re: Online Dating

This writing was in development several years ago and is a condensed recording of my initial thoughts on online dating. It originates from my seven years of experience using dating apps to find long-term relationships, hookups, and friendships. I’ve used a total of four dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Feeld) as both male and female presenting.

Data

For a six-month period from November 1st, 2021 to May 1st, 2022 I recorded data on my dating app usage and results. During this period I used three apps: Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge. Data was collected as male presenting (interested in female presenting), and as female presenting (interested in all types of presenting) and also included a fourth app (Feeld).

Results Across Three Apps (Male Presenting):

Number of swipes: 21,186
Number of profiles liked: 3,670 (17.32% of the stack)
Number of matches: 1,343 (36.59% of those liked)
Number of dates with unique people: 32 (2.38% of matches)
Sexual encounters with unique people: 9 (28.13% of those met)
Number of serious relationships: 2 (0.0094% of those in the stack)

Of the people met, they came from:
Tinder: 15
Bumble: 11
Hinge: 6

Results Across Four Apps (Female Presenting):

Number of swipes: 1,488
Number of male profiles shown: 1,273 (85.56% of the stack)
Number of profiles liked: 78 (5.24% of the stack)
Number of matches: 71 (91.03% of those liked)
Number of dates with unique people: 0 (0% of matches)

Experience

The majority of people on dating apps are men. It varies by platform, but a commonly cited value is 80%, which matched my experience. It's generally difficult to get dates with women, regardless of how you present. 91% of all women never respond to a cold open and less than 3% of matches were ultimately interested in going on a date. A sizable portion of women on dating apps are not there to date and use it to fish for attention, attract new followers on social media, or advertise sex work.

When I'm female presenting it's exceptionally easy to get matches; 91% of all my likes were matches. When female presenting it's easier to match with a woman and extremely likely that you’ll match with a man. As someone who is female presenting it's difficult to find cold opens worth responding to. Few conversations are ever interesting or promising, to the point that I went on zero dates. Within 12 hours I had over 7,000 likes across all four apps, a quantity that would take over two months of swiping to get through.

The data shows that for someone of my demographics it took approximately 10,000 swipes to find a long-term partner. If you assume five seconds spent on each profile it would take approximately 14 straight hours of swiping to find a partner, not including time for messaging and dating. Due to swipe limits across the three apps this equates to 67 days of swiping at the maximum rate.

Metagame Analysis

All dating apps that were used have an algorithm for determining who in the stack you are shown. One of the primary engines of this algorithm is your “Attractiveness Score”. From my research I was able to learn that this score is just an Elo rank, which is a system that was created to rank the strength of chess players based on their performance. In short, every time you get a like your Attractiveness Score increases, and every time you don’t get a like your Attractiveness Score decreases. The rate that your Attractiveness Score goes up or down is related to the Attractiveness Score of the person who liked or disliked you. The higher your Attractiveness Score, the more likely you are to be shown to others in the stack. Some algorithms are biased to showing you to people of similar Attractiveness Scores. Some algorithms use the Attractiveness Score in conjunction with monetization systems to incentivize you to make in-app purchases. All of these tactics were observed during app use and on a pervasive scale.

Photos say more than words and when time is the currency, efficiency becomes dominant strategy. Having good photos is by far the most essential aspect to dating apps and is the result of the tyranny of optimization. People can’t afford to take the time to read through hundreds of words on tens of thousands of profiles, but a photo may instantly tell them if they’re curious to learn more.

There is no secret to cold opens; it’s a glorified ring toss. Dating app profiles are simply too barren to dissect the information needed to reliably construct a cold open that will connect well. Most of the variables related to getting a response are unrelated to the open but are concerned with the person you’re waiting on a response from. Writing witty or thoughtful cold opens is a skill to be sure, but so long as you throw your ring in the right direction you’ve done about as good as you can do and the rest is up to them. Putting irrational quantities of time and effort here will only decrease the time you have before burnout.

Men are incentivized to like and message as many profiles as possible because so few of those interactions will ever result in reciprocation. Time and effort remain finite resources, thus men are incentivized to spread thin their efforts by liking and messaging as many profiles as possible resulting in a minimal amount of effort given to each profile. Subsequently the mindset becomes one of detachment, because attachment or excitement over any one match leads to the more probable outcome of disappointment.

The low male effort per match results in women receiving massive influxes of likes and messages, nearly all of which are low effort and are thus not worth responding to. The same messages are also redundant and unable to stand out from their competitors. This becomes another contributor to dating burnout for women because of the psychological perception that the dating pool is an overwhelming monolith of hostile interest. In turn women end up raising their standards, often having to rely on superficial filters because of the dating app framework to conserve their time and efforts, and end up responding to very few messages, with those few often owing to discrete points of connection or being related to positing within the burnout cycle itself. To the men who are outside observers this is perceived as a random response, and as a result the feedback loop continues as men psychologically perceive reciprocation as random and thus employee additional strategies to increase their odds.

Obvious Conclusions

• Dating apps make money from single people, hence they aren’t in the business of creating long-lasting meaningful relationships. Ironically, dating apps are economically incentivized to keep you single.

• Using dating apps and going on dates takes a considerable amount of time, money, and social energy. Collectively these are the resources of the dating app metagame; use too much of them and you will experience burnout.

• The vast majority of all relationships now originate online. Dating apps aren’t going away; they continue to grow in use and have become a prolific tool for forming relationships. To not use them is to ignore what is a powerful tool and thus may considerably lower your chances of finding a partner.

• Other methods of meeting people are valid, but are not necessarily exempt from the same issues present in online dating. Many of these issues exist independent of the media and have merely become more visible as a result of streamlining.

Potentially Less-Obvious Conclusions

• Dating is luck. It’s a game of probabilities in which you have little control over key variables. Optimization of that game is a minor component yet in practice remains an oppressive decider in your competitiveness; the worst of both worlds.

• When the dating process is streamlined, people are incentivized to adopt conflicting dating strategies, which in turn creates a hostile dating environment.

• Systems of optimization within the online dating framework mostly incentivizes perceptions of superficial judgment rather than the gradual build toward genuine discovery, which in turn decreases the odds of crafting a meaningful relationship.

• Dating apps employ the use of morally questionable tactics such as ranking profile attractiveness with Elo rating, which then uses that rating to incentive monetization schemes and control who is shown to who.

• As a man you are effectively undatable unless you have good photos and sensible cold opens. As a woman your percentage of worthwhile candidates will be proportional to superficial perceptions of male gaze.

• As a man your primarily barrier in finding a romantic partner will be your ability to weather silence and disinterest. As a woman your primarily barrier in finding a romantic partner will be your ability to sift through low-effort candidates.

• In the stage between dating and fostering a long-term relationship, perceptions still trump reality. Most people are bad at accurately perceiving people and instead project onto them. This can make incompatible partners seem alluring and make compatible partners seem unpromising. This is notable as even in this stage most variables remain outside your control.

• While the cold structures of probabilities and optimization are present and inescapable in the dating metagame, retaining an optimistic outlook is essential for crafting human connections. Discipline in your capacity to manage your emotions over long periods of time as you filter the stack is the single most important online dating skill and also the most difficult to develop.

• Programming a robot to filter profiles and an AI chatbot to cold open would save immense time and effort, thus increases your ability to filter the stack and better direct your time and effort, thus is probably the current optimal strategy, and may even become the future of dating once these technologies are universally accessible.