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I am not even slightly an expert on dating advice in general, but I have two insights that I think are valid:
1: Dating sites are garbage in so far as they are filled with 90% low effort posts by low effort people looking for quick hookups with highly attractive people. It would be nice if there were separate dating sites for people who want quick hookups and sites for people looking for long term relationships, but that's not really enforceable. But even if your success rate is 20 times worse online than it is in real life, I found that the explicit permission to engage makes it more than 20 times easier to engage. You're not creeping on people at work or at the gym. This is a place where people explicitly go to meet people romantically, you have permission to talk to them to an extent you're never going to get in person. I must have sent hundreds of messages over the several years I was on these, got maybe 40 matches/responses by real humans, 35 of whom were not even slightly my type and never went past a couple back and forth messages, 4 reasonable length conversations that seemed promising but didn't work out, and 1 that was perfect from the moment it started and we've been happily together for 4 years since then.
And that's the main secret, it only needs to work once. It's largely a numbers game, you need to encounter a bunch of people and it will be a disaster with most of them, and then once it won't. I found online dating way easier to get over the fear of rejection because it was faceless and impersonal. At any moment, they are free to ghost you and never speak to you again, and you can do the same, which means it hurts so much less. But I think this is true to some extent in person as well. If you can manage to encounter enough women that you can ask out without creating major drama, do. Most will say no, and some might say yes, and most of those won't work out long term. But in the end, if it truly works out, you only need one.
2: I find that "Be yourself" is not the best advice for maximizing your chances of getting someone interested in the first place, or getting laid, but it's a good filtering mechanism that saves effort in the long run. Be yourself so that people who don't like who you are will reject you immediately instead of waiting a few dates to find out who you are before rejecting you. I usually gave nerdy jokes and pickups lines in initial messages. And the vast majority of people never responded. And the few that did were heavily selected for the type of people who actually liked them and thought they were clever/cute/funny, so I wasted less time talking to people who dislike nerds.
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