[leach]

Dating apps by and far are quite useless. If you ever want to know how insidious they are, just download one, finish your profile, and swipe for 10 minutes a week.

Since you are not an "active user" they will give you the most attractive people to swipe on. Every couple of days they will give you a "limited time" discount on gold or platinum or whatever. The push notifications are my favorite part, "you could be missing out on the love of your life!!!".

Not to mention the interactions with the UI are littered with casino like visuals. The whole purpose of the app is to get you addicted and spending time and money on it.

It's much easier to naturally meet people in real life through work/school. If you can't there, go hang out at coffee shops or bookstores or something and just hang. Strike up conversation with people, just live. You'll get rejected and some people will be rude but it's all real. You could also always pick up hobbies and meet people there. Just be social, don't spend time and money on these machines of misery.

[rowyourboat]

I'm always so confused by the advice to go to bookstores to meet people. What kind of bookstores do you guys go to where the customers talk with each other?

[Exoristos]

Being able to start a friendly conversation under circumstances where an average male might fail is a prime sign of date-ability. While humans are very complicated, the general animal rule that males must impress females still exists at some level in some form.

[user_7832]

> Being able to start a friendly conversation under circumstances where an average male might fail is a prime sign of date-ability.

Under this assumption, would the average man be undateble?

(Not that I agree or disagree with the rest, but this seems odd to me.)

[throwaway2037]

> Under this assumption, would the average man be undateble?

Yes. If men don't approach women, they stay single. Period. Look at the ratio of men under 30 in the US who are single now. It is mindblowing.

[user_7832]

That's a fair point, it does appear to be anecdotally true.

[Exoristos]

What assumption? The assumption that a bookstore is the only place men and women can interact?

[user_7832]

No, I meant the assumption that the average man is undataeble as he cannot start a conversation.

[mensetmanusman]

Go anywhere people congregate weekly at the same time for a year. You will accidentally community.

[mancerayder]

That's a recipe for women to feel creeped out. Even at Meetups women get bugged by men who for lack of a better term lack awareness and communication skills.

And by this I do imply men talking to women, because despite claims to the contrary, it's the accepted norm (and there are always exceptions). That's my experience, it may be different in same sex communities.

There's no great place for people to meet anymore.

[throwaway2037]

> That's a recipe for women to feel creeped out.

Countless surveys have shown that women do want to be approached. And don't forget about the "Brad Pitt vs Stalker" duality that exists for women and dating: They either view you as handsome who can do no wrong (including approaching them at Meetups), or some kind of creep. There is little in-between. Also, women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness. The open secret is that you need to approach lots of women on a regular basis in all sorts of different settings. Eventually, you will find luck.

[leach]

Basically this, the bookstore was a stand in for any type of place that you may frequent and see others frequent.

People react differently to being approached, just like anyone would. If they are just into you it works. If not some are polite and see it as a compliment and just say no. Others will be offended and scoff. Either way no one gets hurt and you just move on.

Eventually you just get lucky with someone who is interested in you back. This is kinda how it was for most of history, so I find it odd people are so against it now. We are social creatures! go out and meet people, if they happen to be mean oh well, that reflects entirely on them.

[helloplanets]

> Also, women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness.

No source for a claim like this, on a forum where it's the norm for even the most mundane things? Please link one, would be interested in having a look at the study.

[quantumspandex]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060886

[helloplanets]

Thanks for linking the source.

> At least on OKCupid, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness, while men rate women at right about 50% as below-average and 50% as above-average

is very different from

> Women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness.

Pretty confounding to take that sort of a logical leap in a thread that's about the dark patterns, gamification and the highly modified context into which dating apps transform dating inside them.

[arvinsim]

I am an avid book reader but even I cannot leverage it because I buy through my Kindle.

[Qem]

> It's much easier to naturally meet people in real life through work/school.

It was. Nowadays people including the office in their dating pool face a high risk of harassment claims.

[jstarfish]

I investigate these complaints for a living. Please don't date anybody you work with. We'll both be happier for it.

The fun always starts after a breakup and the other party doesn't want to see you at work anymore. There is usually no penalty for falsely reporting anyone to HR for harassment "in good faith," and there are likely anti-retaliation policies protecting malicious claimants from punishment for "misrepresentation" of any situation. Your side of the story will be recorded for the sake of appearance, and ignored. The system is completely broken.

If you're sure they're your soul mate, changing departments is not enough, leave now, on your own terms. You do not want a common HR department acting as a mediator for your domestic disputes. You're asking to be made unemployed and homeless.

[anon78901]

Happened to me. Utter, utter nightmare. As she seemed to winning she got overconfident and started making claims that were easy to objectively disprove. She was thrown out. She broke down and confessed, after it was too late. Not a work situation though. I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho. It really turned my life upside down for awhile. I wanted to quit anyway, to get away from the whole thing.

[jstarfish]

Sorry to hear it buddy. Not the first time I've seen that.

