The Big Dating Apps Are Alienating Their Stakeholders

[Simon Angel]

I don't see why any man with self-respect would want to use Tinder or anyother dating app. It's like putting 50 men in a room with one woman and they're all stepping over eachother trying to impress her. As the saying goes "beggars can't be choosers".

Someone said women go for a "sniper" approach while men go for a "shotgun" approach. Looks like I've been a sniper this whole time and last I checked I've got something loose between my legs. I don't understand going for quantity over quality in terms of women and I've never slept with one that did not excite me on every possible level - their physical attractiveness, personality, values, goals and also whether we'd be good in a relationship.

Sorry to offend some of you guys here but I'd never want to tell my kids "I met your mother on Tinder". I'm so glad Tinder use is basically 0 in my country.

 

[luniac]

When I decided to actually put some kind of effort into my pics, I went into my backyard with proper daylight and took two pics with a timer, one showing off my abs and one dressed pretty nicely, and i actually got some decent matches out of it.

I checked my photos on photofeeler.com lol, the abs one got an 8.4, and the other one a 7.7.
If i took a bathroom selfie or something it would get under 6.0 for sure.

Pictures is everything with these dating apps, my profile itself is barebones, just saying im looking for a cool girl to chill with.

You can be a great looking guy but if your photos suck then it wont matter, or you can be kinda ugly but if you have incredible pictures youll get plenty of matches.

I only paid for a boost one time as a curiosity, so far its all been free, and im on all the dating apps, i just spent like 10 or so minutes a day doing my swipes.

A guy i know who KILLS IT on these apps(but does buy boosts every weekend) is a professional photographer and he took thousands of pics to get some worthy ones.

Also there's no such thing as "game", i literally just say to a match "hey youre sexy whatcha up to", "what do you like to do for fun", "Im in brooklyn, hbu", "You seem cool we should chill, im not looking for anything super serious, if youre up to it, send me your number, ill text you "

I don't waste time or play games, but i am not vulgar either lol

TLDR
ITS ALL ABOUT THE PICS, PERIOD.

 

[luckywatcher]

I love the dating apps myself, but it's always a bit of a gamble you'll get catfished (unless you facetime or something). One app idea I had was to require users to include a 3-5 second video of themselves with sound. The userbase would dwindle as the bots and weirdos ran away, and the remainder would be overall higher quality.

I like the idea of the video. I bet people would still find a way to catfish with it though. I can't imagine it being too hard to detect accounts that use bots and kick them off though.

I haven't personally written a system to detect bot behavior, but I can't imagine it being too difficult.

 

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[Deleted50669]

I like the idea of the video. I bet people would still find a way to catfish with it though. I can't imagine it being too hard to detect accounts that use bots and kick them off though.

I haven't personally written a system to detect bot behavior, but I can't imagine it being too difficult.

Detecting a bot would probably be a matter of pattern detection, running periodic scans on users for repeated opening lines or sets of opening lines. But then you'd get false positives for people who always type the same opener. Another strategy could be to see profiles that get unmatched early in the convo frequently, combined with repeated openers, or something like that.

 

[Deleted50669]

Already exists

foiled again!

 

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[Kid]

10 of those matches are bots, which it seems to me they won't remove or they even have them built in themselves to encourage new users

This sounds like potential for class action lawsuit.

But i'm not sure how much would be winning per person, $100?

 

[fridge]

Get a couple of female friends to help you put pictures / profile together.
Then pay an intern to swipe right all day.
Connect with ANY match and work on your game.
You have no game.

This this this. I went from getting about 10-15 likes a month to getting 60 likes a month all because I had some high quality pictures taken of me at the beach/hiking/well dressed/out with friends/playing a sport. The key is to get 100~ pics taken of you in one setting, then decide on the best 1-3, get female friend approval, and edit those. But yeah even with a lot of matches dating has been super hard during the pandemic.

 

[Kid]

The key is to get 100~ pics taken of you in one setting, then decide on the best 1-3, get female friend approval, and edit those.

Ain't there service for that? If no, then there should be.

 

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[Guest-5ty5s4]

Dating apps are a stupid business model in general, thats why none of them have a high customer satisfaction rate.

The real market to serve is the guys who don't know how to meet/approach women. The PUA guys arr kinda sleezy about it but some of them are ok. Really though its just belief systems that need to change.

For me, my game on a dating app is like a C+ simply because i cant be bothered to put in the time to take good selfies. But in person my game is A+. Every good relationship I've had started with me approaching a woman in public on my own because I was attracted to her.

