Abundance in online dating makes it harder to become curious about a person, tolerate uncertainty, or feel satisfied with our choice, writes Meehika Barua.
I’m a man who originally met women on these apps, but after a certain point everybody seemed to be a bot and the app seemed to be completely gamified, even when I used paid apps. Other people might have different experiences.
I really never found bots to be a problem. Maybe 1 of 20 matches and one gal I actually met started the chat with me saying she knows her profile looks like a bot but she is real and then asks me to meet her later this week for coffee. 😂 im not hot by any means, but she was… sadly it didn’t work out but damn good 45 days.
Mine has always been truth of person. No one seems to be who they really are on their profile.
I turn my profile visible for about 24 hours. As a late 30’s woman, that gets me about 300 likes in a medium sized European city. (I pay for it, it’s impossible to use otherwise.)
I then go into my list of likes and use filters to start left swiping based on hard cutoff criteria (wants kids, Christian, etc). That drops it down to ~100 people. I use an app that has good filters.
I then go through reading profiles and looking at who is attractive for me (pictures and bio). That leaves about 25 people. I then match with all of them at once. Usually leads to 5 or so good conversations, and a few dates. Give it a shot, repeat if necessary.
If I leave mt profile visible for more than a few days I have thousands of likes. I match with most people I see swiping. It’s just not a feasible way to do it. And I’m not even attractive.
It’s just a flood and it’s nearly impossible to manage. It’s such a broken, asymmetrical system. I hate it so much.
From what I understand, women are deluged with mobs of low-effort fuck boys and men are mostly ignored, which creates a feedback loop where men swipe on anything just for the hope of a match, which only makes things worse.
It’s really fascinating from a systems perspective. But it used to be better before enshittification, in my limited experience. The reality is that quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
One of my friends, who is a woman, once showed me her dating app to show me why she found it so exhausting. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my fellow males. She got so many cheap messages from horny guys, to the point where she found the app useless.
For me, last time I used a dating app, I found it very hard to strike up a meaningful conversation with my matches. It was like I had to carry the whole conversation and they took forever to respond. So in that retrospect, it might be why some guys don’t put in much effort when contacting women. But most of the massages my friend showed me, where absolutely just mouth breathing horny guys.
My last runthrough with the apps, I’d carefully read everyone’s profile and craft an interesting introductory message. It took quite a bit of time and was rarely rewarded with a reply, much less a conversation, much less a first date. My messages got shorter and shorter until eventually I was just mass swiping. And, just as far as a use of time goes, if all that matters is a woman likes your profile, it’s more efficient to roboswipe and filter the women who match back.
Also, the emotional toll of serially declaring “I like you” and asking “do you like me?” only to be greeted by rejection after rejection is pretty devastating.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
Gay dating apps are bad too. It’s no better with only men involved. On sniffies, for example, you get on and start texting with a cock pic. Want to have a conversation, get to know them, figure out if they are worth your time, hell, even if they are safe to be around and it’s treated as heretical. It’s just perverted goons.
Guys on these apps lobotomize themselves. They shouldn’t be breeding.
it could be worse. she could have gone on a date with one and they say something really sad like “all the women on there just want sex. I want something meaningful”
oh honey…you have been hitting up all the bots.
there is a point where most people go “this might be a scam” but there is a special few that go so far to give it a whole backstory.
quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
Exactly. That’s the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won’t make money.
EDIT:
I’ll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.
Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer… Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair–just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
Edit:
Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, analyzed the leaked data.[46] They initially found that only roughly 12,000 (0.22%) of the 5.5 million registered female accounts were used regularly.[47][48] The vast majority of accounts had been used only once — the day they were registered. Newitz also found that many women’s accounts were created from the same IP address, suggesting there were many fake accounts. They found that women checked email messages very infrequently: every one time a woman checked her email, 13,585 men checked theirs. Only 9,700 of the 5.5 million female accounts had ever replied to a message, compared to the 5.9 million men who would do the same. They concluded, “The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.”[47] In a subsequent article the following week Newitz acknowledged that they had “misunderstood the evidence” in their previous article and that their conclusion that there were few females active on the site had been based on data recording “bot” activities in contacting members. Newitz confirmed that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users. Still, they note that “we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones.” They noted that the site seemed to keep track of human-to-human contact but that the Impact Team had not released this data.[49]
I mean, they suck for everyone - don’t get me wrong.