I'd say it gets better but it is genuinely traumatic to be attacked out of nowhere for no apparent reason. There's literally nothing you can do to avoid random acts of violence. Even becoming a hermit isn't a solution; now you're that creepy guy who lives in a van by the river who gets blamed for diddling all the kids.

Nomadic life is safer, as long as you don't draw attention and move along before anybody learns how to exploit you.

I hope you find peace and have since landed on your feet.

> I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho

Also not the first time I've seen (or experienced) that either.

I'm seeing more instances of this sort of behavior exhibited by the borderline personality disorder crowd without consequence in popular media. Awkwafina does it in one of her shows, Pete Davison does it in "King of Staten Island," both in relation to getting rid of potential step-parents in publicly-humiliating manners. It's happened to me too in this context. It's really disturbing behavior to see promoted, and now I see it being leveraged at work too as a means of eliminating undesirable colleagues.

Acts of social terrorism, we grant the euphemism "cancellation." There's really nothing you can do but live in fear of it, because there are no rules and our institutions have no integrity.

[lazide]

It’s not just work - it’s any community venue that other party considers ‘essential’.

Church, Dr’s offices, the gym, even a grocery store (if they ‘need it’) is a potential social ‘war zone’.

Oh, and Reddit too.

[baobabKoodaa]

Quitting a gym has lower cost than quitting a job, though. Especially if the "quitting" does not occur in amicable circumstances.

[lazide]

You wouldn’t get a chance to quit either one, probably.

The job might fire the accuser - they might have an incentive to investigate.

At the gym you might get arrested and then banned, with no one interested in doing followup to figure out the actual truth - just have you released after it was clear it was fake. The gym wouldn't want anything to do with you either way afterwards.

[baobabKoodaa]

I don't disagree with any of that. I'm just saying the repercussions for whatever things like that happen, they will be lower at the gym compared to the workplace.

[jstarfish]

Of course. It works at every level, all the way down to family. Other advice here suggests joining groups to meet people, but anytime you two are under the same reporting umbrella, you're vulnerable to malicious claims when they want to be rid of you.

It's a sad state of affairs; I don't have a solution. Private citizens have no business running tribal justice systems. They used to call this form of abuse triangulation (but that term has a wildly different meaning with this crowd).

https://www.healthline.com/health/narcissistic-triangulation

[lazide]

Near as I can tell, the way this usually works out is each gender ends up 'policing' itself to prevent the worst abuses.

In most environments, the older women police the younger women, older men police the younger men, etc.

Good luck doing that online though, or even in the current dynamic.

[golly_ned]

About “asking to be made unemployed and homeless”: do you take punitive action against coworkers who are together or broken up?

[jstarfish]

They're never together at the time of the complaint, but I don't see it mattering-- if a dude is sending dick pics to anyone while on the clock then it's an issue.

So these investigations usually focus on verifying whether he sent them at the time she said he did. Timestamps get forged or omitted in phone screenshots and personal phones are beyond our forensic purview. It's all hearsay. If I can't discredit the evidence, it stands, and the accused is usually terminated. Welcome to Kangaroo Court.

I ate some shit recently when a guy was accused of emailing dick pics to his ex from his work email. I believed her story (men are pigs, right?) until a colleague looked deeper at the email headers; she saw that the ex was the one sending the pictures to him. The social media narratives we're told and the shit I've seen in the last decade could not be more opposite. Men do some seriously gross shit at work for real, just not anything surfaced by the reporting process. That pipeline has just been a torrent of bullshit.

For what it's worth it's not always a romance thing. Bad complaints are always filed by women, but their targets are evenly split across men and women. False claims ensnare bosses and colleagues just the same as icky exes.

[itronitron]

I think the mindset should be that whoever you initially meet, or hang out with, won't be a match but may potentially introduce you to a person with whom you could match. So all coworkers then are excluded from the dating pool, but are potential matchmakers.

[leach]

If you don't date at work you still make friends at work and grow your social circle. Leverage that to meet new people through work people.

It can be risky dating at work but some find the trade off worth it. I suppose it depends on how comfortable you are at your job too. I've definitely seen relationships blossom in my workplace more than once. When you spend so much time with people it's only natural.

[herbst]

You are talking specifically about the male experience.

As 'female' it doesn't matter how often I use the app, if my profile attracts enough males I get matches and ice breakers all day long. If I accidentally open the app after 2 months it just gets more.

I don't need to match or look out. I get nice and stupid messages in mailbox and can choose from them.

If I go to match 80% (made up but realistic number) of the profiles shown already matched with me.

The apps don't want me to buy anything, they nag me for my time.

I could go on. By design I will only see the most successful or 'aggresive' profiles and nothing else.

[leach]

This is very true, I've never used a dating app as the opposite sex so I'm not sure what their experience is like. This definitely sounds about right though.

Makes sense that attention is what they want from you, and how the experience compares to that of an average dude on it.

I suppose I'm forgetting other experiences too, I guess I follow the two "rules" of dating apps because as a dude I get a decent amount of matches. Still I don't like the dating apps, maybe I just yearn for something more real I'm not sure.