Tinder, Azar, Her, Hinge, match.com, meetic, Ok Cupid, Plenty of Fish, and The League are all owned by a single company.
The ratio of women to men on their dating apps are also wack.
Good lord they own basically all the major ones.
Also all the different “X People Meet” apps, but no Linux People Meet? 😭 /s
We meet here bro 😘
I met my girlfriend on IRC, we’ve been living together for 7 years now. She was trolling people with goatse pics and we started talking about philosophy and poetry etc and then it turned out that she’s a super cute canadian girl. This is usually not the story we tell people when they ask how we met.
Holy shit, I didn’t think that was even possible. I can’t let myself start thinking that’s a possibility, I just can’t. That could lead to disaster.
This is usually not the story we tell people when they ask how we met.
Honestly, it’s a way better story than telling people you met on a dating app. And the ones that would be weirded out by the story are probably not people you’d want to spend a lot of time around
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
Hey no kink shaming in the guild!
That’s the most crazy story i have read and the best one probably
Also, THIS is how you are supposed to meet people online not with dating apps, dating apps just suck and make you choose the most sexy “option” and maybe their interests maybe
A girlfriend that trolls people with goatse? lucky bastard
You’d never guess if you just met her, she’s a 5’2 ballet dancer but she knows everything about various serial killers. People are complex, we have many sides.
This makes total sense!
I met my partner on Tinder in 2014, 3 years before consolidation in 2017. When I was using it it was only a joint venture with Match Group
I also had some success before 2014 on okcupid (initially owned by IAC which used to contain Match Group and has since separated from match group but Match group kept OkCupid) and POF (sold in 2015 to Match Group)
Makes sense to me why I had a way different experience on dating websites back when I was single compared to my single friends now.
How is that not an anti-trust issue? Each one started as an independent company trying to add value by bringing something new to the table, and they bought them all up to eliminate the competition and enshittified them all with the same profit-gouging algorithms.
Not to mention the concerted effort they made to make in-person dating a social taboo so that everyone literally depends on the dating apps to find potential partners.
Back before I gave up on dating, when I was still on reddit, I can’t tell you how many times I heard the same advice. “Don’t approach people in person, nobody wants to be bothered. Just use the apps where you know they want to be approached.”
That with the systematic minimization of the shittiness of the apps, and the victim blaming “just work on yourself bro, you must be a shit person if you can’t find a partner, so you’d find a partner if you could just stop being a shit person.”
Looking back, I wonder how much of that was astroturfing by the Match Group marketing department…
Fun fact: you can probably guess the ethnicity of Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Match Group.
What’s this “Helen Keller wasn’t real” meme? I’ve never heard (or seen) it
Neither has she, lololol
I don’t get it.
Is it because she’s dead?
She was blind and deaf but yes she did in 1968.
Just a dumb conspiracy theory where people either think a) she wasn’t actually blind and deaf, or b) she didn’t actually write the books she wrote and shrugs everything she achieved.
https://www.distractify.com/p/is-helen-keller-real-conspiracy
Goes perfectly well to match the stupidity of a populus who commonly has “likes to go to church” in their profiles. OP must live somewhere MAGA-ey.
Years ago, a friend of mine once had: “Seeking partner skilled in armed combat for the coming apocalypse. Must not be averse to cannibalism” as their bio.
Got 'em a couple DMs I think
Yeah that sounds like a fun person
Probably just messaging fake accounts/bots to make it look like women use the app but then real women get the flack for it
Yeah, that’s what they do. People don’t notice that? I’ve known several guys that worked this kind of jobs on and off when really strapped for money. Pretending to be women online. Unethical AF, of course, but this is more widespread than you could possibly imagine. And it’s not hard at all to get hired. I feel sorry for the dudes falling for it, though.
And they’re fake hikers and travelers too. I met somebody irl who said one of their interests was eating food but they just go to the places for the vibes and not for the food. Whereas I’m the complete opposite, I would go to a crack den for the best food.
