Thanks for the post. Would it be okay for me to share an invite link to a free Discord server dedicated to dating support?
The server attracted regulars from various rationalist-adjacent discord servers (chiefly ACX), where a common topic was how to level up one's dating skills (as an overly analytical nerdy type of person). The idea was to help inexperienced people get advice from more experienced people with similar backgrounds and dispositions, but also to just gather knowledge about how to improve one's chances while dating. Sharing experiences, stories, setbacks and wins, this kind of thing.
Someone on r/slatestarcodex is doing another attempt at a "dating app for nerdy people", posted three hours ago and seems to get some engagement already.
On “Who is the best artist: The Weeknd, Future, Drake or Travis Scott?”
Seems the right answer isn’t any of the four, it’s just a filter for “if you like this sort of music at all and can prove it by answering this question coherently.” Any answer would be acceptable but “I only listen to Garth Brooks” would be a negative.
> (If you’re spending that hour mostly chatting with matches, why haven’t you moved to regular texting or other messaging apps with most of them yet?)
I think this is bad advice. Here's something I wrote for a friend a few months ago about why asking for a girl's number usually doesn't get a man anywhere. It's very heteronormative and aimed at male readers, because I was writing it for a straight male friend.
---
I've seen too many men mess up their prospects by asking for a girl's number. "Hey, uh, want to give me your number? Maybe we could do something later."
It's horrible, and counter-productive. Out clubbing, at a bar, at a party, or, most classically, when a guy approaches a girl right as his friends are leaving the bar so that he has an excuse for needing to run away quickly. No girl likes this. This is the relationship equivalent of a job asking you to do a work sample without telling you the salary range for the position. She's going to give you her snapchat, and then "forget" to approve your friend request later.
In person, getting a number after making a plan works better. That way, it feels like you are gaining the ability to handle future logistical problems together, rather than you gaining the ability to contact someone you have no putative reason to be contacting. First, you ask if she's free Thursday for drinks, or Saturday for coffee. Then, if she says yes, you can offer her your number.
On dating apps, "what's your number" is useless. It's a conversation killer. It's the same as saying "I want to be able to contact you even if you block me on this app." At best, it's a test of whether a girl likes you well enough to give you her number. At worst, it kills some conversations that could be salvaged.
I know you, the presumably-male reader, don't think of it that way, because you haven't ever dealt with a girl who gets angry at your rejection and texts you through all hours of the night, and calls, and leaves voicemails, and you block her number, and then she makes fake Google Voice numbers, and calls you more anyway. But girls have dealt with guys doing that, or heard of a friend who dealt with it, or read an article in some type of hot girl internet magazine describing it.
You have to put her at ease; you have to escalate only with a legible reason for the thing you're doing, so that it doesn't feel like escalation. Or at least so that it doesn't feel like escalation for the sake of escalation.
And maybe you don't even need to escalate. Consider whether you really need this girl's contact information: if you just plan a coffee shop date for this Saturday at 9AM at Flour, you can go to Flour on your own, and just wait for her to show up. Bring a book. If you don't have her number, it's harder for her to cancel! And if she does flake, then you spent a Saturday morning reading a book in a coffeeshop, which should be pleasant enough that it's a minimal cost to you.
Also, it's almost always better to give a girl your number, rather than ask for hers. It's easier for her to say yes, because it's lower stakes, because you don't gain the ability to text her. Instead of you making two escalations in a row (getting her number, plus also texting her), you escalate by giving her your number, and she escalates by texting you. If she's uninterested, she can accept your number graciously and then not text you, without making her reject you in person. This filter helps avoid wasting your time (and hers!) making idle smalltalk over text, and prevents you from getting mixed signals from someone who is uninterested but also scared of turning people down to their face. Also, you probably will feel better if you don't get a text from someone who has your number than if you text someone and don't get a reply.
If you're talking to her on a dating app, you probably don't need her number for anything. You don't need a number to plan a first date. You can get it, if you want, but a lot of guys incorrectly think of getting numbers as some sort of progress towards getting laid. It feels like a nice intermediate step, a gradual escalation, but it's not. If you are having trouble getting dates, feel free to try getting numbers, just to cheer yourself up. But remember that having a girl's number doesn't get you anything in and of itself, because you already have an open communication channel.
