to be caught and its clear you are not."

And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly. That one hurts.

This is apparently a pattern with some women. Fire up a dating app, stick around long enough to find a nice enough dude, delete the app, date for a bit, freak out and break it off, stay single and get lonely after a bit, then repeat.

And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly.

You rang?

Thank Christ I broke out of that cycle.

How?

I've done the 'anxious with an avoidant' bit from the avoidant side. Wasn't fun at all. Any advice much appreciated.

The best I can say is "persistence". Sticking with a relationship I know makes me happy even when my gut is telling me to cut and run. Per High Fidelity, it's about learning to recognise when your guts have shit for brains.

I don’t know. Never went wrong trusting my gut but I’ve went wrong several times ignoring it. Maybe my intuition was always calibrated just right. I’ve known people who were equally persistent and all miserable just the same.

It sucks because you rarely ever learn any useful lessons out of it either, because there's no reason for things ending other than "brain said to run so I ran."

You don't learn to be a better partner, you just get left wondering if you were inadequate.

What helped me a lot was keeping tabs on these women for long enough that I could see that it wasn't me, they did this to every guy. I actually had an interesting realization that of all the women I dated seriously... only one of them has managed to get into a stable relationship, so realistically I probably couldn't have made any of those situations work on my own efforts.

But also means I've been pretty bad at selecting good partners.

And finally, the thing I really hate is when I meet a girl whose personality is a really close match to my ideal and is physically attractive, but I immediately clock her as anxious or avoidant and I ultimately learn that she had a bad experience with a controlling, abusive, or adulterous/sociopathic dude who has basically ruined her pair-bonding capability. And I agonize over the "what ifs" I had met her earlier before the damage was done.

This is a problem writ large with how many of them think, that I’ve noticed. They find it easy to attach with men who are “low stakes” to them, because it doesn’t matter if they end up leaving or not. They’ve got no sustained investment in them; they’re a utility or a prop. Guys they have a serious interest in they’re more cold or distant with because they risk a “misstep” of screwing things up; or some other idiotic reason.

Guys see this behavior and say to themselves, “Shit, I wish I was treated like I didn’t matter.” Because women are treating men they don’t like or care for better than the men they do. This is why they’ve got everything backwards. If you like a man and want to lock him down, do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men; keep them a mile away at all times. It’s really as simple as that. I love nothing more than an otherwise boring woman who makes my life easy. That’s the best woman of all time. But they make it harder than it has to be for themselves. And this is the origin story of how good men go bad over time. Men see the narrative unfold with their eyes and see men with bad behavior getting what they want, while upstanding men are punished for it. And so as time goes on, the pool of good men shrinks even further and as women age they wonder where all the decent ones go. That’s what happened to them. They didn’t “go” anywhere. They no longer exist.

Something whenever I hear it that immediately scratches one off for serious consideration thorough is when someone says “I’m not happy…” That is a phrase that is so wildly overused in relationships today that it’s all but lost any serious meaning it may once have had. Concepts like “duty” and “responsibility” are foreign to these people. Nobody in any circumstance of life is guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time. Yes, happiness is enormously important and should be intrinsic to the relationship, but someone who adopts the unhealthy viewpoint of it like they’re always chasing the next high is an emotional junkie who’s more akin to a drug addict that should be in rehab, rather than in a serious relationship. I can’t stand those people.

do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men;

That's the big one.

Most guys are aware that a woman will have a dozen other prospects in their phone at any given time. You CAN'T get attached to that person, b/c her cost of swapping you out for another is minimal. You become aloof because that's what the game theory says you have to do. She can defect at any time, and she can't be punished for doing so, don't be the chump who cooperates too early.

Costly shows of effort and interest that demonstrate she's not entertaining other men is how you'd actually know she's serious and not as likely to leave on a whim (alas, it takes 5 minutes for her to set up a dating profile, so you're never truly safe).

And no, that doesn't count just sleeping with him, since there's no direct cost to THAT anymore. Be pleasant, show appreciation, make him feel like he is important to you, and he's already yours.

What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.

What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.

You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.

Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.

The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.

But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.

I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.

