I can't really imagine another way to date. People want to go about their day and get groceries without being hit on. People want to go to meetups without being hit on. Nobody wants to play matchmaker for two friends then be stuck in the middle when it doesn't work out. Online dating gives you a way to explicitly opt in to "I want to meet you romantically" and lets you meet people who you would otherwise have absolutely no way to encounter.
I would advice most people to stay away from online dating. Especially if you social anxiety or low self esteem. Why would you place the chances of finding love in the hands of a corporation?
In the case of tinder here is why: After I sign up tinder I started getting constant ads. These ads have followed me for months, to this day. Here is the most recent example: https://imgur.com/a/IJFCG0m.
Most dating apps are owned by a single company Match group. They own for example: BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful, FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge. In fact, tinder's delete account button is very conveniently placed. They don't care if you delete your account... as long as they can shuffle users around. The match group itself is owned by an even bigger corporation IAC. It owns about 150 brands worldwide. For example: TripAdvisor, Expedia, Ask.com, The Daily Beast, About.com, Dictionary.com, Investopedia, among many others.
I have a hard time believing that Tinder have any incentives to make you find date. Why would they do that? You will quit the app and they will stop making money!
I believe they use a lot of dark pattern to try to sell stuff. Here in an example: https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg. When I used tinder they keep the notification "there is someone that like" but they would actually show me the person. Another example of the dark patterns: https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg. They also shadow-ban users among many other things.
> I think that internet dating is a modest positive addition to our world. It is generating interaction between people that we otherwise wouldn’t have. People who have in the past had trouble finding a potential partner benefit the most from the broader choice set provided by the dating apps.
I feel online dating is skewed in favor of users who are in top x% attraction level. The return on time spent is poor if you are not very attractive.
Moreover, I think it's difficult to switch it off completely. It's harder to commit, invest time and effort to build a strong relationship even when things are not going smooth - when there is endless potential of finding someone better/more beautiful/taller/richer etc. just a few swipes away.
I recently had a bizare experience. My girlfriend that I met in college and was dating for 4 years broke up with me and a week later I saw her profile on Bumble.
It was definitely very upsetting. Women have a lot more power with online dating and can essentially meet someone at anytime if they are good looking. I don't doubt that she has dozens or even hundreds of messages from guys.
I don't have many high quality pictures and I don't do very well.
In online dating it's definitely true that a small percentage of men (say 20%) has sex and the opportunity for a relationship with the majority of women (say 80%).
So I guess I will be single for awhile
As a gay man, meeting other men online is the only way I can. :-(
There don’t seem to be many appropriate dating spaces for the LGBTQ+ community in the physical world... maybe it’s just a fact of being in your mid twenties during a time of great change, but I wish there were spaces that didn’t necessitate drinking, where you could meet people in this arena.
Overall, online dating makes me quite sad. It’s very easy to judge and dismiss someone online based on a few lines of text and some photographs.
That’s probably why I’m still single. Nobody’s interested in my profile or photos. It’s hard to stand out in such a competitive arena; I’d prefer to get to know people in the flesh.
Personally, using apps diluted the spark of dating for me so I stopped using them. The most intense part of "mating" for me are the initial stages of attraction, trying to suss out whether or not the opposite party is attracted to you and reading the signs, that and flirting can generate a great high because there is such risk.
At the end of the day once the app sets you up you'll have to flirt anyway to generate attraction -- but if you've ever had a spontaneous flirtatious interaction with someone you're attracted to you know what I mean.
I am more interested to know whether successfully married couples are more likely to meet online than all couples. Maybe this simply demonstrates an uptick in number of relationships and less time someone is single until they find their long-term mate/partner.
That's awful to be honest.
I don't have anything against online dating in principle, though I do find it pretty weird, but there's got to be a better way than relying on obscure matchmaking algorithms, shitty apps optimizing for engagement and your being single (remember, if you're not single you're not using the app), run by shady companies harvesting all of your data. Americans will always surprise me in their ability to surrender every single aspect of their life to megacorporations, even the most intimate and personal ones.
I'm sure it is, but I can't help but feel that that's mostly because more traditional ways to meet people have basically evaporated due to social and economic forces.
Personally, I found online dating such a tedious affair that I decided I'd rather be alone.
This is the abstract:
> We present data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.