But being able to see them as an ego boost, or having the frustration be that you get low quality matches, as opposed to the punishing experience of “80% of the matches you get at all are catfishing bots” is very different.
It’s fascinating how different women’s experiences with these stupid things are than men’s…
Yeah it’s wild.
All of my female partners have at about 20 likes for every 1 that I, a male get from females.
I think I prefer to be on this side of the fence to be honest. Having more than a handful of people to chat with at once would be overwhelming.
How so?
I’m a man who originally met women on these apps, but after a certain point everybody seemed to be a bot and the app seemed to be completely gamified, even when I used paid apps. Other people might have different experiences.
I really never found bots to be a problem. Maybe 1 of 20 matches and one gal I actually met started the chat with me saying she knows her profile looks like a bot but she is real and then asks me to meet her later this week for coffee. 😂 im not hot by any means, but she was… sadly it didn’t work out but damn good 45 days.
Mine has always been truth of person. No one seems to be who they really are on their profile.
I turn my profile visible for about 24 hours. As a late 30’s woman, that gets me about 300 likes in a medium sized European city. (I pay for it, it’s impossible to use otherwise.)
I then go into my list of likes and use filters to start left swiping based on hard cutoff criteria (wants kids, Christian, etc). That drops it down to ~100 people. I use an app that has good filters.
I then go through reading profiles and looking at who is attractive for me (pictures and bio). That leaves about 25 people. I then match with all of them at once. Usually leads to 5 or so good conversations, and a few dates. Give it a shot, repeat if necessary.
If I leave mt profile visible for more than a few days I have thousands of likes. I match with most people I see swiping. It’s just not a feasible way to do it. And I’m not even attractive.
It’s just a flood and it’s nearly impossible to manage. It’s such a broken, asymmetrical system. I hate it so much.
From what I understand, women are deluged with mobs of low-effort fuck boys and men are mostly ignored, which creates a feedback loop where men swipe on anything just for the hope of a match, which only makes things worse.
It’s really fascinating from a systems perspective. But it used to be better before enshittification, in my limited experience. The reality is that quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
One of my friends, who is a woman, once showed me her dating app to show me why she found it so exhausting. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my fellow males. She got so many cheap messages from horny guys, to the point where she found the app useless.
For me, last time I used a dating app, I found it very hard to strike up a meaningful conversation with my matches. It was like I had to carry the whole conversation and they took forever to respond. So in that retrospect, it might be why some guys don’t put in much effort when contacting women. But most of the massages my friend showed me, where absolutely just mouth breathing horny guys.
My last runthrough with the apps, I’d carefully read everyone’s profile and craft an interesting introductory message. It took quite a bit of time and was rarely rewarded with a reply, much less a conversation, much less a first date. My messages got shorter and shorter until eventually I was just mass swiping. And, just as far as a use of time goes, if all that matters is a woman likes your profile, it’s more efficient to roboswipe and filter the women who match back.
Also, the emotional toll of serially declaring “I like you” and asking “do you like me?” only to be greeted by rejection after rejection is pretty devastating.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
Gay dating apps are bad too. It’s no better with only men involved. On sniffies, for example, you get on and start texting with a cock pic. Want to have a conversation, get to know them, figure out if they are worth your time, hell, even if they are safe to be around and it’s treated as heretical. It’s just perverted goons.
Guys on these apps lobotomize themselves. They shouldn’t be breeding.
it could be worse. she could have gone on a date with one and they say something really sad like “all the women on there just want sex. I want something meaningful”
oh honey…you have been hitting up all the bots.
there is a point where most people go “this might be a scam” but there is a special few that go so far to give it a whole backstory.
Exactly. That’s the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won’t make money.
EDIT:
I’ll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.
Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer… Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair–just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach
Removed by mod
User name checks out.
Constantly. Show me the lie.
I mean, they suck for everyone - don’t get me wrong.
But being able to see them as an ego boost, or having the frustration be that you get low quality matches, as opposed to the punishing experience of “80% of the matches you get at all are catfishing bots” is very different.