I mean, I had a significant LTR with a woman, met her through OKCupid, built quite a bit of a life with her.

That ended badly for reasons that I came to realize were related to her deep, unaddressed anxieties. But for a couple years there it felt like it was going great. I know what it feels like to fall asleep beside someone and wake up next to them hundreds and hundreds of times.

That part of my psychology means I can't find real fulfillment in casual flings or just using someone for sex. The deeper intimacy is missing. I'm aware of how nice it is to be with someone who feels compatible and expresses affection and in theory wants you to be happy too, and now I can't accept less.

And I'm agonized by how hard it is to find and secure that nowadays. It took me about six months on the market, including the dating apps, to meet that one. A few more months to commit my trust to the relationship.

Now, its been years of trying for a new thing, and I've encountered just about every other failure mode and false start you could imagine. And that's why its so odd, if women don't want to be on dating apps like you say, that they also don't like to behave in the ways that would actually lock down a partner, but instead make the process painful for both themselves and the men they encounter, for no apparent gain.

More comments

The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.

Lesbians in porn do not act like lesbians IRL, but how men like to imagine lesbians. Likewise "girlfriend experience" is not named because it accurately portrays girlfriends IRL, but bevause it portrays how men would like girlfriends would act. Such conduct is not required to be prevalent among real GFs for the name to stay around.

Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.

A man who is "pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a [partner] with sexual desire as an undertone" is not as valued as highly by women, as it is by men. I would correct your statement to say "Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels sparks in her the same utility gain". What that is exactly is a subject of debate, but one can't women and men value the same things in a partner. As you admit in the following quote:

Most women don’t want to be on dating apps and most would consider it at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention

Gender asymmetry is built into every point of this debate.

More comments

The older you get as well and as your drive begins to dwindle, the long-term appeal of any of it diminishes significantly; and you lose considerable interest in it over time. Certainly the best time to take advantage of me would’ve been the ripe age bracket of my very early 20’s. I discussed this with a friend some years back and he remarked, “Once I hit the age of 40, I’m not taking any new calls… No, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to meet you, no; I don’t care about you; leave me alone…” That was about the age he just wanted to officially stop everything, consolidate his gains and what he’s made for himself in life, call it quits and live out the rest of his days in peace.

Misery loves company. He and I had a hard enough life growing up as it was. I’m just about with him. Even though I wanted a family, I have no problems being happy on my own.

“Once I hit the age of 40, I’m not taking any new calls… No, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to meet you, no; I don’t care about you; leave me alone…” That was about the age he just wanted to officially stop everything, consolidate his gains and what he’s made for himself in life, call it quits and live out the rest of his days in peace.

Can't lie, I'm contemplating that deadline myself, in my late 30's.

Every failed connection or relationship that goes nowhere unfortunately makes me bayesian update towards the likelihood that I'll just never find someone that I can make it work with.

Thing is my drive isn't dwinding yet. I'm not feeling 'old' by any means yet. I still feel vital and effective and the misery is coming from trying to encounter someone whose interests and values align when most of those interests and values are selected against by the default overculture.

There's an odd disconnect these days. I'm able to attract women... but I'm less interested in playing the games and I'm better able to perceive the immediate disqualifying factors. The women I have available are not bad people but I don't expect that anything I initiate between us would last... so why toy around with each other?

I can sustain my current life routine indefinitely (until AI disruption finally hits) and every foray I make into the dating market gives me yet more reasons to stay out of it.

His argument was persuasive and he didn’t have to do much convincing to get me on board. People like me were just placed in the wrong century. Like you I’m also not feeling old, but I’m definitely not 18 either. A lot of people are going to come due for a very rude awakening in the years to come and I’m not normally one to be the guy to gloat “I told you so,” but I’m definitely going to be the guy with a smirk that says “I told you so.” I know a couple of those people already.

I was never a guy who played games when it came to interpersonal relationships. If it isn’t a board game, a card game, a video game or a bedroom game, I don’t play it. You don’t play with people’s lives unless you want to invite some serious trouble into your life. I’d have thought that point was made a long time ago. Enjoy each other’s time, shared interests and company, and be a family. Why complicate and risk destroying it all out of mental instability? I know a lot of women on the same level as you. I don’t oblige them because I don’t think they’d be a good mother. I know too much about their history; and that’s not where their mind has been.

