“We’re seeing a greater need for authentic human connections”
I’m going to take a wild guess and wager that this is about increasing engagement by increasing the amount of opening moves that are created on the platform.
Dating sites profit by increasing engagement with the platform, not by getting you an “authentic connection” that gets you off the platform and into a healthy relationship.
There’s a reason people are going analog again. They know these sites are just a thirst trap.
Calling it a thirst trap is too innocent. These dating app companies are scum-sucking vampires designed to make most people feel lonely and desperate enough to give them money in perpetuity. People just handed one of the most important and intimate aspects of their lives over to US tech bros, pressured everyone else to do the same, and two whole generations are not just having less sex than their parents, but half of them have never had a long-term relationship as they’re approaching 30.
Why can’t we go back to meeting people on BBS and forums. Shit I met my partner in 2009 on a forum. It was organic and real, no apps, no algorithms just good ol’ fashion php with a dash of flame war.
Or just… talk to people IRL? I met my wife at my apartment complex, and plenty more meet their SOs at a local social event or whatever. Go to meetups for stuff you’re interested in and talk to people. I trust that way more than dating apps that pair you with strangers given a short bio…
Yeah, talking to people sucks, I get it. I’m quite introverted and need to relax after putting myself out there. When I met my wife, we texted for 2-3 days before I had enough social energy to ask her out on a date, even though I was quite interested in her. She’s a little introverted as well, so we’re a good match.
Text is way easier for me, but in-person is way more effective. Most of my friends met their SOs in person at some kind of meetup, whether a DND night, tech meetup, or a dance (not a club, that’s way too loud). Online worked for my brother, but I just don’t see nearly as much success as with in-person meetups, at least among my friends.
People especially women hate meeting people in public. It’s either “inappropriate,” or there’s music louder than a war playing. There is no in between.
I’m talking about pretty “safe” settings, like:
- game night with mutual friends - your and their friends will help keep things on the level
- co-ed sports (again, with mutual friends)
- community events, such as at a local library or whatever
- meetups for interests - often hosted at some local business that does something related to the thing (I’m a dev, so I go to local Rust, Go, Python, and JS meetups on occasion)
In other words, places where people are “forced” to interact doing something that interests them, while around other people that could come to your aid if someone is being creepy. The goal shouldn’t be to find a SO (that attracts the wrong type), but to interact with people that share an interest. You should be looking to make friends, and if that blossoms into something more, I guess that’s cool too. Don’t go into it looking for an SO, go into it looking to engage about something you enjoy.
anything with mutual friends
I don’t have any of those, they all knocked each other up in their 20’s, their personalities died and now they’re all underpaid zombies with diaper bags and minivans who never text, and in car-centric America there is no mechanism for meeting more.
co-ed sports
Illegal in the South for the same reasons that you can’t buy beer on Sunday morning.
Community events such as at a local library or whatever
My town hosts regular community events and distributes a list of upcoming ones every month as part of a newsletter included with our water bills. 100% of them are for ages 6-12 or 65+; About the only event I’m aware of that might allow normal no adjective adults to attend is the occasional First Friday event, which plays music you could hear from geostationary orbit. I mean seriously the music will rattle my windows about as hard as a freight train and the stage gets set up 4 blocks further away than the tracks. Should I call OSHA or something?
Meetups for interests
All of my interests are some combination of near total sausage fests, have no support/community in my area, or any support for them died during the pandemic.
often hosted at some local business
Buy shit! Buy shit buy shit buy shit!
I mean, if all you see are obstacles, that’s all you’ll ever encounter, friend… you can be a victim of circumstance or adapt and overcome.
anything with mutual friends
I don’t have any of those
Hence the goal here of expanding friend network with people who actually have time and shared interests.
Illegal in the South for the same reasons that you can’t buy beer on Sunday morning.
That’s incredibly stupid… Then again, my area also restricts buying beer on Sundays.
100% of them are for ages 6-12 or 65+
Maybe try the nearest big city? Or maybe the next closest one?
local business
I mean bigger companies, companies that are looking to hire people, not sell you stuff. For example, I’m in tech, and most of the companies that host events are just looking to attract applicants in whatever their tech stack is, their target market is something entirely different (e.g. they’re B2B).
I’m not talking about things like sewing classes at the local crafting store, though if you’re going to buy from them anyway, I guess I don’t see the harm.
