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Wellness Wednesday for January 17, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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In many of those extremely-addicting modern multiplayer games, it seems that in order for a beginner to be competitive with even other beginners (that is to say, not lose every single game), he has to spend quite a bit of time learning the “metagame”: the set of standard strategies widely used by players and the interactions between them. This learning process often takes the form of reading some wiki article that helpfully explains everything: if you have this playstyle, then you should use this character and use these skills at this point in the game; this can be countered by that character, who is in turn weak to some other strategy, yadda yadda yadda. These wiki articles are invaluable for newbies; reading them is the difference between having a shot of winning and getting steamrolled every game.

My question is regarding one of the most addicting, most important modern multiplayer games that there is. Here it is: is there any newbie guide to standard strategies for using dating apps (as a male)? I’ve finally resolved to take the plunge into the abyss (since even though I’ve always heard that they’re absolutely soul-crushing, I’ve realized that this is my only chance at this point for finding a 3D woman to date/marry), but I don’t want to make this dive without any equipment. If I’m gonna spend time (and self-esteem) swiping, then I should at least be smart about it, if I want to be competitive instead of yet another “0 messages in last 6 months” datapoint.

Of course, I already understand the basics, like

  • Be attractive.
  • Don’t be unattractive.
  • Have photos of yourself with friends.
  • If you are lucky enough to get a match, don’t just send “Hey”.

But this is more akin to the basic rules of the game (e.g. “use the arrow keys to move”, or even “your PC must have this much RAM to run the game”) than the higher-level strategy that I’m looking for. In particular, I’m looking for answers to questions like:

  • What does a good bio look like? Is “name+career+hobbies” too boring?
  • How funny should you be in your profile? What does good wit look like in this setting?
  • If you do by some Act of God get a match, then what does a good opener look like? Are the proverbial “Tinder jesters” that you see on Reddit going about this in the right way? Is it instead good to start with a question about any hobbies that she indicated on her profile? What if she doesn’t have any good hobbies?
  • Is there any way to select for “good girl” material on these apps?

I assume that millions of words have been written about this subject, and I also assume that 99.99% of them are pure garbage primarily intended to optimize SEO and get ad views. So I’ll instead ask a community which I understand to be pretty smart, and which I also understand (from lurking previous Wellness Wednesday threads) to contain some dating app connoisseurs as well. So for the sake of myself and any others in a similar situation: what’s the best way to do dating apps?

Here is an extremely thorough guide that is very sex-focused, possibly more than you might want. But having some sexuality in your profiles seems like a good idea, and you can dial it up/down depending on what sort of women you're looking for. The guide's got 2023 edits in it so hopefully it's still relevant: https://killyourinnerloser.com/tinder-guide/

I found the messaging section quite useful - there are scripts to start off with where each message progresses towards a number and from there to a date.

It's unclear to me whether the paid features mark you as a "sucker" and the apps' algorithms try to keep you on the hook, or whether they work as advertised. Probably a bit of both. I know that if I don't open the apps for a few weeks Tinder starts offering premium subscriptions at a discount. Pretty sure that running out the daily swipe/like limits applies an Elo penalty if you do it too often.

Why are the example messages so full of typos and blandly-written? Is this how normies interact with each other?

Older millennials, maybe? Definitely not young people. And those screen shots look like they are at least 5 years old.

I'm an older millennial. My point is that when I actually get to see how normal people get dates, it frankly looks like two animals grunting at each other. Neither party bothers to do anything extra to convey their personality or say anything you wouldn't get out of a boring, lazily-made chatbot.