A date I had said their hobbies were walking and hiking among other things. Our 1st date was at a local park with a 20 step stair case that took her out… It was my first exposure to this bizarre labelling that goes on here.
There wasn’t a 2nd lol
Humans are just animals at the end of the day. This is all a sexual display of fitness. Hiking and traveling tell people you’re physically and financially fit. You can move around no issue. You are social. You are socially and physically healthy.
They lie a ton and show pics of hiking from 5 years ago and act like they can still do all that. Or they never could and the pics are deceiving… Regardless, it’s just a game all genders are playing to show sexual fitness. It looks like carbon copies because it’s the best way to communicate “my body moves well and I can afford luxury”.
joke is on them.
I can’t afford luxury shit, but I can ride my non luxury bike like 150 miles in a day.
“my body moves well and I can afford luxury”
Swipes right
I love walking and hiking, but having to walk uphill takes me out, too.
I had a firdt date with someone who loved hiking. I asked her if she wanted to go on a trail i like. I was worrued that it was maybe to long and steep, or maybe even to short. When we met, she was way bigger than i expected. I told ger that we could do something else, but she insiated. She was super slow and i was worried sge’s gonna pass out. She asked me if how far we have to go, when i could still see my car. Similar thing happened when i went on a vike ride with someone who was really into cycling
a vike ride
I feel like this could be really uncomfortable because of the helmet horns.
I invited a girl out on a bike ride and she literally did pass out. Was able to revive her and walk her home.
She never talked to me again.
swipes right
Best Chinese food I’ve had was in a legit city basement.
The best food is usually in places like that too. My home city has this literal hole in a wall mexican place. You know it’s good when it’s also a grocery store and nobody speaks good English except for the kids who are the wait staff. Best fucking food I’ve ever had and I’m gutted because they closed down 6 months later and I don’t know if they moved or went out of business 😭😭😭
There’s this bengali place I love that is also a grocery store. It’s so epic
I have a Pavlovian response to seeing shelves of spices and dried peppers in unlabeled bags in a language I can’t read because of this. If I’m already hungry and I walk in to a new place and see that suddenly I’m ravenous.
amen brother.
best places to eat are the places with no white people. whitey has no taste.
but sucks that usually such places don’t last and get replaced with generic white person food.
No need to get all racist, mate
“Hellen Keller wasn’t real” is an immediate swipe away from a profile. I don’t care if they’re joking or if they’re actually a nut job conspiracy theorist. If the latter, obviously we’re not gonna vibe, and if the former, that entire joke/line of thinking is prefaced on ableism and the idea that a deaf and blind woman could not have accomplished what she did, not to mention the erasure of a prominent socialist, suffragist, and activist. I fucking hate that joke.
This is the first I’ve ever heard about it, and I’m so confused
It started as a joke, and now there are actual people who believe that she was either not a real person, or that her accomplishments were faked. People with disabilities are already assumed to be lesser than able bodied people, and this particular trend is stripping away one of the most prominent examples to the contrary. It is also erasing one of the most prominent examples of a famous socialist woman in American history, and a southern American socialist woman at that. Her story is amazing, but more importantly, she is historically significant. She is an example to so many people, and she has been liberal-washed for a century, and now she’s being erased entirely. It’s disgusting.
I guess this is another moon landing flat earth sovereign citizen thing.
it’s a nothingburger that people online like to tilt at.
because they are all brave Knights errant, who are rescuing damsels or something.
where you around for Bonsai Kittens? lots of people lost their shit over that thinking it was some legit thing.
This is not at all comparable to bonsai kittens. Bonsai kittens were not at all based in reality. Hellen Keller was an actual, real human person who is being erased by idiotic conspiracy theorists. She was a disabled woman who overcame profound disability to become an incredibly example to millions of people, while also being a highly intelligent political thinker. She has been liberal washed for a century, and now she is being erased entirely. It’s not a funny little joke to disregard the accomplishments of someone who represents something that profound to people who are routinely discriminated against. The woman grew up at a time when disabled people were locked away in hospitals, homes, and attics.