And yeah, the meetups I’ve attended are largely male dominated (that’s the nature of my interests). But that’s 100% okay because the goal is to find people with share interests, not find a romantic partner. Finding a romantic partner should come naturally from making friends. Friend may introduce you to a romantic partner, or they could become one. If you’re making finding romance the goal, you’re going to get burned by abusive partners because they’re attracted to such platforms as well.
So that’s my advice. If your friends are all married and boring (I’m now one of those), make new ones. That’s hard, I know, but it’s a lot safer to do that than try to hook up on dating services IMO.
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Eh, that could be true. I’m just relating my experience and trying to be helpful.
I’m quite introverted, so spending time in social situations can be very draining. This doesn’t apply as much to digital communication, but I do find myself delaying responding if it could turn into a social situation (e.g. someone asks if I’m busy, I’ll often just not respond until it’s too late, “oh no, sorry I missed this, maybe next time…”). I’m not socially awkward or anything, I just prefer to avoid socializing with people (COVID was actually fantastic for me since I didn’t need excuses).
I’m imagining that a lot of single people who don’t want to be single fall into that category as well. So that’s where I’m coming from.
When we first met, I was super into her, and it was obvious that she was into me because she asked for my number, she texted first, etc (I walked up to her though). I really liked her, but I wasn’t up to actually spending time with her, so I made excuses until I was ready to give her my full attention. But that couldn’t have happened if I had stayed home. In fact, she moved out of town a month or two later, so we dated long distance for a year until we were able to be together.
So my advice is to put yourself into social situations that are relatively comfortable for you. Don’t make the primary goal to find romance, make the goal to find someone that enjoys what you do (even if they’re not a possible romantic partner).
That’s fair advice. Thanks for your good intentions. I’m very sorry about the snark. That was uncalled for.
Met my first girlfriend on a forum that’s name in english would be masturbation.org, she contacted me. The second one I met on my country’s equivalance of Omegle. The current one I found on Instagram.
Turns out that if you put even a little effort into your first message and for the very least make sure the grammar is on point and save the dickpic for later, she may actually reply back. The bar isn’t very high if you want to stand out. Seeing the kind of messages she gets almost daily really shows how pathetically low effort they are. It’s clear as day that you’re just one of the 50 girls he messaged today.
Isnt being approached by creeps part of the ‘authentic’ experience?
Not on your phone, though. That’s just ambush after ambush. Statistically, IRL there a higher chance of escape in that analog.
(Hol’ up. What’s a double entendre that’s not sexual called?)
Double meaning?
Yeah, I was thinking a portemonteau, but that’s incorrect
I don’t think double entendre is necessarily sexual
A pun, usually.
I feel like I saw somewhere that men message dozens of times more women than vice versa. I get their non-nuanced temptation but you can hardly call a system that encourages one gender to incessantly spam the other ‘engagement’.
I read that men have to send over 110 likes before they get a single response whereas women get 50-60 guys a day messaging them and they act really creepy like sending dick pics.
It’s absolutely true. I’m polyamorous, and various women I’ve dated over the years have shared their dating app situations with me. Not one of them didn’t have 999+ likes and/or a dozen messages from new men on that day alone (depending upon the app).
I prefer apps like Hinge and OKCupid. They allow me to tell more about what I’m about, and I get to learn more about them as well before I attempt to reach out. I’ve had fairly good success with both.
Hinge is the only one I use anymore. Honestly, you need to be able to say something. Just swiping doesn’t do shit. If they paywall that feature they’ll be sunk in no time. I’ll be the first to leave. But I’ve been dating someone for a little and it might turn monogamous soon. So, guess we’ll see.
If I may, out of curiosity, you say it “might turn monogamous soon”; when you first started dating, what were each of your dating styles? Has one of you been more monogamously-minded than the other? Is one person more interested in monogamy than the other?
That’s the way it works in real life tho…it’s not the apps fault. Women always have more options than men.
I will never understand this take.
Logically speaking this is simply incorrect.
Have you been on a dating app? The experience is extremely gender specific. Men spend their time sending out as many likes as are available, and women spend their time sorting through likes they get. This is the experience for either gender unless you’re at the very high or low end of the desireability spectrum.
That is the way dating apps work.
It’s wild to me that anyone would say that sentence and not immediately realize they sound like an emotionless robot. Like damn, who would’ve thought people have a great need for authentic human connections? Not me!
