[cassonmars]

Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.

[coder583]

There is an approximately equal amount of men and women in the population. How is it possible that so many matches are "low quality" for women?

[bluejay2]

Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.

[baobabKoodaa]

Sounds like you've read the OkCupid blog post that used to be online, before Match decided to buy OkCupid and censor them.

[quantumBerry]

They were censored? How is this even controversial? Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher -- it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective.

[blunte]

> it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective

Only if you believe in the relatively modern human concept of two monogamous people being the only parents of a child.

Biologically speaking, a woman wants the sperm which will provide her the most survivable and resilient child, plus any number of other adults around who will help care for and protect that child.

This idea of a woman being choosy is a very new concept. You don't have to go back far in time at all to see where women had no choice at all (or look in some current cultures).

But if you go back further, or you go to places less touched by modern conventions, you find men and women of groups being generally sexual with each other, and being responsible for all the children in their group. This appears to be how humans survived and flourished for most of human history; or at least, it fits the existing evidence much better than the idea of a monogomous (and very 1:1 protective) couple.

Sure, if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner (and she's not allowed to be an equal participant in the world where income or resources are earned), she will choose the man more likely to guarantee that the basic survival needs are met or exceeded as much as possible. But she will still biologically seek the strongest, fittest, most genetically compatible and complementary man she can have sex with. From a modern human survival standpoint, this is the path of success.

[quantumBerry]

A woman takes 9 months to birth a child, and up until very recently had some serious risk during childbirth. The dude just has to shoot his load. This imbalance in reproductive investment predates modern human concept of monogamy.

> if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner

If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal, because the reproductive investment of the man and the woman start to look a lot more equal (a lifetime investment for each). In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.

[bluejay2]

I think you are right.

[jwond]

There was an OKCupid study that found that women on OKCupid rated 80% of men as below average.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

[jack_pp]

That's funny at first glance but it might be more accurate than we would like to admit. Maybe there were a lot of below average men (compared to the general population) on OKC when that study was conducted

[bsder]

Actually, the OkCupid founders used their own pictures and got nailed as significantly below average. <chuckle>

They really weren't. If anything, they were probably a bit above average.

Although, there is one thing that might have contributed back in the day. Female users of online dating might have been concentrated in tech areas. Being a rare female in a male dominated ratio area causes a highly skewed estimate of how attractive you really are.

[leephillips]

It could also reflect the nature of the general population. The distribution is unlikely to be symmetric.

[pvaldes]

Discovering that men 'over average' don't have problems to find women or are married yet, so don't need the services of the platform wouldn't be much of a surprise...

[jeegsy]

This is very true. Anecdote and all that but I've known some very fortunate dudes who literally just had to show up and the ladies would fall over themselves. It was entertaining and sobering at the same time.

[cassonmars]

For starters, the pool of people on say, Tinder, for example, is already disproportionately imbalanced in terms of represented populations (as I said, 10:1). Assuming an even distribution of “attractiveness” (which obviously isn’t straightforward to quantify and varies by locale), there’s already a huge discrepancy: even a woman of average attractiveness (of ten women 1-10, she ranks a 5) has fifty (given ten women, there are a hundred men in total) that rank below, in terms of attractiveness. When you have a limited number of right swipes a day, well below the number of available options that _do_ qualify, and nearly every right swipe is a match, it leads to a conditioned behavior of selecting well above one’s “rank”. Of course, online dating apps have no interest in removing the barriers that result in this condition — it makes men pay more for more swipes, higher priority in the stacks shown to women, and the option to see who swiped on them. In other words, it’s a rigged game.

[honkdaddy]

Thanks for the detailed reply. This matches my experience fairly well.

With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?

[cassonmars]

Admittedly, I’ve had a very unusual experience on Tinder. Attraction is important, but it’s not the be all end all for me, as there are way more important things. That being said, I also know I rank pretty high on their scoring mechanics, based on the characteristics of who they show to me, and how I am shown to others (for example, Tinder primes people to swipe right by showing a high scoring user when you first open the app, many close friends have informed me “Tinder keeps showing me you when I open the app”, but there are other considerations you can use to assess your internal score). So I match with interesting choices on other attributes. And of the crowd I match with I have built a workflow to manage the volume (literally, I have over three thousand matches as of writing this, historically a total of over 7,000 in the year and a half I’ve used the app) — I reverse engineered their API so I could pull the matches and messages and create JIRA tickets automatically so I could bucket conversations based on initial intentions. It sounds pretty horrible once I write that out, but on the other hand I feel it’s pretty horrible that people don’t get a fair shake because of the way this game is rigged, and this ensures better “fairness”, at least in some way. Also not to mention, about half don’t message first, and of those that do, about a fifth of the time they’re pretty unsavory openers.