Do you have any idea how utterly insulting it is to see people saying she could not have done what she did, or that she did not even exist, simply because they cannot imagine that a woman with her disabilities could learn language? As if to say that disabled people should be outright rejected because their experience is different from an an able bodied persons?
This has nothing to do with “rescuing damsels,” and the suggestion that it does is insulting in and of itself. The woman is dead, she cannot rescue herself, she deserves the recognition that she has lost. When she is taught in schools, it’s an abbreviated, liberal washed, abridged few paragraphs, when the reality is that she is one of the most important figures in the American disability rights movement, and one of the most prominent examples of a socialist woman in US history, especially southern American US history.
dude, idiots think bonsai kittens were real and were going around outraged about it.
just like idiots think helen keller isn’t real.
you are taking idiots way too seriously. please go outside and enjoy the sunshine and stop being ragebaited. you are not saving the world by being angry on the internet at stupid people. all you are doing is inflating your own ego and making yourself miserable.
A VERY prominent and UNAPOLOGETIC socialist. The way history has defanged her and turned her into a simpleton who learned to speak is an absolute appalling insult to the strong, principled woman she was.
Doesn’t matter had sex.
at least “designed to be deleted” part of it is truthful. Nothing else to be done with that garbage program.
Lol it’s so enshitified it’s designed to be deleted
Dating apps should be publicly funded like a kind of public utility. And private dating apps heavily regulated and prevented from advertising. Because currently they making profit by keeping you single.
Like water and air, love should not be for profit.
We need 3rd spaces, online dating is just worse in general. People meet at trading card places and card shops because that’s just where people hang out, but that doesn’t exist anywhere else really besides bars.
People are becoming more isolated and more online, it’s way easier to see if you like someone (and you’ll be exposed to many people) if they happen to be in your vicinity rather than typing in text on a dating app.
is that what you tell yourself?
you really think a government dating app is going to help get you laid?
I think it’s more that the entire business model of dating apps means they profit from people staying single and looking, not finding long term relationships.
Public ≠ the government.
I think they think an app that isn’t being run by a corporation for profit would help them get laid. In theory the government could run and app for this purpose but I don’t think it would work well in practice at least not in the US.
Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Plenty Of Fish and others are owned by one giant company called Match.com. You are not ugly, a monopoly just puts you down the pile by algorithm to prompt you to pay to increase your chances of more likes (that’s not to say that making your profile look good doesn’t matter). There are independent dating apps like Coffee and Bagel and Bumble, but either those apps don’t have many people or copying Match’s anti-consumer behaviour like Bumble does.
Can Lemmy be used for dating?
Any platform can be used for dating
Sweet home Alabama, where the sky is so blue…
I have read about people trying to use LinkedIn for dating, and I feel like that’s a red flag. Those men should probably be quarantined.
Everyone on LinkedIn should be quarantined.
Oh yikes
There’s Alovoa… an open source platform but it’s even less densely populated than Lemmy
I bet someone did just that and succeeded
That really depends: are you looking for a nerdy man who lacks social skills or are you t4t and super online? If so, yeah probably. If not, feel free to try
I am a nerdy man who lacks social skills looking for a nerdy woman(ish person) who lacks social skills.
He’s got a point about carbon copy profiles, they all blur together after a while, and it’s very difficult to find something interesting to talk about in a lot of them.
“fostering men until they find their forever homes.”
I see this one at least 10 times a day.
I know it’s meant to be positive but gives me horror to me, like Hansel and Gretel
it means she isn’t accountable for her actions that drive men away. you are smart to be afraid.
and on the first date she will tell you how all her exes are awful and it’s your job as her next boyfriend to fix all their mistakes. you basically start out the relationship with her in emotional debt, and you’ll never pay it off with the interest rate she is charging.
I have a suspicion it’s one of the default prompts. Or they’re just asking an AI or something.
I’d love to hear someone who thinks Helen Keller wasn’t real describe what they think the late 1800s was like.
I haven’t heard of her so I guess I can start with my guess of what the 1800s was like.