This kinda shit you hear from people so deep in the world of product marketing is sickening and really shows how disconnected from they are from both reality and the point of selling a good product: benefitting people. I guess I’m just glad to see more stories of people ditching dating apps as they continue to become more predatory and less helpful.
Isn’t this the one thing that made it stand out?
Yes, but there is a new CEO, people are leaving the dating apps like crazy now, and they’re probably trying to do some shortsighted BS that will increase engagement now at the expense of eroding the long term health of the product experience.
It’s ok, they’ll make it up with some IA.
IA aka Inept Assholes
It’s not changing the default behavior, so it still has it.
Per the article, they’re introducing a new opt-in feature that a woman, enbie, or person looking for same-gender matches can set up - basically a prompt that their matches can reply to.
I think Bumble also used to prevent you from sending multiple messages before getting a reply, but maybe that was a different app… If they still do that in combination with this feature, then I could see this feature continuing to accomplish their mission of empowering women in online dating.
lol right? And wasn’t it for women to have a safer place to online date?
So they’re basically throwing women under the bus for money. Classy.
At least they’re grown!
It doesn’t sound that way. Can you explain how the specific change does that? Sounds like to me it’s an option for women, and it’s done in a way that limits how they can reach out first.
One thing I’ll say about the old model was that out of all the dating apps, Bumble was the only one where every woman who I met or even just messaged with could hold a conversation. That one requirement of them reaching out first set the bar, and I knew they were making the choice to speak to me out of all the other guys they were drowning in. I ended up with more dates through Bumble than any other app, and even made great friends with some people I didn’t romantically click with. Online dating is awful, or was for me, but Bumble was the least awful one of the bunch. The new model sounds not so great.
I met my fiancée on Bumble 4 years ago, but I also created this from my experience on the app:
Sorry to embarrass you OP but it’s actually spelled “hay.” “Hey,” is an informal greeting.
No, it’s for horses 🐴
Haaaayyy gurrlll
Hay is for horses.
Hey is for horse girls.
That’s the joke?
Which of those girls is your fiancée?
Not pictured; she spared herself the shame by having an actually good opener that referenced something in my bio
This says way more about you than it does about the women on the app.
To me it’s so so. They either texted, we had a conversation and ended up on a date the next week, or they sent a message, i answered, waited for a week to get a “lol”.
really? I haven’t used Bumble myself but I’ve heard stories of guys with inboxes full of women just saying “hi”
Bots. Bots everywhere.
In my experience all the women do start with hi however 100% of them engaged with the conversation after that. It felt much better then getting a bunch of matches but most of them ignoring you(understandably).
The story I heard was 9/10ths of the women on the platform had “I don’t message first, you message me first” in their bio, so it was functionally a display case for morons.
Look at Fabio over here.
So… tinder? Every other dating app?
Bumble was unique because men couldn’t make the first move.
Right… so now it’s Tinder? Or every other dating app?
they’re all owned by match.com anyway.
I don’t think Bumble is
Bumble is pretty much the only one they don’t own. The only other one I can think of is coffee meets bagel, does anyone still use that?
I think we should get a blind match dating app, where we emphasize on the content and not on the visuals. You just add some information about what kind of a person you are, what you are looking for, etc. and after you match and exchange some messages, you can open the pictures.
But dating apps are turning into those cheap e-commerce sites where everyone judges the items by the packaging and no one actually cares about the content. And mind you in a lot of cases the pictures of the packaging are highly exaggerated or from a couple of years, from better times. And you know, no matter how shiny this package is, there would be a day you will need to throw it in the trash and you will need to decide whether to throw the product along or only the package.
Excuse my metaphors.
I have an inkling that would result in people speedrunning all the stuff up until they can see what someone looks like…
Looks do matter, and everyone has different preferences.
The problem isn’t that people are judging people based on only their looks, it’s that these companies have tuned their matching algorithms to match people who enjoy each others appearance, and specifically don’t like each other as people.
In reality, for a satisfying relationship you need both. It’s really hard to be more than friends with someone that physically repulses you, and it’s really hard to be more than friends with benefits with someone you don’t like as a person.
By specifically tuning their system to only give you one, and never the other, they keep people in the grind. You might be pretty happy using these apps for hookups, but even there the algorithm will actively be working against you stumbling onto someone you might wanna meet more than once, because they want you back to swiping for the next person asap.
