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If this comes to pass, it might just kill online dating in Australia. That would be bad in the short term, but might be beneficial in longer run insofar as OLD is no longer really functional for most people yet has made more traditional means of meeting partners harder.
Is it really that bad? I met my wife on hinge; almost everyone I know is more-or-less successfully meeting people for dates (and more if they want) through OLD.
OLD's kind of what you make of it.
I've met the mother of my children through it after a year grinding away. It's a good outcome for me.
I met about 50ish girls in person over the course of the year, and based on still having most on social media it's striking that the majority still haven't found a partner. I was mostly dating UMC, intelligent, educated girls with good jobs who allegedly want to have kids within 3-4 years and yet the majority of the cohort seem to be stuck in a purgatory of Icking and not meeting somebody good enough.
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Do we really want dating to be decided more or less by proprietary algorithms in Silicon valley and apparently now government regulation too?
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I met my wife on OLD too, but back when it was good (2012). Nowadays I almost exclusively hear complaints about the big OLD services — for median women it provides easy access to casual sex but not relationships, for median men it provides nothing.
It's certainly gotten worse as time goes on. Scammers, fake profiles, catfishing, wannabe influencers recruiting followers on the flimsiest of premises ("I'm never on here, hit me up on insta @basicbae"), expired profiles, the list goes on and on. I've seen its worse in cities outside of the West where you can get a large amount of escorts plying their trade (eg Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok).
You can still get results, but the time spent/dates attended ratio is much worse.
The stigma of online dating seems to have evaporated as the fraud in it has increased. No comment on the quality of the dates generated for the users.
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I think there’s some serious bias in terms of who is complaining about it online. People for whom it works just don’t congregate online to talk about it.
At least in SF up through 2021 (when I met my wife) it was great and easy for whatever I wanted as a guy and even today in 2023 it seems to work well for all my friends. I have some older women friends who a little bit seem stuck in the “continually hooking up with someone out of their league and being unable to turn it into a relationship” cycle but a lot of them source through non-OLD anyway and I’m not sure whether their counterfactual non-OLD dating life would look better.
Seconding this, I had good success with online dating but tend to pass over these conversations when they arise, which definitely contributes further to the bias.
In my experience when one breaks the flow of negative stories or offers advice, one tends to get ganged up on by people trying to vent their frustrations at you, interrogate your personal qualities and lifestyle for reasons to disregard your input, or seeming to project onto you the role of the people who've rejected them and trying to argue at you about how they posess x qualities and should be a great catch. God help you if you go into R9K or an incel forum and try to help someone out.
It can easily seem like a something is bad for almost everyone involved, while in reality those it is working for aren't inclined to seek spaces to talk and argue about it online.
Would you estimate the distribution of user success?
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