There's an entire world of men who are lacking the confidence to this one simple thing, and that's why there are so many options for guys who have it.

Maybe Ill write an ebook on this lol

You might laugh at me for saying this but I think Dr. Jordan Peterson has already filled this niche. His advice, philosophy and psychology are far more beneficial than any pick up artist nonsense ever will be.
If you want to foster true connection with another real person, then following through with his ideas about being the best version of yourself are really all you need.
Honesty and responsibility are the ultimate traits for finding and maintaining quality relationships.

 

[Timmy C]

A guy on my Facebook feed was complaining how his Tinder Gold account of 4 years was banned. They gave him no reason and no appeal. Imagine paying hundreds of dollars to get a big middle finger...

About 15 other guys and even a few women chimed in with similar tales, and others talked about suddenly going from a steady stream of matches and likes to like 1 a week.

This caused me to be slightly curious and look at the reviews for Tinder on Apple's App store. Boy does it look like a treasure trove of frustrated customers looking to jump ship. They all seem to perceive it as having shifted its model to milking them for as much as it can get. There's apparently a feature where users have to pay $39 for a single "Super Boost" for 3 hours. Its even more $ if they want a longer one.

Other users complain about mostly matching with bots and women promoting their onlyFans account. Sounds like an epic shitshow that is out of control and either fueled by arrogance or being bloated. Maybe they are over-squeezing the towel.

Any of you software guys who want to create an app might do some further digging.

Edit: Looks like they are owned by "Match Group" which went public in 2015.

I can tell you there is a need for this. From the guy side it is unusable.

 

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[Hadrian]

Dating apps are a stupid business model in general, thats why none of them have a high customer satisfaction rate.

The real market to serve is the guys who don't know how to meet/approach women. The PUA guys arr kinda sleezy about it but some of them are ok. Really though its just belief systems that need to change.

For me, my game on a dating app is like a C+ simply because i cant be bothered to put in the time to take good selfies. But in person my game is A+. Every good relationship I've had started with me approaching a woman in public on my own because I was attracted to her.

There's an entire world of men who are lacking the confidence to this one simple thing, and that's why there are so many options for guys who have it.

Maybe Ill write an ebook on this lol

Working on something for guys as we speak with one of the more respectable Guru's... just trying to find the balance in filtering out the sleazy side of PUA with the genuine side of becoming the most interesting guy in the room... (not a dating app thats too hard a nut to crack even though I've got a gem of an idea).

 

[Johnny boy]

Dating apps are a stupid business model in general, thats why none of them have a high customer satisfaction rate.

The real market to serve is the guys who don't know how to meet/approach women. The PUA guys arr kinda sleezy about it but some of them are ok. Really though its just belief systems that need to change.

For me, my game on a dating app is like a C+ simply because i cant be bothered to put in the time to take good selfies. But in person my game is A+. Every good relationship I've had started with me approaching a woman in public on my own because I was attracted to her.

There's an entire world of men who are lacking the confidence to this one simple thing, and that's why there are so many options for guys who have it.

Maybe Ill write an ebook on this lol

What's "sleezy" to you is probably just the truth.

 

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[csalvato]

Then pay an intern to swipe right all day.

Worst. Internship. Ever.

 

[Hadrian]

You can learn a lot about the history of politics, culture, technology, economics, philosophy, propaganda, and toxicology if you seriously investigate the conditions that led to the creation of PUA in the first place.

Men have been sleeping with women for the entirety of human history. Why do so many men not know how to? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm asking in good faith.

Technology has massively interfered with how people interact with one another (and this interference will only grow more extreme as technology develops). And one of its most import consequences is that it has allowed men to become so weak.

I'd heard someone say a while back that PUA's actual value is that it leads (without actually teaching) men to discover masculinity. Do you think that Caesar or Genghis Khan needed pick up lines?

Miscellaneous problems listed below. I might update this later. PUA only happened because of a sickness in society.

Obesity

View attachment 35423

Testosterone Decline:

Reuters | Breaking International News & Views

Find latest news from every corner of the globe at Reuters.com, your online source for breaking international news coverage.

uk.reuters.com

Estrogeneration: How Estrogenics Are Making You Fat, Sick, and Infertile: Jay, Anthony G: 9781946546012: Amazon.com: Books

• Our testosterone has declined due to a poisonous environment

Propaganda

Toxic masculinity - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Economics

View attachment 35424

source: Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts

TLDR: Read Aristotle, not PUA

Good Post with lots of useful data. I posted in the mens locker a balanced view of my experience in the PUA world and why guys get into it in the first place, but in summary it's a false economy at the end of the day, but I would still recommend it to anyone who is starting from zero as it is a gateway into masculinity (positive and toxic) and ultimately entrepreneurship.

