site banner

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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