[cromd]

I think you and those responding to you are saying many valid things, but there are ambiguities still. Does "dating" mean "late-stage worried-about-dying-alone parents-nagging-me dating"? Or does it mean "screw around and go where the wind takes me?". Is the context online or offline?

I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years, but it can't continue forever. The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating, but it won't work out for more permanent relationships. From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over. So they start to change preferences as they get older. And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.

It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means. Maybe looks are the 4th most important thing, given that the man is, at a minimum, in the top X%. But what's the formula? There are nonlinearities also, i.e. you can't always compensate. Having a million dollars and being 5.5 feet tall is better than having a billion dollars and being 4.5 feet tall, I'd predict. Something can be low-importance, but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.

I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day. I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no. Yes, the average woman has lots of options on Tinder, but that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much. Men think women have it great online because the women have what men want - lots of choice. But I have many female friends who are depressed about dating despite their long list of suitors. They struggle to build satisfying connections. We could ask who is to blame, but I'll just note at the end of the day, one side might be slightly happier than the other ... but only slightly! So frustrated people should keep that in mind.

[scarmig]

Something about the way dating apps are set up lead to suboptimal outcomes, for both sexes.

As a point of evidence, I mostly used Tinder before meeting my current girlfriend on it, because Hinge and Bumble are unusable for me because they both require listing height, which results in me getting no matches from women on them. But, interestingly, my current girlfriend (and the girlfriend before her!) said that she wouldn't have matched with me if I had listed my height: in real life, however, it's not a concern, and she bemoans the fact that we spent so much time within a half mile of each other without meeting and she wasted so much time with people who weren't as compatible.

Women are inundated with options, so they have to filter them somehow: most women have similar preferences in men, and so once they filter their particular matches to those men who meet those easily filterable preferences, they end up with men that have already been heavily picked over and haven't left the market, either because they don't want a relationship or because they have other characteristics that result in them exiting relationships relatively soon after they start. So it ends up being a market for lemons (if a relationship is what the woman is looking for), leading to lots of mediocre or bad experiences.

[cromd]

Yeah, traditional Boolean search would be an improvement in some ways: “show me men taller than 6, or programmers of any height” (heh), but that’s either too overwhelming for users, or promotes spam or scraping or stalking or something. But maybe more choice isn’t the answer. Or maybe if you gave people the flexibility, they would be more cognizant of all the things they’re missing out on, and of the difficulty of getting it right, and take a less targeted approach with less “overfitting”. But the current system of independent “AND” cutoffs is what people get forced into. And an algorithm is a good alternative, but people don’t trust the algorithms much.

[scarmig]

I'm pretty sure that if you somehow gave people an accurate filter for "loving partner who is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship underpinned by mutual care and affection," it'd instantly become the most popular one. But that's impossible to verify without weeks or months of dating. And there really isn't a good proxy for it, and if there were, it'd be quickly gamed.

I do suspect you could mitigate the market-for-lemons/selection effect by allowing filters on number of likes/matches and duration of time spent on the app: if someone has been on an OLD app for years consistently getting dozens of likes per day, they probably aren't a likely candidate for a long term relationship. But that'd be much less popular, because few people are willing to focus on potential partners not many other people want.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Does "dating" mean "late-stage worried-about-dying-alone parents-nagging-me dating"? Or does it mean "screw around and go where the wind takes me?". Is the context online or offline?

Screw around part, before the predisposed expected monogamy bit usually called boyfriend/girlfriend. Holds for both.

> I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years

This cannot be true. Just algorithmically, they have a rating for you, so women cannot pick men outside their rating regardless of their preferences. (I don't agree it would hold if they could pick any man, but its a moot question because they simply can't)

> The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating,

It doesn't. That fact comes from a horrible game of telephone, from a survey ran in a blog over a decade ago. The attempts to make an intellectual sounding argument for redpilling started early with comments about the Paretto principle. But thats not what the data showed at all.

> From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over.

In the uk less than 50% of people are single in their 20s which is the heaviest user base of online dating sites.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/714172/uk-current-relati...

> And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.

The idea that women go on sexual rampages after tall chiselled bodied men in their 20 and find a chubby bald rich 40 year old to settle after they are done is unsupported by data, research and anything outside of 4chan greentext stories. Which is where the idea started and should have died.

> It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means.

Women are asked to name what is important in a relationship, what is a dealbreaker, etc And looks hardly come first. Funnily enough in men appearance is quite an important metric early but goes down with time. Women usually say "stable income" as one of the most important things, many times above wealth (specially inherited many women prefer a smaller stable income over a one time larger paycheck).

> but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.

Sure, but thats on the extremes. Most humans fall in a bell curve, and 80% of them are not being tossed away over some perceived lack of top percentagedness.

> I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day.

And at the start of the day.

> I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no.

at the end of the day, its a company, they are there to make money not make you happy. Their product is access to women, their business model exploiting men loneliness.

> that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much.

They don't, which is why there are few women and why most feautures are designed either to make money or to retain women and nothing else. Those are the two metrics tinder checks.