The fact remains that the matchmaking industry is doomed to be toxic in a capitalist system, because actually being good at it, also means getting rid of your customers.
I’ve met several partners off the internet through means where images were not involved, but it was clearly geared towards dating still (mainly reddit, if you would believe it). Some like to get the images out of the way early, others talk for weeks before that becomes an issue. There’s still some that then drop out (I’m not the most attractive lad to ever be a lad, plus preferences exist, as you say) but others worked out great.
My strengths don’t lie in my style or looks, so dating apps are basically useless to me, yet I have no trouble in attracting partners in circumstances where my personality is a bit more in focus.
I think there’s a space for apps like those for sure. Since there’s plenty where you can go purely or predominantly by looks, no one has to go for an app where that is the case.
You should take a look at blindmate. It does exactly what you imagined. You just upload some Fotos, Friends of yours answer some questions about you and swipe for you. If you have a match you write a little bit and after every other message you unlock a bit more on the others profile. I don’t know if it’s currently available outside of Germany.
I think we should get a blind match dating app, where we emphasize on the content and not on the visuals. You just add some information about what kind of a person you are, what you are looking for, etc. and after you match…
And it’s only the morning after that you’re allowed to turn the lights on.
Any dating app where both people have to “like”/“swipe right” each other should allow either side to initiate tbh or at least opt out of the stupid matchmaking system and accept all incoming matches.
I was on the dating apps last summer after having been out of the dating pool for 6 years and the current crop of apps are pretty awful for men (amd probably women as well, maybe for difderent reasons). When I used dating sites in the early/mid 2010s most sites let anyone initiate a conversation so you didn’t need to worry about the (usually paywalled) “like” system. These days literally everything is a Tinder clone and the only interaction you have with the app is like or dislike. I get why they did it because women receive so much bullshit from unsolicited messages, in my experience it devolved into just mashing the Like button over and over again blindly because it’s a shitty numbers game and the odds aren’t in your favor. There’s no sense reading through detailed profiles and making thoughtful decisions when it’s rare to get a match anyways. Easier to like every single profile and then be the one to filter out matches once they come in. If the harassment is going to primarily target women and women are the ones who need to be more selective in their matches, the dating apps should let women be the ones to pick matches, or better yet give each and every user a toggle that lets them accept matches from anyone, because that makes it easier to get over the hurdle of not receiving any matches at all.
I eventually gave in and paid for the Tinder upgrade that lets you like an unlimited amount of times. I just mindlessly mashed the like button until the queue was empty every day. Before long, matches were actually happening. Two months into that nonsense I actually got a perfect match (she sent the first message) and we’ve been together for 6 months now. I absolutely love her and I’m glad it worked out, but damn was dating on Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, and POF a horrible experience all around. All owned by the absolutely dreadful Match.com now of course. The prospect of your perfect match being hidden behind a stupid loot box RNG style gacha system is absolute insanity, because that’s what it is. You have a limited number of likes and the profiles you get to see are seemingly picked at random.
Five bucks says all the first messages from men are asking if the woman chose the bear, and if they answer yes calling them some slur.
I’ll take that bet.
How would you like to pay me?
I’ll send you some rolled coins.
In penny’s please. I’ll let you pay for shipping. :)
Sadly I’m Canadian and we no longer manufacture pennies. Nickels ok?
Turns out they never do lol
I used bumble for a bit and saw women’s bios that said that they are not making the first step.
Didn’t RTFM…
I mean on bumble, they did. It’s why I prefer it when I was single. Felt a bit better to allow the women to make the first move as tinder it felt like if you weren’t peacocking in some fashion, you were doing it wrong. Felt better for either gender. Bummer to hear they’re turning into tinder+.
By and large, women on Bumble don’t make the first move. Opening with “Hi” isn’t a move, which is what many women on Bumble do to qualify the app’s requirement that the woman speaks first.
I’ve lost track of how many matches I’ve had on Bumble where they didn’t quite get the point of the app, and would open with something like “Impress me”. Like, there’s a hundred other apps you could use if you don’t actually want to make the first move, why use the ONE where you’re supposed to if you’re not going to do it?
The CEO of Bumble’s parent company, Richard Pictograph, pushed for the feature
The bar is no longer “up here”.
