[notch656c]

Tinder is straight up depressing for the median dude. My mind was blown just how much harder it was to get a date on tinder vs getting a date in real life. I can do the latter pretty easily but trying to get one on tinder would be like months of constant effort to then get ditched before the date even starts.

It feels like 90% of women on there are chasing the top 10% of dudes and not settling for anything else.

[wolongong942]

While the 80/20 stuff is true i think another under-explored aspect is that there just isn't many non-bot women on these dating apps, after all their business is exploiting men for these gold memberships/boosts. Most women i know in their 20s easily get attention on a daily basis through posting on Instagram, working a retail orwaitress job or simply walking into a bar, they also have social groups and hobbies so they aren't really using Tinder.

[yieldcrv]

the wildest part is that the very people who advocate not hitting on people at work will be the first people talk have a nice relationship with a customer who hit on them at work

everyone can perceive that this acts as just gatekeeping for unattractive people

yes, newsflash people would rather not have advances from ugly people, but to masquerade that as trying to vilify advances at all is pure fiction

[willcipriano]

Those 10% dudes are smart enough not to settle for a 90% woman for more than a few dates when they can pull a new one off the app at a moments notice. In the end they are the only winners in this situation.

[nannal]

Tinder appears to be doing fairly well given it's their situation that they've engineered.

[willcipriano]

Fair enough, trendy restaurants and bars also probably do well.

[alexose]

I think our generation will be remembered for over-optimization more than anything. We keep chasing the best hotel, the best restaurant, the best partner, not realizing that things that give us meaning and happiness are intangible, unique, weird, and usually right in front of us.

[yamtaddle]

I often wonder exactly how much happier I am having a billion excellent choices for entertainment, versus the small set we might have in the '90s.

I doubt it's that much. Is the very-best movie from last year, uncovered by ten or fifteen minutes of targeted searching and reading, likely to be better than whatever I'd have picked up at the video store based on gut feeling and what a few friends had told me? Oh, god yes, of course it is. Am I happier this way, though? I'm less certain about that. Probably a little? But I don't think it's a large effect.

Ditto having "the world's knowledge at your fingertips" (well, ignore that it's far from all of it and that you're probably still better off hitting the books for a lot of things, but it's good at the trivial stuff anyway). Can I answer most silly little "I wonder..." questions in five to ten seconds? Yep. Am I happier this way? I'm not so sure, since before the Internet was available nearly everywhere nearly all the time I rarely even became consciously aware of such trivial thoughts and they were very easy to dismiss when I did.

[ahartmetz]

I don't know, haven't most people learned by now that all these fine-grained ratings essentially mean either "crap" or "not crap, it depends on your preferences"? In a few cases, "crap but you might like it".

[farmaway]

>It feels like 90% of women on there are chasing the top 10% of dudes and not settling for anything else.

It feels that way because it is that way (stats from OKCupid, but I suspect the effect generalizes):

https://archive.is/lGIdO

[shitter]

Yes, but I don't see why everyone is acting like Tinder is the only choice. There are other apps that seem to work differently and better.

I used Tinder for close to a year and had an experience close to what you're describing. I only managed to go on two dates that both went nowhere. At the suggestion of someone on one of the dating subreddits, I switched to Hinge, saw the difference in the amount of attention I was getting, and never looked back. Eventually, I met my girlfriend on there.

[mikhael28]

Does she know your HN username is sh*tter? :')

[tasuki]

> It feels like 90% of women on there are chasing the top 10% of dudes and not settling for anything else.

Sure, and 90% dudes are chasing the top 10% women.

[bmn__]

But if they cannot win the competition of the chase, they will easily settle for a lower decile woman. That's the difference.

[astrange]

That's Tinder. I'm told Bumble and Hinge actually work for people.

Of course, what really helps is to be on the favorable end of the gender mismatch if you're somewhere like SF or NYC. It's not nearly as bad as online people say it is though. You only need to find one person!