[claudiawerner]

As much as I appreciate your point, I've heard that dating is very much a numbers game for men, and that's not out of a misguided focus on quantity over quality. In online dating, it's extremely common to be in a situation where the other party, if they respond at all, seems unable to answer with anything but one-word responses, and it's diifficult or impossible to have a conversation like that. A focus on quantity is actually an optimisation, becuase to have a chance at quality you need quantity.

Women suffer precisely the opposite problem when dating online: a barrage of first messages, most of them low quality, from just about every man who has seen their profile. Therefore, the pressure on men to get anticipate and navigate this situation is even greater - either by sending a well thought out and canned message to multiple women (to beat the other men), or to spend a longer time customizing a message to each woman. The second is typically a losing strategy when the response rate is so low.

There are some good writeups using results from subreddits for dating on Reddit which iterate on this point. It's worth noting that Tinder is great for validation so long as you're getting a lot of messages. In fact, it's so good, I've heard of people simply swiping through matches because they enjoy the idea that so many people are into them. It's the dating version of the 'refresh your HN profile to see if you have more upvotes' game.

I'd like to end on another, related point. Often, people claim that men get so few matches and/or responses because they have a bad time taking photos of themselves, and tend not to bother nearly as much as women tend to. From what I can gather, this is far from the truth; most women's profiles and photos have just as bad craftsmanship as men's do.

I suspect this is one of the biggest changes in the dating world within the past 10 years.