If you dive under the bonnet and understand it correctly the PUA world is as much about pulling chicks as the Fastlane is about driving lambo's.... But neither are helped by all the fake gurus out there!

 

[Ivan Koretskyy]

Here’s my pitch. Y’all can have this if you want.

A dating app for ugly people. No bots allowed, no advertising is allowed, and no attractive people are allowed. If they appear in the app then they are banned. It’ll be a good market for those that are struggling to find a mate (mostly for those struggling males).

 

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[SEBASTlAN]

I love the dating apps myself, but it's always a bit of a gamble you'll get catfished (unless you facetime or something). One app idea I had was to require users to include a 3-5 second video of themselves with sound. The userbase would dwindle as the bots and weirdos ran away, and the remainder would be overall higher quality.

Already exists

 

[Process]

Tinder user here!

I can confirm the app is going to pieces, squeezing its userbase.

Tinder was sued for discretionary charges.

Tinder settles age discrimination lawsuit with $11.5 million worth of Super Likes

Tinder also gave users Super Likes


As a lonely guy myself. Knowing what I did about the prices, I joined Tinder under a VPN, with a number not tied to my device, using the sandbox app.

Tinder turns out not only shoves advertising on almost every other button press but also water down matches. I know these are experiments, pools of users, and several analytical behaviors in the background. Indeed the app is designed to make money.


How it makes money is the discussion.

In the past, people would delete their account and make a new one as this would make a new profile and show them the best users in their area. (on the start of account, users get an invisible super-boost)

Tinder caught onto this and logged the behavior and now punishes this action.

Those users fall into smaller pools where the app, designed to find sex or love, does what it's supposed to do and cycles through the ever-shrinking collection of users.

Then come the E-thots and E-bots.

Along with the general creep on the platform, women jump off through social esteem using the said app or the public concession that that app sucks. Filtered in among these profiles are fake accounts. The user spun bots that steal photos and mass create accounts hoping to trick horny people into spending money. Perhaps encouraged by these bots, some real women do the same thing, panhandling their paid accounts to gain income. This causes unrest and unease among the male population pools in the app, who turn to sites like Reddit and other forums to increase their pool and find whatever they are looking for on the app.


For girls, the app provides a different set of challenges.

Women are blissfully unaware of bots that solely target men (isn't that an exciting data point?)

Instead, girls are flooded with matches. While on the men's side, they are lucky to see ten real girls within a day's usage, girls will instantly receive thousands of faces, each with its animation of you has matched!

Tinder, it seems, has even made a separate dashboard for women, which loads without them realizing it once they reach 500ish matches.


Thus begin Tinder's monetization methods. For girls, they receive the offers of seeing faces of men. Girls also can buy super likes and pay for "Boosts" however the boost feature will never glow and shine on the screen as it does for guys.

Most women's features are for seeing who they may be speaking with and changing their location within the app with a feature known as "Passport."

Tinder has, with the cause of COVID, made passport free for the time being.

Other options for the woman are locking down their profile, not displaying to specific users, or hiding their profiles.

Men, on the other hand, are given Boosts as a paid option. A boost is a purchase that increases their viewability and "shows them at the top of the stack once added to the account."

What men don't realize, however, is at the top of a conga line, you have 500 more people ready to make you trip

Paying for boost works. It has to, or it would be illegal. However, it also burns one's account as susceptible to the validation of loneliness and marks them as a person who will spend money on the app. individual after the boots session of a long 20 minutes, they fall down the stack, two tacks, only Tinder knows how far they fall until they are in a hole.

In this hole, they can look up and see the party dancing around them.

Tinder seems to give them an invisible boost to expand their VIEW but not visible to others

Often these users start burning through super likes which once the person they paid to send

(again envision a model digging through a garbage barrel here)

their profile glows with a blue star

While Tinder envisioned this would be met with squeals of delight and result in int more matches, it does the opposite. Girls are aware this means a guy paid to catch their eye, and the blue stars are not seen as a good thing… an image tinder has worked to change as these blue badges are cash purchase.

Each sex is plagued by one more additions to the cash slurping app.

Tinder comes with "Tinder Gold," a paid membership which also gives users the options to

Rewind (whoops I swiped the wrong way)

Passport (travel to another place and match with people there)

Extra super likes (get a few super likes to use)

Unlimited Likes

For men, unlimited likes mean they can use the app until it tells them there is no one around them.