If you are going to ask for a girl's number anyway, against my advice, at least give a reason why you need it. Asking what her number is, in an open-ended sense, can be scary for her, because she'll be wondering why you're so afraid of being on the app. But if you bring up some sort of dog that is being cute near you, and say you wish she could see it, but this app doesn't allow images, you create the reason why the app is insufficient for communication. Then, the natural flow of the conversation leads to her giving you her number — without you having to ask explicitly! It doesn't have to be a cute dog in particular: anything that requires an image or video is good. Bring up your calligraphy, or your interior design, or the flowers you just bought for your table, or something. Finagling the conversation so that your bedroom decor comes up, and then sending her a photo of your bedroom decor, basically guarantees that you're going to get laid. Although mostly it does that because you are the type of person capable of this kind of conversation-finagling, and because your conversation partner was receptive to that.
If you can't come up with anything better, I suppose you could use the tried and true classic of saying that the app is buggy and you're missing notifications. Maybe it's even true. But why would you want to say that? Just use the app until you meet in person, and as the girl is leaving your apartment the morning after your first date, ask her for her number so you can schedule the second one without reminding her that you are still on the dating app where you two met.
---
If anyone has thoughts on this, I'm curious to hear them. Does asking for numbers without some putative reason to be asking actually work out well for you? Are off-app conversations actually useful/important/a big milestone in a converastion for you?
I met my fiancée on a date that was arranged through a messaging app so maybe I'm just biased towards that approach.
This comment would work much better at 10% it current length.
It also doesn't have any claims of evidence. There are zillions of just-so stories that explain what should work, which never fails to get mired down in the distinction between normative and descriptive.
So you'd want to hear men's experiences in whether it works or not.
Yeah, I can appreciate that the comment is long. I think it's really hard to have hard evidence for this sort of thing - imagining trying to set up any experiment that isn't wildly confounded seems really hard! So my hope was that by illustrating lots of example events, I could help transfer my intuition about each of those events, and what would happen in the counterfactual where a party did X or Y in those events. And for that, I felt that I needed lots of examples, because just saying "imagine a guy at a party asking a girl for her number", to me, doesn't really narrow down precisely the dynamics that I am trying to gesture at. Which 10% would you keep, if you don't mind being asked to line-edit someone else's comment?
I was aiming for 100% descriptive, in the "action X is likely to cause outcome Y" sense, which always scans as normative because of the implicit assumption that outcome Y is what you are aiming for. Or at least the writing style above, where I said "you should do X because I'm assuming you want Y". Is that what you mean by the normative/descriptive distinction bogging down the comment?
I've had lots of personal experiences and talked to other people about their experiences and witnesses yet more people trying to flirt/exchange contact info/get dates. So I'm not sure what you mean by the last line: how could I get that? Just send this essay to lots of men and ask them what they think? Running a poll would give me some data but I wouldn't be so sure how to run the poll (ask men what they do? ask men what works? ask women what works? ask women what they like? ask women what they think that would like? ask women what they think other women would like? ask men to try one or the other and report back?) and I wouldn't be sure what to conclude from it.
I think I think of dating as the sort of environment where metis wins out over episteme, so I was focusing on trying to convey lived experience/tacit knowledge, which is why it's fairly hand-wavey and unrigorous. Does that make sense, or do we disagree on more than whether this is the sort of topic best handled by episteme or metis?
This seems very accurate to me, with the standard I've been out of the dating pool for a long time.
A key thing that underlies the actionable advice is that you cannot give off too desperate/needy/loser vibes, and must give off "I like you a bit, but if this goes wrong I'll be 100% fine with it" vibes.
This isn't saying become Tom Haverford/insanely self confident until you are weird, but someone with the balls to arrange to meet at X date/time without gaining a semi-perm way to contact someone is sending the right signal. Same thing with "here's my #, I'm going to head out now, but if you want to meet up Y some time let me know".
