[benten10]

Finally, a topic I can consider myself some kind of expert in!

For the record, here are my credentials: I've tinder-valeted multiple guy friends, selecting women and conversing with them and warming things up for them. My friends happen to be across a wide variety of attractiveness and success spectrum.

Observations:

1. As is obvious, attractive/successful men get a lot more likes than women.

2. Guys who get lesser matches get increasingly desperate, and start liking everyone.

3. Being 'picky' for guys is hard work. It seems funny when I put it this way, but going through hundreds/thousand(s) of women, and even making a binary choice of yes/no is actually pretty tiring. Even my better guy friends have tended to go on the safer side and pick the earlier choices, because oh god it's a tiring head-aching process, even if you have a group of friends assisting you with the choice and the conversations.

Going through Tinder so much has made me very very very cynical either about people, or the kind of people on Tinder. We're all stereotypes. Really. One picture with mountain in the background, one with a beach, one in Europe, one with friends, one with pet/lonely pouty picture. Bios mentioning 1) 'sarcasm' 2) love of beer 3) love of scotch/whisky. Some mention their heights, most add ' I don't know why this matters but here it is'. Almost everyone desirable puts 'not into hookups', but rarely means it. So many other things. It was only after I started heavily using Tinder (for others) that I really appreciated meeting/dating people more in person/talking over the phone and got really into 'old school' dating.

Anyone else have very different experience?

[jdavis703]

What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area. This happens every time I travel back to D.C. I imagine that there are a lot of interesting variables that go into this, making this research not applicable for the "real world."

[toomim]

The sex ratio in DC has more females. But also your matches will tend to build up behind the scenes when you are away, as people swipe your now-relocated profile, so when you return, they'll unleash like a torrential orgasm.

[Grishnakh]

It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women.

NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men.

Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.

[cloudjacker]

The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with multiple people without competition.

[Grishnakh]

The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother.

Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.

[cloudjacker]

You talked exclusively about a gender deficit, I mentioned gender surplus.

You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

[Grishnakh]

>if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

Yes, I realize that, however the venues for this are very limited in my experience; I already listed out everything I could think of.

Usually, when this discussion comes up, people will recommend things like "find groups that do things you like, and you'll meet women you like there!" Sorry, but I'm not likely to meet any desirable and single women at a Linux or programming group. And I do attend some outdoors groups, but IME there the women are generally much older than me (and I'm not young either). I'm not really sure what the single female 30-45 crowd does in the DC area, but it's not hiking. From my limited dating experience in this area, their general free-time activity appears to be hanging out with their female friends and complaining that they can't find a husband while their biological clock is running out so they're going to start on IVF from a donor.

[Jtsummers]

I was traveling a good bit when I gave Tinder a shot (several months). Different cities gave me very different results. Hometown - nothing, not enough users so a lot of bots. Atlanta - tons of responses. LA - not quite as many, I probably didn't look as interesting compared to the other guys on there? Rome - Decent number, better than LA, not as much as Atlanta.

Then I met someone and we've been dating for 6 months so hopefully I don't get to test it out much more.

[jseliger]

What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area

SF has an unusually lopsided gender ratio, with more college-educated men than women, while almost all other major metro areas skew towards having more women than men. Jon Birger's Date-onomics covers this: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics..., and I rather liked it.

[ch4s3]

Maybe you stand out more in D.C. Are you something(professionally) other than a lawyer?

[xemdetia]

While not expert in Tinder specifically this seems to come up in most digital matchmaking scenarios in my experience in variety of areas. If you keep your ear to the ground long enough you can identify broad archetypes, the same way as if you watch how people write search queries. You can quickly identify who is new, who has been around for years, who just came back and is out of date, who only knows one trick that worked for them in the past, the desperate, the overdetailed, the ascetics, the repeaters, the copycats and so on.

It was a little more interesting when things were more anonymous, but nowadays since identity and digital identity are strongly coupled I assume less dupes, alternate accounts, and full-identity copycats. In my opinion it's just a characteristic of the medium of digital matchmaking. The goal outcome is a match, that's all you want. There is a temporal lingua franca of the moment with trends, and you are either following it or you are not. Because the other users are only able to see this particular payload of images/bio/whatever, all inferences towards this goal must be evaluated from only this input and so it does tend to be exhausting.

I think to answer your question more succinctly, I haven't seen a digital matchmaking service that doesn't act like this.

[gmarx]

The women who put their heights and remark they don't know why it matters? They see height in all the profiles they view (i.e. men's) and figure they should put it in their own even though they don;t get. Men do this because for almost all women this is a selection criterion and cannot be expressed readily in photos