Girls hardly ever use this feature as they aren't required to swipe for long and can see their dashboard of users who want to meet them.

The ways Tinder tries to monetize with different methods grows each week as they identify another data point that squishes a dollar from a user.


disclaimer: all thoughts are my own and do not reflect the oponions of any company listed within this post.

wow that is quite the write up. What percentage would you estimate is purely bot traffic?

 

[Primeperiwinkle]

You might laugh at me for saying this but I think Dr. Jordan Peterson has already filled this niche. His advice, philosophy and psychology are far more beneficial than any pick up artist nonsense ever will be.
If you want to foster true connection with another real person, then following through with his ideas about being the best version of yourself are really all you need.
Honesty and responsibility are the ultimate traits for finding and maintaining quality relationships.

Out of curiosity.. why do you think more men aren’t following his advice? Do they just not know about him or do they listen and not follow through or what?

 

[ExaltedLife]

What's "sleezy" to you is probably just the truth.

Lol. Be who ever you want, kid.

 

[Johnny boy]

Lol. Be who ever you want, kid.

will do

 

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[Saavedra]

I love the dating apps myself, but it's always a bit of a gamble you'll get catfished (unless you facetime or something). One app idea I had was to require users to include a 3-5 second video of themselves with sound. The userbase would dwindle as the bots and weirdos ran away, and the remainder would be overall higher quality.

deepfakes ftw

 

[The-J]

I've never used Tinder (haven't been single in a long time). But to me it looks like the problem is two-fold:

1) People who are used to getting laid for free are pissed that Tinder is now making them pay for it
2) People who aren't getting laid try paying for it and still end up not getting laid

People getting banned from the platform is just icing on the shit sundae.

Sounds to me like the business model really isn't very sustainable and Tinder is trying their damndest to monetize their gigantic userbase, despite the fact that paying a company isn't going to get you laid (paying a girl might!) and that people who are used to getting laid for free are not going to want to pay for the privilege to get laid.

 

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[WillHurtDontCare]

Good Post with lots of useful data. I posted in the mens locker a balanced view of my experience in the PUA world and why guys get into it in the first place, but in summary it's a false economy at the end of the day, but I would still recommend it to anyone who is starting from zero as it is a gateway into masculinity (positive and toxic) and ultimately entrepreneurship.

If you dive under the bonnet and understand it correctly the PUA world is as much about pulling chicks as the Fastlane is about driving lambo's.... But neither are helped by all the fake gurus out there!

The best "PUAs" are warlords, politicians or religious leaders (or all three!).

Brigham Young - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"A polygamist, Young had 55 wives."

The best PUA strategy is to build, or take, a community.

masculinity (positive and toxic)

Toxic masculinity is a propaganda slur created by people who make careers by pathologizing everything. Anyone who uses that term seriously should be totally ignored.

 

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[Hadrian]

The best "PUAs" are warlords, politicians or religious leaders (or all three!).

I know what you're trying to say there but its inaccurate as the whole psychology is reversed from what PUA does.

Toxic masculinity is a propaganda slur created by people who make careers by pathologizing everything. Anyone who uses that term seriously should be totally ignored.

No Toxic Masculinity is alive and well as can be seen from Captain Carnage himself Donald Trump all the way down the city suburban gangs devoid of proper male role models. I could recommend quite a few books on the topic.

In fact every statement appears to be missing the context entirely. And as this conversation does nothing to support this thread or present an opportunity for knowledge or growth, I will wish you well and bid you adieu.

 

[WillHurtDontCare]

No Toxic Masculinity is alive and well as can be seen from Captain Carnage himself Donald Trump

People at the heights of power have always been and will always be ruthless, egotistical bastards. This will never change, and the people who deny this will get steamrolled.

Human nature is brutal.

I could recommend quite a few books on the topic.

And those books would be garbage propaganda and anyone who takes them seriously will be worse off for it.

 

[RussRussman18]

A dating app isn't exactly something you can bootstrap, even if you are a very good programmer. You need a massive amount of capital to advertise to (at least) an entire region simultaneously.

Tinder and Bumble, as bad as they are on paper, are all the market 'wants' right now. Men are more desperate than ever, and very few women use dating apps. I did a deep dive on this subject a while back, the ratio of men to women on dating apps is 4 to 1. But when you factor in how many of those "female accounts" are bots, scammers, gay or trans catfishes, etc, the ratio is closer to 8 to 1. With such a ridiculous imbalance, it's no surprise there are so many unhappy customers. But the problem is the situation itself, not the technology