I have enough in the interest department to keep me occupied, and enough interests and things I like to do in my private life to keep me occupied and entertained until the end of time and there’s enough people in my family and in my close friend’s family that I’ve had an enormous impact on that leaves me with a feeling of achievement I’ll be proud of on my death bed. The most important document I own is a 3-page essay my best friend’s younger brother (who always viewed me as an older sibling, like a lot of people close to me) wrote me at a time when I was feeling down many years ago. In it he dropped a line saying, “Why do you want a son so much when you already have one?” I always think of that line.

Being an older sibling to others can be rewarding, it can simulate some aspects of parenthood. But full parenthood is a class of its own, and raising a child of your own from conception is the full undiluted parenthood experience. It's full of stress and backaches but also full of intense amazing moments. It is an experience worth trying for at least once if a good partner can be found.

If a man can be made presentable to college age women, then that is the group he should try to find a good woman from, as they have less relationship baggage. It might just be a matter of luck or fate though with how few eligible bachelorettes there are these days.

That’s what I’ve always been after but it’s eluded me my whole life.

I had an interesting position between my sibling and the rest of our extended family. A lot of my 1st generation cousins are much older than me, the youngest is like 12 years older or something like that, and they would always be hanging around themselves or our parents. They’d encourage me to spend time with them and a lot of times I did, but I was clearly out of their age bracket from being able to meaningfully associate with them. The younger half was much younger than me. The oldest was within 2 years of me and the rest between 5-20 years younger. So I always stood on an island that was the middle ground, where nobody else my age was. My sibling always associated with my 1st cousins, I was always the “big brother” and mentor to my 2nd cousins and I stuck with them.

My friends interestingly enough were born the same year as me or the year prior. But they also had big families and whenever we’d spend time, their parents would encourage them to tag along with us and we’d also be in charge of them. So they participated in many of the same activities we did and we never treated them as a separate class most of the time (but not always). They always looked up to us as well.

A big, extended, and physically close family is a nice thing to be a part of. I'm from large extended families on both sides myself. I did happen to notice that my desire for children increased as I moved much farther away from the family area, as I missed the family atmosphere that similar aged "child-free" friends could not provide.

For me the desire was always there. I had my head on straight from a pretty young age as far as that was concerned. Nobody ever had to coax me into it.

Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?

Or have they just failed to get women to sign up? Or because the ones that signed up would only seek 7 feet tall high-earners with good hair? Perhaps the app would need to integrate the percentage of prospective matches generated by each successive restriction in the search box to counter that problem.

As stated by @orthoxerox, OkCupid was very close.

You answered a bunch of interesting questions, and you'd search for people who answered those questions in ways that indicated they would be compatible, then winnow from there.

There was a lengthy profile sections so people could put quite a bit of info about themselves if they wished.

And, the killer function, you could actually search and filter from the pool in a given area to zero in on ones that seemed most promising. It was more like spearfishing rather than sticking your bait out there and seeing who nibbled.

It was FAR from perfect in terms of actually generating dates, but I know multiple people who met spouses there.

I myself met the Ex that I almost married on there. Granted, it was because we both happened to be online at 2 a.m., me because I had gotten stood up by a different date. Timing/luck was a huge factor.

When I came back to it years later after my breakup, it had already been converted to a Tinder-style swipe app... as has EVERY OTHER APP.

I have a friend who is something of a player -- had casual sex in high school, was resented by a lot of women as a ladykiller, accused of infidelity repeatedly in ways that may or may not have been true. Even as an adult, when I really got to know him, he had a new girlfriend every 2-6 months. He had an engagement that broke off not too long after I got to know him.

He apparently had created an OkCupid or Match or one of the other traditional online dating websites after the engagement broke off, didn't use it much, didn't find much going on there, and his story is that when he went to log in after months of not using the site, he had one match, who was like a 95% match or whatever that platform used to gauge compatibility and had messaged him, he messaged her back. Apparently she was an English evangelical (there are such a thing, apparently) in the United States as part of a religious choir.

