[anonporridge]

I believe old OkCupid data (which has since been deleted from their blog) found exactly this.

In short, males looking for females are very even in their rating of women along a bell curve. Females looking for males heavily skew towards the top 20% of males, while considering the bottom 80% "below average".

Tinder, and every other dating app, absolutely take advantage of this deep truth of human psychology and milk the bottom echelon of desperate men for every penny they can.

[bruceb]

Take that OkCupid stuff with a grain of salt. While I am sure there are general trends that are true, OkCupid didn't isolate the characteristic they were testing. So their stats were just a crude measure.

[atlgator]

It was all published in a book called Dataclysm by Christian Rudder.

[anonporridge]

Thanks!

Ref, https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

[Beltalowda]

Having looked a bit at male profiles, I have to say that a lot of profiles really are quite bad. For whatever reason, the "average quality" is worse.

[baobabKoodaa]

Are they so bad that the average male profile is somehow below average?

[Beltalowda]

If half the profiles are just a no-brainer "no" then the "real average" is only over the top 50% rather than the full 100%.

I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.

The biggest challenge is that Tinder can be an emotional rollercoaster and really screw over your self-esteem.

[baobabKoodaa]

> If half the profiles are just a no-brainer "no" then the "real average" is only over the top 50% rather than the full 100%.

You're doing a lot of mental gymnastics to redefine terms like "average". Ah yes, it is perfectly fine for women to consider 80% of men to be below average in attractiveness, because those 80% are just a no-brainer "no" because they are not attractive and math is hard.

> I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.

Perhaps you are in the top 20% of men so you feel that it is easy to be in the top 20% bracket, but men who are not up there don't really have a path to get there. You imply that men should simply stop sending dick picks (and stop doing other, very obviously bad things), but the proportion of men sending unwarranted dick pics is vanishingly small.

[Beltalowda]

All I'm saying is that "average" isn't really all that meaningful here (as it isn't in many cases). For example, the number of men who have just one or two badly lit photos from their webcam is staggering. That's just a no-brainer.

> you are in the top 20% of men

Not at all.

[baobabKoodaa]

> All I'm saying is that "average" isn't really all that meaningful here (as it isn't in many cases). For example, the number of men who have just one or two badly lit photos from their webcam is staggering. That's just a no-brainer.

You're missing the point. The major finding in that OkCupid post was that (according to that post) women have an unrealistic expectation of the attractiveness of men. They demonstrated this by showing that the majority of women consider the majority of men to be below average in attractiveness. This claim is not refuted by your observation that some men send unwanted dick picks, and it's not refuted by your observation that some men use badly lit photos. I don't know why you feel like these observations somehow refute this claim? Even if 100% of men were sending dick pics and 100% of men were using badly lit photos, this still wouldn't change the fact that 1+1=2, or the fact that top 50% of men in terms of attractiveness are above the median in terms of attractiveness. If a person holds a world view to the contrary, their world view is factually incorrect.

[ryandrake]

I think you guys are both in agreement. If half the profiles are, say, 0 out of 10, then there's no way the average could be > 5. I mean, that's just math. I don't understand dropping all values less than the median to get a "real average". It's absolutely possible that women rate 80% as below average--that just indicates a huge number of zeros or huge unimodal distribution towards the low end of the range.

I've been married for a long time so thankfully don't need to use Tinder, but this reported rating distribution squares with my memory of the dating market in meatspace. 90% of women go after the top 20% of the guys. Online probably doesn't change this.

[greatpostman]

Yeah, basically they make you pay to tip the odds so in your favor that you might overcome that terrible ratio I quoted

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

I'm actually surprised that dating apps aren't doing more with monetization opportunities. There are plenty of whales out there who would be happy to deploy their disposable income for mating opportunities. Why not let someone spend $1000 a day to be the top displayed profile in a city for an entire day?

[anonporridge]

Those people aren't using Tinder.

There are "dating" sites that specialize in connecting wealthy/successful people (mostly older men) with young, beautiful people (mostly women). They do charge quite a bit and make bank.

[xiphias2]

I’m wealthy enough to pay for these kinds of services, but never tried them, as I find sex with women who just want me for my money boring / a haggle between the amount of money a girl wants to extract from me vs the amount of sex I want to have with her. The more I experienced this, the more I realized that it’s better to do 2 hours of sports a day (1 hour running and 1 hour gym, while dieting).

The Jeff Bezos / Leonardo DiCaprio scene clearly shows that money can’t buy sexual attraction.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

I'm not an expert at that particular area, but my anecdotal impression was that high-end matchmaking services (say 50-100k to find a life partner) were fairly underwhelming. Or are you talking about the whole sugar dating world here?

[tmpz22]

GP is most certainly referencing the sugar daddy explosion

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

I don't think that's apples-to-apples though. Sugar dating is typically transactional and typically doesn't lead to genuine connection and relationships, whereas most datings apps are about something more than an occasional hookup, including Tinder (see the millions of "not here for a hookup" statements in womens' profiles that have been there for years).

[Lewton]

You can already do this in tinder for about 24x30 usd (prices probably vary)