Napoleonic wars leaving millions dead.
People pushed into overcrowded towns and cities, fuelling disease outbreaks like cholera.
Potato famine and British government approach of “lol don’t care” resulting in over a million dead.
I mean, it is a very reasonable concern. Upon hearing Helen’s story, it’s very easy to see how it might have been a Clever Hans situation. At surface level, Helen Keller’s story sound a lot like Clever Hans.
The difference between the two is that Keller’s claims actually stood up to scrutiny. Hans could never perform his feats in independent and controlled testing. Keller was able to function and communicate independently with people for decades. But if they are not aware of this history, I can see why people are skeptical.
Dating apps are the worst, the absolute worst, way to meet people. I met my husband in a chat room and that’s fucking awful right? Dating apps are worse. Go on blind dates, set your friends up, go and scream in the middle of a park, all of those are better than dating apps. Humans don’t work like catalogues.
go and scream in the middle of a park
I see you use the bird method
If I see someone attractive screaming in a park they probably have my attention.
Dating apps are brutal for men, especially 4channers.
They’re terrible for women as well, just in a very different way.
What is it they say, dating apps for men are like being in a desert looking for anything they can drink.
Dating apps for women are like being in a swap; plenty to drink but none of it good.
No, the problem with dating apps for women is that there are tons of “regular” guys looking for a relationship, but because of the gender ratios there are also quite a few “top 5%” guys relative to the number of women. Guys that are very attractive and have great charisma, the kind you’d see on the bachelorette or similar shows.
What ends up happening is that most women will match with these guys (the same way men will swipe right on every supermodel looking woman just in case). So you have relatively few guys dating pretty much all the women they can, because our society says that sleeping with a lot of women if you can is a great way to show you have value. And for these men there are plenty of fish in the sea and no reason to settle down so they get labeled “fuckboys”. Fundamentally these men would normally be completely inaccessible to most women, but the gender ratios on dating apps create this situation where average men don’t get any matches and average women are only dating fuckboys who don’t want a relationship. Then they leave the app and quit dating for a bit out of frustration.
In a normal setting average men and women pair up over shared interests and goals, and fuckboys date supermodels (over their shared focus on aesthetic beauty and charisma I suppose).
Obviously this is an overgeneralisation. But it’s not exactly a gendered issue since if you flip the genders you’d other still get the same dynamic. The problem on these apps is the gender ratios. You can’t have health matchmaking when there are 10 men for every woman (or vice versa).
This wreaks of incel talking points. You’re literally doing chads and stacys here. I think the real problem may be more things like this:
Women tend to have realistic expectations and seek out partners their own age on dating sites. Men of all ages try to get with 22 year olds. 40 year old men who are bald, 50 lbs overweight, and with no real hobbies will message women in their 20s expecting a response. And they themselves will have a long list of weed-out criteria. No woman nearly as obese as he is. No women with children. No women over 30.
The data shows that women are much more reasonable in their partner expectations than men. This is likely what is largely responsible for the difference in gender ratios on the platforms.
Women on dating apps rate 80% of men below average and men rate 50% of women below average. You can say women are more reasonable but it sure doesn’t look like it.
What I said has nothing to do with chads and Stacey’s. It’s an outcome of an almost 4:1 gender ratios on dating apps. The outcomes are the same in anything that’s badly matched. 4:1 jobs to employees means employees will jump ship at the slightest hiccup seeking greener pastures with very little getting done. The opposite ratio is of course worse with employees being abused in every way like in every recession.
Any time the ideal ratio is 1:1 and you throw it off that hard you’re going to have dysfunctional human behaviour because we’re not designed to have so many options. We evolved in deep scarcity and a key aspect of our survival was optimizing our choices. When we have no choices, or too many choices we are dysfunctional. Fuck even too many brands of shampoo is stressful to choose from.
I’m not judging anyone or stereotyping anyone here. The same would happen with reversed genders. It’s just dysfunctional human behaviour because of shitty algorithms.