About a year ago they got married in a Church of England parish. I heard the wedding party's trip to the UK was great, although we're really more distant from each other in the past few years as our lives have drifted so I wasn't part of that.

My joke is that the best people you can meet on online dating are people who have just arrived (and are freshly looking and hopeful) or people who are just leaving (because they've realized the specific platform or OLD as a whole aren't getting them what they want). Online dating just seems to suck for people who use it to try to find partnership, and anyone who 'goes native' on them is probably not a dateable person.

I used OKCupid during what was apparently it's heyday and I found it pretty good, certainly compared to stats I see thrown around now, which I am deeply immersed in as I am in the process if getting divorced (from someone I met on OKC). I got a reply from like 25% of the girls I messaged and once I had a reply my conversion rate of turning it into a date was like 75%. From what I can see people saying of the swiping apps that is several orders of magnitude better than present day (though the effort involved in finding good matches and generating good initial messages might have been higher, dunno). Once the divorce is final and I spend some time on the new apps I will report back and give my impression of the differences.

Be braced for misery my guy.

No point in sugar coating it. Just realize its not really a 'you' thing.

OkCupid used to be like that, they even found what questions were the most useful for determining compatibility. Engagement farming killed that model. The most successful dating app is the one that keeps you swiping and paying for features.

Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?

Duolicious (list of 2000 questions)

Way too many questions, and psychometrically incompetent. Couples mainly pair on intelligence and political ideology. Surprisingly, big 5 spousal correlations are quite small. They also pair on BMI and drug using status. Not 2000 dAnK mEmEs questions.

To clarify, Duolicious does not use your answers to these questions for pairing directly. Rather, it distills from these questions your positions on 47 personality traits, and uses those variables for pairing—but it also lets you filter by individual answers in the search interface. Full explanation

Are you the dev or something? 47 traits mostly pulled out of thin air does not change my psychometrically incompetent assessment.

So this is what @faceh needs apparently ? @faceh please sign up and give us a report on the issues you immediately encounter on that app.

I think it'd be better to just find the correct environment, select whichever female specimen is the most liked / compatible, and deal with it until completion.

Personally, if I had to do it again, I would wager that a BLM protest would not be the right environment for me to find a match, perhaps I'd end up with some white-aspiring South-American or Asian.

Took me five minute to sign up and there are absolutely zero people meeting my criteria in a 30 miles radius.

in a 30-mile radius

That's unreasonably picky. Try increasing the radius. Also, don't forget to answer a bunch of the 2000 questions.

Remember that this website is rather small. As I understand it, the creator got a reasonable number of users by advertising on 4chan (there's still a dedicated thread on /soc/, though he no longer participates there) and Twitter something like a year ago, but you still can't expect to see a zillion people on it.

The 'nearest' prospect that showed up with the maximum range was across the state.

30 miles, for me, encompasses my town and the 3 nearest towns, any further than that and its a real commitment to drive out to meet someone.

Because Dating Apps have perverse incentives. If a dating app is really good, it loses customers and since the goal of the app is to make money, losing customers leads to a bad revenue stream. Their goal is to show you matches that are close to what you want but that are incompatible, so that you feel like there is progress and then are willing to pay for upgrades to do better/be seen more/swipe more, etc. Realistically the only way to fix this would for a non-profit or for a government entity to create the "dating app" as they aren't required to be profitable and likely are more interested in the 2nd order effects of matchmaking/relationships.

The way to fix it would be with matchmakers who might charge a deposit but get their payout upon a successful-relationship-milestone. But society can't agree on what that milestone should be.

They do have perverse incentives. However, in certain contexts it might be possible for them to be profitable even if they do not act on the perverse incentives. For example, medical professionals make money despite, generally speaking, not acting on the perverse incentives that would make them more profitable if they did a somewhat worse job of treating patients. Or am I wrong about this, and medical professionals actually do pursue these perverse incentives more often than I think they do? In any case, of course in medicine there is strong government regulation trying to prevent people from acting on the perverse incentives, whereas in dating apps there is not.