I haven't looked at the underlying data (but its publicly available - yay!), but it does sound from the abstract and the dataset's website like the author may be (and the article definitely moreso) reading into the fact that it's online too much, and not really looking into the actual dynamics of the ways people interact online. They mention "mediation" by friends, but it's not clear to me if one or both of (1) meeting at an event hosted by a mutual friend and (2) being exposed to each other because of a mutual online friend are considered "mediation" by the friend. I know a lot of couples have first interacted because they were friends-of-friends (i.e. sliding into the Instagram DMs), but there was no active mediation (i.e. setting up) from the friend. It's all passive. Other than the fact that more socialization is done online in general, those situations aren't that different with respect to how important the friend is.
The article then mentions "algorithms", which I think is a bit generous considering how popular the apps are that don't match you up based on much more than gender preferences and location. Instead, you just go for volume online and evaluate the match in-person or through subsequent chat. It seems like match-making algorithms have decreased in perceived importance as online dating has matured. e-Harmony used to push it big time, but it seems like the Tinders of the world absolutely dominate now.
If that’s the case then I’m doomed to real-world dating.
Apparently I need to hire a photographer and a social media coordinator, because otherwise I absolutely stink at flirting online.
Other issue is that I like intellectuals and smarter crowds. My experiences online have been rather unlucky in this area.
I am skeptical.
>I was surprised at how much online dating has displaced the help of friends in meeting a romantic partner. Our previous thinking was that the role of friends in dating would never be displaced. But it seems like online dating is displacing it.
Hmmm. In my experience friends are still pretty heavily involved (assuming one has friends). They're just not involved in the discover process, but they're definitely involved in the filtering process, perhaps moreso now.
So it seems like online dating has mostly just replaced the discovery process - how do you find people to meet. This is probably a good thing. But once you've met a person I still think your friends provide feedback that may determine whether you see that person again.
Years ago I met my wife online. Now, I wonder which companies have bought our messaging histories... and when a breach will release those and any other content I posted back then.
Attractive people don’t need to date online. Attractive women, in particular.
Most popular way is still thru friends.
Note that "meeting online" includes things like social networks, games and chats, along with actual online dating. In 2017, 39% of new couples met met online. Online dating itself only accounted for about 24% of all new couples.
At some point, it's just called "dating."
This is like saying I'm doing "online job seeking" because I find out about jobs online. At a certain point, that's just the default for how it's done. Similarly, I'm not "online working" because my job is done mostly online. I'm just working.
My wife was introduced by a mutual friend in 2000. Married 4 years later. The year before I had tried dating websites such as Match and they were atrocious. Fake profiles, delayed email responses, bad dates based on what the programmers thought would ideally "match" people up.
I imagine the smartphone and dating or hookup apps are so much more sophisticated today. Or maybe I dodged a technological bullet?
What site do you find the best for online dating?
I'm a bit on the younger side (23) but I've used online dating almost exclusively for finding partners over the past 2 years. Being a bit of a numbers freak, I downloaded a copy of all my data from Tinder and made a Sankey diagram with it and it ended up being pretty cool to look at: https://imgur.com/a/ueNmDlZ
I don’t have any way of comparing this beyond anecdotally but... I’ve dated one only person and for many years.
I’ve never had the chance or reason to use online dating. But I feel like most of my friends who do enter committed relationships from online dating don’t seem to trust each other very much even after a significant chunk of time and it seems weird to me. Curious if this resonates.
I've met my last two girlfriends online. Both were ok, but ultimately didn't last (the relationships lasted 3 & 6 months respectively). And the dates that didn't turn into anything (of which I went on ~10 or so) were really average.
On reflection, the social aspect of meeting people through friends really helps solve a lot of future relationship problems (you have things in common, some level of shared values etc).
In my view online dating is brutal for all. As a guy you are constantly swiping and sending out a lot of messages with a very low conversion rate (I'd be surprised if 1% of all swipes turn into a date). If you go on things like /r/tinder there are lots of guys who complain about being on the platform for months or years and not having a single match. As a woman you're often dealing with hundreds and hundreds of matches. Everyone has to run a massive pipeline which means things end up being very transactional if you aren't careful.
Because there's so much competition things that wouldn't necessarily matter all that much end up being huge deal breakers (say for example height, or niche preferences).
I'm off the apps, at least for the moment, and am focusing on meeting people in the real world.