It’s actually not an incel talking point. If I remember correctly, this came out of plenty of fishes Data dives on their populace. They basically showed that some top X percentage of men got the vast majority of messages and interactions on the platform and that really emboldened the incel talking points. Also remember they did some dives on race and basically found out that Indian men and black women are matched at vastly lower rates than anyone else.
Anyway, I’m on team Go do things that interest you and never install dating apps. The people that work on these apps have a vested interest in keeping you an unhappy customer forever. So why would you pay them or give them your data? Because I mean if I was them I would make sure a free user never got his dick wet except in rare instances so that he would tell other people to get my app.
Helen Keller wasn’t real
wat
Hellen Keller went with Goku and Sonic to take The Ring to Narnia for Zordon.
Deaf, blind, and socialist? She’s just woke propaganda
Dating apps belong to a trash can. Hobby is the best place to find a partner. Go to a local meet up to play board games, hike, cycle, jam, improv, debate or whatever. The only way left in the modern world
Hobby is the best place to find a partner.
no it fucking isn’t. I can 100% guarantee the nerds reading this that your wife isn’t going to appear in the progressive metal moshpit, the netrunner tournament or the climbing center…
well I mean, that last one has a chance of happening, but don’t hit on women where they exercise for fuck sake. Also, Disregard females, acquire ascents.
I’m into ham radios. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve seen a woman?
I mean… I don’t think you’ve seen your ham radio buddies either.
Yeah… “Join a hobby group” is the the go-to answer for people who are devoid of ideas but still want to feel helpful.
Honestly, I think there’s something to be said for going back to “little old lady in the community who matches up young singles.”
A yenta? In this economy?!?!
Matchmaker matchmaker…
Maybe there’s some geographical or cultural differences, but I can say for sure that hobbies is a perfectly normal place to meet women in my area of the US. I have dated plenty of people I’ve met through hobbies.
Also I think there’s a difference between picking up a woman at a gym vs picking them up at a running or biking meetup. I think just like with anything else, there are inappropriate ways to do it, but it’s not socially unacceptable from my understanding whereas gym pickups really are.
I think just like with anything else, there are inappropriate ways to do it, but it’s not socially unacceptable from my understanding whereas gym pickups really are.
yes. I agree with this nuance
I can say for sure that hobbies is a perfectly normal place to meet women in my area of the US. I have dated plenty of people I’ve met through hobbies.
the thing to help young men reading this realise isn’t that hobbies are unacceptable, it’s to be wary of going to male dominated spaces and expecting that to count as socialising that will lead you to finding a partner. The promise of feminism of equal gender participation in human affairs still has not been fulfilled.
Yeah I think it also must be said that you should befriend women in the hobby. I’ve seen guys who go into hobby spaces and befriend the guys and hit on the women and it doesn’t work out. But when you’re friends with the women you may find yourself connecting with one, or being set up by your friends.
hit on women where they exercise for fuck sake
Women can say fuck off to me for themselves
Depends where you live. In my current city there are almost no women going to those kinds of meetups and the city I grew up in is so dead there just aren’t any events like that.
Date men then
Walking, cycling and making jam are all things I do on my own tough
But together is fun
Flea markets, anyone? There are several big ones in my area, occurring regularly. I go several times a year and it’s always so much fun when I do. And it’s very easy to chat people up.
If I found a girl in my garden I would assume she was fae and be most suspicious.
I met my soon to be wife on a dating app. You might think from that opening sentence that I’m about to extol the virtues of dating apps. I am not. They are garbage, so I agree the trash can is the best place.
This was during covid lockdowns, so no social opportunities, and I had recently moved to a new area and didn’t know anyone nearby. So seemed the only option, terrible as it is. And yeah it worked out for me, but that’s beating the odds. It was an unpleasant experience and was thrilled to be done with it. But, it might be a similar situation for others. No better option seemingly available.
That said, prior to that, I attended a lot of meetups via meetup.com and had a fair bit of luck dating through that. And regardless of if I met someone or not at any given thing, I had fun.