Not true, a Marriage App generates its own new customers by working well. That's the point of marriage. There's certainly value in becoming The Marriage App That Works, which can be passed down through the generations, if only people want what it can offer. The limit is that silicon valley people don't want to offer it and a lot of Westerners don't want to buy what it would sell.

If it was so easy to create a company based on long term matching at scale, then where is it? Tinders been out for what 15 years, okcupid, match.com 30? 90% of datong apps/websites are owned by match.com

At some point you need to consider the systemic problems that incentivize dating app profitability. If matching people for long term profit made more money for shareholders then selling short term boost/matches then it’s likely we would see that sort of emergent behavior. It’s clearly not. The system is just not setup that way. Being known as “the app” only works if you have such network effects that you can get a large base of people so short term losses are offset by long term gains.

I believe the secret would be that payment is due at time of marriage. But that creates incentives which push the target market out of the mainstream.

Was there ever a business willing to wait ~18 years for its returns?

Barrel-aged spirits are a classic example: scotches are not infrequently in that age range.

On the other hand, I've heard a lot of people in the business remark that it makes starting costs pretty overwhelming. At best you can start selling gin and vodka, or reselling out-of-house product while you wait for yours to age. Depending on jurisdiction you get to pay inventory/property tax on it too while you wait.

I once spoke to a guy who worked in a recently founded distillery. While waiting for their first batch of whiskey to age, they started selling gin and vodka just to get a bit of revenue in their coffers. To their surprise, their gin and vodka ended up being so popular (winning assorted international awards) that many of their customers are entirely unaware they distill whiskey.

Yes and also children exist right now and approximately 0% of them are betrothed, so they will be looking for marriage sooner than in 18 years.

How am i, the app company getting paid? I’m not making an app out of the goodness of my heart. I need to achieve network effects, i need to market, i need people to not be afraid to say they met on my app so i can get credibility.

How does the shidduch system work, economically? Is the yenta doing it for free, or do both sexes pay up front, or is payment due at time of betrothal?

Make men pay to be on it and focus on attracting women and matching well. The men provide the revenue, the good reputation provides the men.

Why would I a serious man pay for an app with no women on it, and why would i as a women waste my time joining an app with no men.

The entry barriers are already hard enough without first trying to filter at the very beginning.

If i am a man on the app, how am i paying? Subscription? Well the company now has an incentive to keep me on the app, if i match with someone i will leave and stop paying.

More comments

Tree farms

Fair. I'll specify: a business willing to wait 18 years for its returns in an area where returns aren't guaranteed and governed pretty much only by soil quality, rains and time; and also that area being social media???

Software-wise, there are plenty of apps that are barely manned, generating zero revenue and somehow still exist. I think the main cost of dating apps is marketing, advertising on non-software platforms where you might find young women. It's the holy grail of advertising and it takes top-dollar to get it.

There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her. So perhaps this is something that should be left to her parents. Perhaps already a thing in China. Otherwise with technology-minded millennials' children reaching adult age it should be. I know I'm concerned about my daughter's marriage prospects, so if I have to sign her up to an app to have access to a pool of relevant bachelors the world over, it might be worth it.

Otherwise another solution would be some kind of wife-hunting service, for this guy:

It enrages me. I know with precision the qualities I'm looking for. I know what qualities I want to avoid. I'm acutely aware how rare these qualities are, DOUBLY so among those who are still single. So I want to be given tools to zero in on these people more directly, and not absorb the waste of time and additional risk of figuring out if this person who deigned to match with me is sane or not, whilst operating on the assumption they are not.

No need to have the women sign up for that, just identify them and let the customer actually do the effort of dating them. What's Palantir for?

There was a famous noughties fake website offering exactly that service. Large parts of the MSM were taken in and wrote outraged articles about how awful it was.

There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her.

Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.

So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.

Would you pay 1k a year to give your daughter a better shot at marriage? Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding? One really needs to think of the funding model of these companies they are VC invested short term companies where the goal is to hit a suitable critical mass of users and then ratchet the crank to turn a profit. And the barrier to entry is in the dirt. Their mercenary network of users is pretty much only the moat.