Having someone's IRL phone #, if you decide to be a creeper, is a huge annoyance to them. Same thing with address. Showing you're willing and able to operate under some uncertainty and have the confidence to do your post is good.
I've thought of implicitly communicating "I'd like to be a closer friend, but it's okay if you'd rather not" as an important rule for early friendships as well as dating. Somehow it seems like a lot of people don't know this rule, though?
You're right for IRL interactions. Except for the part where you suggest a man offering the woman his number after making plans: women just rarely text or call when they have a man's number.
But for meeting on Tinder: for whatever reason tinder conversations tend to fizzle out, and getting onto whatsapp etc. as soon as possible works much better. I don't exactly know why, maybe it is that going from Tinder straight to a date feels like a big step, whereas Tinder to Whatsapp to a date feels like small steps. But that's just speculation.
I'm very much not trying dates or getting numbers, but I note that when I do, I should just give a number and a plan, and let her act (or not!) on it. Very insightful at least for me, thanks a lot!
I'm guessing the importance of the Android/iPhone debate will vary in importance by economic status. For those of us in PMC/UMC, either one is a $1,000+ expenditure - so the choice doesn't reveal any information. If you're further down the economic ladder, Android phones are commonly offered by prepaid cell providers. So in that milieu, the Android phone may signal poor stability / access to credit.
For men who use android it probably makes sense to get a low end iPhone (currently about $600?) _just_ to use for online dating. He will probably get more dating value out of that then a similar amount spent on tinder or any other app. And it can be used for this purpose for years. FWIW when I was on apps a few years back, using android, I sent out probably 140-150 likes...zero matches on those.
There is reason to believe the apps themselves discriminate against men using android. There was a thread on hacker news not long ago that discussed it, from someone who claimed to have experience working on an app, here is the primary source, just search for android: https://blog.luap.info/what-really-happens-inside-a-dating-app.html
That's where I'm at with it. I think I would prefer to pre-screen out someone who is as vain and shallow as to categorically dislike someone with the wrong phone. Life is so much more than petty trinkets. I can afford to buy a lot of trinkets, but if I choose not to does that change who I am?
I got the same vibe from the model's question about who gets the walk in closet. It's two screenings in one. The obvious screening is that she gets preference in the household (at least in regards to that kind of thing, but it clearly goes way beyond the closet). The maybe less obvious one is that you shouldn't talk to her if you don't have a walk in closet.
She has clearly signaled to me that she and I would not get along. Which I am fine with, even if I were single and looking. Better you get no match than a bad match, and I appreciate the extra information to help make that decision.
I’ve really not had the issues described in the article. I honestly enjoyed online dating while it was happening. I got hinge for the first time 4 months ago and deleted it last month after meeting my now girlfriend.
The way I used hinge was to ask someone on date after the second or third message. They would agree about 50% of the time. It would be totally reasonable to not agree to that so I wasn’t bummed out if they say no.
After my fourth first date I found someone I really got on with, and so far so good !
re: "seeding", afaik that kind of thing was common practice for dating/hookup sites as far back as a decade+ ago and it's probably more shocking in the rare cases it doesn't happen. IIRC one of the things from the Ashley Maddison leaks way back when was that only like 3% or somesuch of the accounts belonged to actual women (granted, the site had a particular niche). The more free/less mainstream the site/app you're using the more you ought to expect it's happening, but I guess it would be big news if a major app was doing it (but also like come on we're well into the age of generative AI now).
Hinge is leagues better than tinder or bumble. More matches, and much higher non-ghost rates on those matches.
It's not at all difficult to get a girl's phone number or social media from a match if they don't ignore you from the get go. Converting from getting contact info to an actual first date is much harder.
There are quite a few first dates where they like me but I don't like them, or I like them but they don't like me. Ones where we like each other are rare.
I paid for Hinge premium for a week when I was visting family for a month, and swiped through every profile in a ~20km radius. The premium went away after a week, but the likes still had gone through, so matches trickled in for the rest of the month. I got a large number of matches from it, but only a couple actually translated to dates. I'd still say it was worth trying. When I returned to the city I was living in for the previous year, I bought premium again, but it was useless and translated to no new matches.
Typing a creative pick up line or even just generically referencing their profile does take mental effort. I'm not sure how much more likely it is to result in a match. But I've found just consistently liking every profile with no comment is better, because it lets me like on 10x as many profiles, which matters more than a higher match rate with fewer likes.
I've tried out a fair few different pictures of myself. I've found just looking normal is best, a weird picture can reduce my match rate to 0. The one truly exceptional line to include in a bio that has translated to many matches and a few dates is saying "I've written fanfiction".
As Bumble's first PM, I must say I got a kick out of this list. There are things here that I can corroborate and challenge based on my own professional experience (to say nothing of un-professional "experience" basically dating at scale before the dating apps worked and I got married to a woman way out of my league).
Would be a fun conversation to have if our NYC paths ever cross.
I was on dating apps a full two years without ever getting a date. My strategy was to text until I felt like there was a possibility we liked each other, then try asking for a date. This always ended in conversations fizzling out and never getting a date.
Once bumble came around I completely changed my strategy. If I matched with a girl and she messaged me, I would set up a date within five minutes. I went on five first dates within a month of trying this. Since getting dates became such low effort, I could easily decide whether a second date was worth the time or not. I ended up finding my wife this way.
Good post. I like seeing these kinds of analyses that intersect relationships and economics. BTW I did a deep dive into why dating apps have become worse over time, and why the ultra-premium $500/month tinder subscription you mention is too high, but also much too low: https://substack.com/home/post/p-137509608
Thanks for the post. Would it be okay for me to share an invite link to a free Discord server dedicated to dating support?
The server attracted regulars from various rationalist-adjacent discord servers (chiefly ACX), where a common topic was how to level up one's dating skills (as an overly analytical nerdy type of person). The idea was to help inexperienced people get advice from more experienced people with similar backgrounds and dispositions, but also to just gather knowledge about how to improve one's chances while dating. Sharing experiences, stories, setbacks and wins, this kind of thing.
Someone on r/slatestarcodex is doing another attempt at a "dating app for nerdy people", posted three hours ago and seems to get some engagement already.
"Not A Zombie: Dating for People with Brains"
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kalf5c/scotts_call_for_a_new_dating_app_notazombie_proof/
I mean, there's also https://cuties.app/ (primarily a TPOT thing, but), https://www.manifold.love/ (which has been revived), and https://dateme.directory/ for just a directory of date-me docs.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/dating-roundup-4-an-app-for-that
On “Who is the best artist: The Weeknd, Future, Drake or Travis Scott?”
Seems the right answer isn’t any of the four, it’s just a filter for “if you like this sort of music at all and can prove it by answering this question coherently.” Any answer would be acceptable but “I only listen to Garth Brooks” would be a negative.
> (If you’re spending that hour mostly chatting with matches, why haven’t you moved to regular texting or other messaging apps with most of them yet?)
I think this is bad advice. Here's something I wrote for a friend a few months ago about why asking for a girl's number usually doesn't get a man anywhere. It's very heteronormative and aimed at male readers, because I was writing it for a straight male friend.
---
I've seen too many men mess up their prospects by asking for a girl's number. "Hey, uh, want to give me your number? Maybe we could do something later."
It's horrible, and counter-productive. Out clubbing, at a bar, at a party, or, most classically, when a guy approaches a girl right as his friends are leaving the bar so that he has an excuse for needing to run away quickly. No girl likes this. This is the relationship equivalent of a job asking you to do a work sample without telling you the salary range for the position. She's going to give you her snapchat, and then "forget" to approve your friend request later.
In person, getting a number after making a plan works better. That way, it feels like you are gaining the ability to handle future logistical problems together, rather than you gaining the ability to contact someone you have no putative reason to be contacting. First, you ask if she's free Thursday for drinks, or Saturday for coffee. Then, if she says yes, you can offer her your number.
On dating apps, "what's your number" is useless. It's a conversation killer. It's the same as saying "I want to be able to contact you even if you block me on this app." At best, it's a test of whether a girl likes you well enough to give you her number. At worst, it kills some conversations that could be salvaged.
I know you, the presumably-male reader, don't think of it that way, because you haven't ever dealt with a girl who gets angry at your rejection and texts you through all hours of the night, and calls, and leaves voicemails, and you block her number, and then she makes fake Google Voice numbers, and calls you more anyway. But girls have dealt with guys doing that, or heard of a friend who dealt with it, or read an article in some type of hot girl internet magazine describing it.
You have to put her at ease; you have to escalate only with a legible reason for the thing you're doing, so that it doesn't feel like escalation. Or at least so that it doesn't feel like escalation for the sake of escalation.
And maybe you don't even need to escalate. Consider whether you really need this girl's contact information: if you just plan a coffee shop date for this Saturday at 9AM at Flour, you can go to Flour on your own, and just wait for her to show up. Bring a book. If you don't have her number, it's harder for her to cancel! And if she does flake, then you spent a Saturday morning reading a book in a coffeeshop, which should be pleasant enough that it's a minimal cost to you.
Also, it's almost always better to give a girl your number, rather than ask for hers. It's easier for her to say yes, because it's lower stakes, because you don't gain the ability to text her. Instead of you making two escalations in a row (getting her number, plus also texting her), you escalate by giving her your number, and she escalates by texting you. If she's uninterested, she can accept your number graciously and then not text you, without making her reject you in person. This filter helps avoid wasting your time (and hers!) making idle smalltalk over text, and prevents you from getting mixed signals from someone who is uninterested but also scared of turning people down to their face. Also, you probably will feel better if you don't get a text from someone who has your number than if you text someone and don't get a reply.
If you're talking to her on a dating app, you probably don't need her number for anything. You don't need a number to plan a first date. You can get it, if you want, but a lot of guys incorrectly think of getting numbers as some sort of progress towards getting laid. It feels like a nice intermediate step, a gradual escalation, but it's not. If you are having trouble getting dates, feel free to try getting numbers, just to cheer yourself up. But remember that having a girl's number doesn't get you anything in and of itself, because you already have an open communication channel.
If you are going to ask for a girl's number anyway, against my advice, at least give a reason why you need it. Asking what her number is, in an open-ended sense, can be scary for her, because she'll be wondering why you're so afraid of being on the app. But if you bring up some sort of dog that is being cute near you, and say you wish she could see it, but this app doesn't allow images, you create the reason why the app is insufficient for communication. Then, the natural flow of the conversation leads to her giving you her number — without you having to ask explicitly! It doesn't have to be a cute dog in particular: anything that requires an image or video is good. Bring up your calligraphy, or your interior design, or the flowers you just bought for your table, or something. Finagling the conversation so that your bedroom decor comes up, and then sending her a photo of your bedroom decor, basically guarantees that you're going to get laid. Although mostly it does that because you are the type of person capable of this kind of conversation-finagling, and because your conversation partner was receptive to that.
If you can't come up with anything better, I suppose you could use the tried and true classic of saying that the app is buggy and you're missing notifications. Maybe it's even true. But why would you want to say that? Just use the app until you meet in person, and as the girl is leaving your apartment the morning after your first date, ask her for her number so you can schedule the second one without reminding her that you are still on the dating app where you two met.
---
If anyone has thoughts on this, I'm curious to hear them. Does asking for numbers without some putative reason to be asking actually work out well for you? Are off-app conversations actually useful/important/a big milestone in a converastion for you?
I met my fiancée on a date that was arranged through a messaging app so maybe I'm just biased towards that approach.
This comment would work much better at 10% it current length.
It also doesn't have any claims of evidence. There are zillions of just-so stories that explain what should work, which never fails to get mired down in the distinction between normative and descriptive.
So you'd want to hear men's experiences in whether it works or not.
Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, I can appreciate that the comment is long. I think it's really hard to have hard evidence for this sort of thing - imagining trying to set up any experiment that isn't wildly confounded seems really hard! So my hope was that by illustrating lots of example events, I could help transfer my intuition about each of those events, and what would happen in the counterfactual where a party did X or Y in those events. And for that, I felt that I needed lots of examples, because just saying "imagine a guy at a party asking a girl for her number", to me, doesn't really narrow down precisely the dynamics that I am trying to gesture at. Which 10% would you keep, if you don't mind being asked to line-edit someone else's comment?
I was aiming for 100% descriptive, in the "action X is likely to cause outcome Y" sense, which always scans as normative because of the implicit assumption that outcome Y is what you are aiming for. Or at least the writing style above, where I said "you should do X because I'm assuming you want Y". Is that what you mean by the normative/descriptive distinction bogging down the comment?
I've had lots of personal experiences and talked to other people about their experiences and witnesses yet more people trying to flirt/exchange contact info/get dates. So I'm not sure what you mean by the last line: how could I get that? Just send this essay to lots of men and ask them what they think? Running a poll would give me some data but I wouldn't be so sure how to run the poll (ask men what they do? ask men what works? ask women what works? ask women what they like? ask women what they think that would like? ask women what they think other women would like? ask men to try one or the other and report back?) and I wouldn't be sure what to conclude from it.
I think I think of dating as the sort of environment where metis wins out over episteme, so I was focusing on trying to convey lived experience/tacit knowledge, which is why it's fairly hand-wavey and unrigorous. Does that make sense, or do we disagree on more than whether this is the sort of topic best handled by episteme or metis?
This seems very accurate to me, with the standard I've been out of the dating pool for a long time.
A key thing that underlies the actionable advice is that you cannot give off too desperate/needy/loser vibes, and must give off "I like you a bit, but if this goes wrong I'll be 100% fine with it" vibes.
This isn't saying become Tom Haverford/insanely self confident until you are weird, but someone with the balls to arrange to meet at X date/time without gaining a semi-perm way to contact someone is sending the right signal. Same thing with "here's my #, I'm going to head out now, but if you want to meet up Y some time let me know".
Having someone's IRL phone #, if you decide to be a creeper, is a huge annoyance to them. Same thing with address. Showing you're willing and able to operate under some uncertainty and have the confidence to do your post is good.
I've thought of implicitly communicating "I'd like to be a closer friend, but it's okay if you'd rather not" as an important rule for early friendships as well as dating. Somehow it seems like a lot of people don't know this rule, though?
You're right for IRL interactions. Except for the part where you suggest a man offering the woman his number after making plans: women just rarely text or call when they have a man's number.
But for meeting on Tinder: for whatever reason tinder conversations tend to fizzle out, and getting onto whatsapp etc. as soon as possible works much better. I don't exactly know why, maybe it is that going from Tinder straight to a date feels like a big step, whereas Tinder to Whatsapp to a date feels like small steps. But that's just speculation.
I'm very much not trying dates or getting numbers, but I note that when I do, I should just give a number and a plan, and let her act (or not!) on it. Very insightful at least for me, thanks a lot!
The answer is: get a haircut and go to church.
Speaking as a hot girl dating someone from church.
For women, read Not Your Mothers Rules
I'm guessing the importance of the Android/iPhone debate will vary in importance by economic status. For those of us in PMC/UMC, either one is a $1,000+ expenditure - so the choice doesn't reveal any information. If you're further down the economic ladder, Android phones are commonly offered by prepaid cell providers. So in that milieu, the Android phone may signal poor stability / access to credit.
It's presumably also an US centric issue, the rest of the world mainly uses whatsapp or wechat
It's more than that - iPhone men are cool/normal, android men are weird/nerdy
Does anyone know where the red card rule comes from? (Claude couldn't figure it out, at least with my prompt.)
Sure why not, I've got a profile on cuties.app here: https://cuties.app/profile/harry-sniffnoy-1730759798669x571414465727442940
And a shorter version here: https://hjaltman.github.io/dmd/
For men who use android it probably makes sense to get a low end iPhone (currently about $600?) _just_ to use for online dating. He will probably get more dating value out of that then a similar amount spent on tinder or any other app. And it can be used for this purpose for years. FWIW when I was on apps a few years back, using android, I sent out probably 140-150 likes...zero matches on those.
How would the choice of phone affect matches prior to texting?
There is reason to believe the apps themselves discriminate against men using android. There was a thread on hacker news not long ago that discussed it, from someone who claimed to have experience working on an app, here is the primary source, just search for android: https://blog.luap.info/what-really-happens-inside-a-dating-app.html
Why would I want to a date a woman who would discriminate against someone for having a non-iphone phone?
That's where I'm at with it. I think I would prefer to pre-screen out someone who is as vain and shallow as to categorically dislike someone with the wrong phone. Life is so much more than petty trinkets. I can afford to buy a lot of trinkets, but if I choose not to does that change who I am?
I got the same vibe from the model's question about who gets the walk in closet. It's two screenings in one. The obvious screening is that she gets preference in the household (at least in regards to that kind of thing, but it clearly goes way beyond the closet). The maybe less obvious one is that you shouldn't talk to her if you don't have a walk in closet.
She has clearly signaled to me that she and I would not get along. Which I am fine with, even if I were single and looking. Better you get no match than a bad match, and I appreciate the extra information to help make that decision.
I’ve really not had the issues described in the article. I honestly enjoyed online dating while it was happening. I got hinge for the first time 4 months ago and deleted it last month after meeting my now girlfriend.
The way I used hinge was to ask someone on date after the second or third message. They would agree about 50% of the time. It would be totally reasonable to not agree to that so I wasn’t bummed out if they say no.
After my fourth first date I found someone I really got on with, and so far so good !
How experienced were you with in-person dating before you tried Hinge?
Okay but not very frequent at all lol
re: "seeding", afaik that kind of thing was common practice for dating/hookup sites as far back as a decade+ ago and it's probably more shocking in the rare cases it doesn't happen. IIRC one of the things from the Ashley Maddison leaks way back when was that only like 3% or somesuch of the accounts belonged to actual women (granted, the site had a particular niche). The more free/less mainstream the site/app you're using the more you ought to expect it's happening, but I guess it would be big news if a major app was doing it (but also like come on we're well into the age of generative AI now).
My experience:
Hinge is leagues better than tinder or bumble. More matches, and much higher non-ghost rates on those matches.
It's not at all difficult to get a girl's phone number or social media from a match if they don't ignore you from the get go. Converting from getting contact info to an actual first date is much harder.
There are quite a few first dates where they like me but I don't like them, or I like them but they don't like me. Ones where we like each other are rare.
I paid for Hinge premium for a week when I was visting family for a month, and swiped through every profile in a ~20km radius. The premium went away after a week, but the likes still had gone through, so matches trickled in for the rest of the month. I got a large number of matches from it, but only a couple actually translated to dates. I'd still say it was worth trying. When I returned to the city I was living in for the previous year, I bought premium again, but it was useless and translated to no new matches.
Typing a creative pick up line or even just generically referencing their profile does take mental effort. I'm not sure how much more likely it is to result in a match. But I've found just consistently liking every profile with no comment is better, because it lets me like on 10x as many profiles, which matters more than a higher match rate with fewer likes.
I've tried out a fair few different pictures of myself. I've found just looking normal is best, a weird picture can reduce my match rate to 0. The one truly exceptional line to include in a bio that has translated to many matches and a few dates is saying "I've written fanfiction".
As Bumble's first PM, I must say I got a kick out of this list. There are things here that I can corroborate and challenge based on my own professional experience (to say nothing of un-professional "experience" basically dating at scale before the dating apps worked and I got married to a woman way out of my league).
Would be a fun conversation to have if our NYC paths ever cross.
I was on dating apps a full two years without ever getting a date. My strategy was to text until I felt like there was a possibility we liked each other, then try asking for a date. This always ended in conversations fizzling out and never getting a date.
Once bumble came around I completely changed my strategy. If I matched with a girl and she messaged me, I would set up a date within five minutes. I went on five first dates within a month of trying this. Since getting dates became such low effort, I could easily decide whether a second date was worth the time or not. I ended up finding my wife this way.
Good post. I like seeing these kinds of analyses that intersect relationships and economics. BTW I did a deep dive into why dating apps have become worse over time, and why the ultra-premium $500/month tinder subscription you mention is too high, but also much too low: https://substack.com/home/post/p-137509608