You've rediscovered Greek life. The entire point of sending your daughter to join a sorority is to make sure your son in law is wealthy and culturally compatible. They dress it up with dance routines and mansions to make it more appealing to eighteen year old girls, of course. But the SEC parents are the ones paying for it, not the girls.

1k is nothing. If she gets married in her early twenties that's less than 10k.

Many people spend a lot more than that just on the wedding day.

Many parents spend a lot more than that every year keeping their kids in private schools where they can ensure their kids are around other 'good-enough' kids. Many parents spend a whole lot more than that sending their young adult women to college for the reward of them ending up childless girlbosses or worse.

Ideally the service should be able to vet out people with criminal pasts or tendencies, certain early-adulthood onset mental illnesses, scammers, etc.

Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding?

If you want to get into a delivery-based system, it should go beyond the wedding. A husband who disappears, becomes a deadbeat, starts a second family, becomes a reddit moderator, etc, should not be considered 'success'. Perhaps some kind of life insurance model with a mafia/bounty-hunting component for retribution would work.

In theory that's what keeper.ai is working towards.

Interesting site, but I’m not sure what the AI adds other than marketing gimmicks. Matchmaking algorithms are apparently good enough, okcupid was successful before match.com bought it and heavily monetized it into oblivion.

Yes, there legitimately should be no need for the 'matchmaker' role at all, if they let you search with the precision that I'd like.

Imagine if Google, instead of returning an array of results that are mostly responsive to your query, it showed you a snapshot of some webpage that sort of matches your general interests, and then makes you swipe through each one individually. A large enough database with a powerful enough search function shouldn't need a middleman I have to pay to find and access the result I want.

I think the appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done" being a real possibility rather than a whole process, so if you're really to in the mood for going through the process for months on end, they give you a shortcut.

I get the vision, but i think the average user is going to use it to search for the hottest member of the opposite sex they can find in their radius (lets be real it will almost always be men -> women) that meets some of their criteria. This just devolves into the pareto problem again. If you are a hot woman you are going to get spammed with messages. Theoretically a good matchmaking app acts as a filter by preventing you from needing to see all the spam and only connecting you to mates that it thinks are comparable.

appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done"

That might be the sales pitch but is there any evidence of it? Thats essentially both OKC, Hinge, and hundreds of other matchmaking services pitch too.

Well yes and no.

If ALL you had to go on was physical appearance, then yeah you zero in on the pure 'hottest' and drop from there.

But OKCupid in its prime let you get granular and find someone who was 'hot' in the way you actually prefer, and would have enough preferences in common that you could actually expect a positive interaction.

And of course it let you identify various dealbreakers easily so you didn't waste time.

These days I basically can only snap judge someone based on whether they have a nose ring or they have aggressively liberal politics mentioned on their profile.

That is essentially both OKC, Hinge, and hundreds of other matchmaking services pitch too.

Nah I think that's the hilarious thing. The sales pitch of swipe apps is "we'll connect you with so many people! The possibilities are (theoretically) endless!" and they never explicitly promise those connections are likely to go anywhere.

The bait is the theoretical ability to find that perfect match amongst the detritus... whilst denying you the tools necessary to do so.

They avoid any, call it 'liability' for providing 'bad' matches because hey, you're the one swiping on these people, we're just putting them profile in front of you. But if it DOES work out somehow be sure to thank us because but for us that connection wouldn't have happened!

Perhaps some kind of ranked competition system? Let the men have a way to express interest, then set them up in 1-on-1 or 1-on-many competitions. Could be actual physical fights, could be 'paperwork-filling competition' or even filling captchas, if the problem is simply that a given woman will get too much volume, forcing captcha would make it harder for male users to flood too many women at once. Perhaps have a setting for women to be able to pick the competition, or let the male users pick the competitions they want to engage in.

More comments

You could apply the filter to messages, too. Perhaps with "... and here's 99+ more that don't quite meet your filters" glimpse of what you can get if you compromise a bit.

More comments

The AI adds apparently nothing because the app doesn't work due to the creators pairing people by hand. Why even be a website at that point?

Marketing probably, and giving me amusement. Gotta get on the AI grindset for VC funding.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats