You Could Be Flirting On Dating Apps With Paid Impersonators (qz.com)

Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin sheds some light on the world of paid impersonators on dating apps like Tinder. Here's an excerpt from the report: Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas -- a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential "Opportunities." For every phone number I get, I make $1.75. I'm what's called a "Closer" for the online-dating service ViDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). Men and women (though mostly men) from all over the world pay this company to outsource the labor and tedium of online dating. The matches I speak to on behalf of the Texan man and other clients have no idea they're chatting with a professional.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that these ghostwriting services exist. Tinder alone produces more than 12 million matches a day, and if you're a heterosexual American, you now have a one in three chance of meeting your future husband or wife online. But as e-romance hits an all-time high, our daily dose of rejection, harassment, and heartbreak creeps upward, too. Once you mix in the vague rules of netiquette and a healthy fear of catfishing scams, it's easy to see why someone might want to outsource their online-dating profile to a pro, if only to keep themselves sane. But where does the digital social assistant end and the con artist begin?

Comments

no subject

[Anonymous Coward]

first post! ... and on the other side there is someone paid too. So two paid persons do a date chat via someone else's dating profil. Dating virtualization?

cool

[Anonymous Coward]

how is this /. worthy?

Re:cool

[umghhh]

It could be that this is a friendly advice to /.ers how to get laid. I gave up long time ago and prefer other paid services but there are still some naive among us that long for real romance with real humans (or what they think are that). If you are sane male with some selfrespect you will not go out there hunting - especially if you read all the nonsense on social media about how you should not be a 'predator' because females allegedly do not want it. Well guess what - confused females may not want it but will be utterly disappointed if you do not try. I do not see any way out of the dilemma other than paid services. I think it is even worth a study - how unhappy and lonely people can get in 'liberal' and 'just' society. Other aspect of this - this seems to be an areas not easily to be controlled by AI not now at least.

Re:cool

[AmiMoJo]

This isn't really news though. I remember a guy sued one dating site for using employees posing as potential matches. He even went on first dates with a few.

Then there was the Ashley Madison leak where it turned out that a significant proportion of their female members were bots.

Re:cool

[umafuckit]

Well guess what - confused females may not want it but will be utterly disappointed if you do not try.

"Confused females"? And the rest of the sentence... This is why things aren't working the way you'd like.

Re:cool

[Hognoxious]

It's news. If you've been in a coma for a quarter of a century.

Grrrrrr Wooof! WOOF!

Re:cool

[K. S. Kyosuke]

As multiple women told me, "women don't know what they want and they won't stop pestering you until they get it". Maybe that was it?

Re:cool

[msnash]

Shut up

Re: cool

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this slashdot worthy?
This here is exactly the kind of job opening up for all those people put out of work by automation...
You'll be pimping for those not put out of work by automation.

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

This isn't really news though.

Yes it is. This is totally different from what you describe. Both of your examples are of the site using fake profiles, which is well known (although I never heard of them hiring people to go on actual dates, and I am skeptical whether that really happened).

TFA is describing members hiring people to impersonate them. So they are actually looking for a match, but are paying someone else to go through the tedium of sending introductory inquiries, and the back-and-forth chit-chat before exchanging contact info.

Re: cool

[Anonymous Coward]

We are all confused. People who see themselves as social engineers are attempting to turn back thousands of years of evolutionary programming over the course of a few generations. They see what they think is a problem - people aligning with gender roles - and want to play God and change it.

Men are pre-wired to be protectors. They have a body that produces more muscle, fast twitch reflexes and a Testosterone fueled aggressive streak that allows them to power through difficult and dangerous tasks.

Females are pre-wired to be healers, helpers and nurturers. They sew up their mate's wounds, have a body that can grow, incubate and feed children.

Males tend to be very competitive. Not just to be the best, but to find their plave. Females tend to be more cooperative. These statements are not just true among humans, but among other mammal species as well.

So, it is okay for people in this and the last few generations to be very confused. Males and females want what their wiring says they should want... but societal indoctrination tells them to ignore it.

Some of this is good. We have had basic laws that protect the weak from the strong since the dawn of civilization. Nowadays we see something deeper: an attempt to deconstruct maleness and femaleness. The final results of this long-running experiment won't be known for a long time. But the current and next generations are the guinea pigs.

Re:cool

[AmiMoJo]

Damn, I should have read TFA.

Re:cool

[Dread_ed]

Whoever modded that as flamebait is a shitstick. It's a joke, not an attempt to start a flame war. Some of you are so thin skinned you might as well wear you organs on the outside. Faux rage at everything. You miss the forest because foliage might be a racist insult to green people who haven't been discovered yet. It's disingenuous.

It is incredibly funny, specifically for the fact that this trait is common to children, women, men, humans of all genders, and those of anti-gender, dogs, cats, pretty much every mammal. And for the fact that to some of us, women are particularly effective at getting what they want. That makes it easier to observe in the case of male-female relationships, but its a truism for all nonetheless.

A less funny quote this reminded me of: "This world is designed to provide you with everything you want. The only problem, you have to know what it is." Points to the same issue. People are generally uninformed about themselves, what is most important, what defines them and their lives.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

This is indeed news to me and something that should be clamped down on hard. Having a lot of money already represents 90% of what women on those sites are looking for, hiring somebody else to go through the tedium of online dating for you, is just disgusting.

Dating sites being unethical isn't news, but wasting time on people that are outsourcing the work is not something that most people expect.

Personally, those introductory inquiries aren't the problem with dating sites, it's how low the quality is for women and how ridiculous their requirements are. I doubt most of them would agree to date Mr. Right or Prince Charming because somebody better might come along.

Re: cool

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not really the case though. Men are indeed providers and protectors, but women are basically just a source of babies and incentive for the men to not just settle for enough for themselves.

Women throughout history have contributed very, very little to human existence other than the aforementioned babies. Men produce a surplus that the women take for themselves and are usually ungrateful bitches about it if it isn't completely to their liking.

The current situation where women want to take all of men's jobs, but don't want to actually share the proceeds is very, very troubling as it could lead to very real issues down the line when those resources become unavailable.

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

This is indeed news to me and something that should be clamped down on hard.

Why should it be clamped? Who is going to do the clamping? The site? How can they know if it is happening or not? The government? You have got to be kidding?

but wasting time on people that are outsourcing the work

The are not "wasting time". The people hiring impersonators (2/3 men and 1/3 women according to TFA) are seriously looking for a match. They just don't have time to send 200 inquiries to get 20 responses, and then engage those 20 responses in some chit-chat to get 10 phone numbers that lead to 5 dates, one of which is "the one". That is an extremely time consuming process, especially if each inquiry is customized to the target's profile.

it's how low the quality is for women and how ridiculous their requirements are.

I see. So you are perfect, but all the women are just not good enough for you, and that's their fault. Maybe you should join an Incel support group.

Re:cool

[Ol Olsoc]

This isn't really news though. I remember a guy sued one dating site for using employees posing as potential matches. He even went on first dates with a few.

Then there was the Ashley Madison leak where it turned out that a significant proportion of their female members were bots.

The problem was and is that most women find most men unattractive for one reason or another. Apparently on Tinder at least, the stats on attractiveness are that men rate women on a curve that centers areoud 50 percent. Which we would expect.

Women on the other hand, rated over 80 percent of men as unattractive. But how do you keep men coming back when only a very few of them ever stand a chance of landing a date? And then you would have a lot of women competing for a very small pool of men. (they are anyhow, but you need new men to rank) This might have been exacerbated by the recent manprovement initiative, where women are now allowed to call men out who do not fit their high standards.

Since an overwhelming majority of men are deficient and unattractive, you have to tease them in order to get them to stick around. Enter the Bots and employees posing as interested others. Just enough to keep the undateable unattractive men rising to the bait.

Re:cool

[Ol Olsoc]

This isn't really news though.

Yes it is. This is totally different from what you describe. Both of your examples are of the site using fake profiles, which is well known (although I never heard of them hiring people to go on actual dates, and I am skeptical whether that really happened).

TFA is describing members hiring people to impersonate them. So they are actually looking for a match, but are paying someone else to go through the tedium of sending introductory inquiries, and the back-and-forth chit-chat before exchanging contact info.

Hard to imagine the level of laziness required to hire someone to get you dates. As I recall back in the day, the run up to dating a woman was fun.

Re:cool

[Ol Olsoc]

As multiple women told me, "women don't know what they want and they won't stop pestering you until they get it". Maybe that was it?

Wow - Flamebait? This joke has an element of truth, which might be why it got blasted.

A huge problem with the pairing interactions between men and women is that in general, then male asks for the interaction, and the woman accepts or rejects.

I watched a very interesctin lecture by a man talking to women on why many women seem to pick the "Chads" of the world, aggressive handsome men who are self absorbed, and not men who would be considered good for long term relationships.

He used the rule of thirds. A third of men will never approach a woman, a third might, but are reticent about it, and a third are the aggressive sort.

The first group is obvious - no go. The second group might, but have a tendency to be friend zoned. The agressive guys have no problem with approaching women, and can be quite charming about it.

So women after a while expect aggression, and the guys in the second group get friend zoned, mainly because they are too timid, and probably for evolutionary reasons, the women respond to the more aggressive and charming men. I emphasize evolutionary because https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

Hard to imagine the level of laziness required to hire someone to get you dates.

RTFA. They don't get you a date. They get you a phone number. After that, you are on your own.

As I recall back in the day, the run up to dating a woman was fun.

This isn't "back in the day". With on-line dating, a man is lucky to get a 5-10% response rate to initial inquiries. If your time has value, paying someone else to make the inquiry and filter the results totally makes sense. Hand crafting inquiries, when you know that 95% of them are going to be ignored, is not "fun". It is a tedious chore. It is only fun once you are talking to a real person, and that still happens.

Re:cool

[AmiMoJo]

Those numbers only apply to tinder-style speed dating though. On such sites the ratio of men to women is 40:1 or worse, so naturally women can be more selective. It also ignores that women tend to value other traits as much or more than looks, traits that a photo can't convey.

This flaw extends to all dating apps/sites. They are extremely superficial and it hurts many men's ability to find partners on them. We really need to find a better system.

Re:cool

[lucm]

I gave up long time ago and prefer other paid services

You would assume that in a society where offering the wrong kind of wine to a lady is considered sexual misconduct (ask Aziz Ansari), prostitution would be a booming industry to cater to the needs of men weary of the dark cloud of fake metoos. But look what happened in Seattle where regular customers of escort services were shamed, or how the FBI has taken down backpage because there were ads for prostitution. The only safe space for single males nowadays is gay saunas and pornhubs, which may not be up to everyone's taste.

The only amusing part is that as a side effect of this socially driven emasculation of males, more and more heterosexual females are struggling to find non-limp dick males so they end up pouring billions in the dildo industry.

Porn and rubber dicks, people, that's the pot of gold at the end of this feminazi rainbow.

Re:cool

[lucm]

I remember a guy sued one dating site for using employees posing as potential matches.

I know for a fact that in cheap labor countries there are huge call centers crammed with people pretending to be potential matches for western dating sites/apps, and asked to make the courting process last as long as possible to keep the "customer" coming back to the ad-bloated service. The hilarious thing is that it's not even the same employee who keeps the conversation going, they just pick it up from the log and move it forward.

I think we need a new form of turing test to determine if we're talking to the same person online.

Re:cool

[Aighearach]

When you're mad that people didn't laugh, just stop talking. Until after you've had a full night's sleep.

Re:cool

[Aighearach]

This doesn't surprise me at all, I wouldn't expect you to get any better than that.

What I was told was, "She isn't going to tell you what she wants, she expects you to understand her well enough to know already."

Just because somebody simplified the saying for you doesn't mean that reality is that simple. It only means she was trying to understand what advice you'd know how to make use of when she considered her words.

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

I think we need a new form of turing test to determine if we're talking to the same person online.

We already have that: A face-to-face meeting.

You already read each others profiles and exchanged messages. An extended back-and-forth conversation is not going to give you much more info. Just ask for a simple meet-up at Starbucks or Jamba Juice. If the answer is "no", then move on to the next prospect in the queue.

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

Those numbers only apply to tinder-style speed dating though.

Actually, the 80-20 numbers come from OkCupid.

It is not just a sign that women are pickier, but also that THEY CAN'T DO MATH. They were not asked to judge if the men were "unattractive" in an absolute sense, but whether they were below the median. The men did it correctly, putting 50% above the cutoff and 50% below.

Re:cool

[lucm]

Just ask for a simple meet-up at Starbucks

I don't think you have done a lot of online dating. Here's the thing: the vast majority of people are not worth a trip to Starbucks, just like a vast majority of candidates for a programming gig are not worth calling in for an interview.

Behind a cute pic and a casual "hey there lol omg did you watch the latest GoT" there could be some seriously disappointing entity, like a vegan pinterest addict who took a day off to cry when Clinton lost, or an over-the-top party girl who has the constant greasy cough of regular drug smokers. Unless you're in for a quickie it takes a lot of screening to get to someone that has no major mental or cultural defects.

Re:cool

[AmiMoJo]

That blog post is a fascinating insight. Note how women tend to rate men unevenly, but that doesn't seem to affect the rate at which they message them.

I also wonder how much of it is just down to bad photos.

Re:cool

[ShanghaiBill]

If someone has major defects that they didn't include in their profile, they are not going to tell you about it in an online message either. Do you really think you are going to learn about her raspy cough and bad breath by exchanging messages? A F2F meeting is a far quicker way to narrow the candidate pool. A quick meet-up for a $5 cup of joe is not a big commitment.

Re:cool

[Ol Olsoc]

Hard to imagine the level of laziness required to hire someone to get you dates.

RTFA. They don't get you a date. They get you a phone number. After that, you are on your own.

Ther's a difference with not much distinction. Care to analyze me grammer as well? Telling me to Read the Fucking Artical is a tad rude, me hearty. Chillaxe.

As I recall back in the day, the run up to dating a woman was fun.

This isn't "back in the day". With on-line dating, a man is lucky to get a 5-10% response rate to initial inquiries. If your time has value, paying someone else to make the inquiry and filter the results totally makes sense. Hand crafting inquiries, when you know that 95% of them are going to be ignored, is not "fun". It is a tedious chore. It is only fun once you are talking to a real person, and that still happens.

And if his time really has value, his best bet is to have the person fmor the service go on the date as well. Or eliminate all of that expensive time spent dating and simply buy a mail order bride.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is going to do the clamping?

This guy, of course.

Re:cool

[nasch]

the vast majority of people are not worth a trip to Starbucks

Propose a meetup somewhere you might want to go anyway. From what I hear most people go to coffee shops a lot (I'm not most people) so you're not even spending much extra time.

Re:cool

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Nobody simplified it for me; your phrasing is simply not being used around where I live.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no guarantee that male attractiveness is evenly distributed on a subjective 6 point scale (zero to five). This article's data indicates that it probably isn't, indicating that women are indeed more selective. The middle rating (2.5) was "medium" not "the median".

If I were you, I'd worry less about women's math skills and more about your own reading comprehension.

Re:cool

[minstrelmike]

Back in the day there was a better response rate?
Perhaps every person ever asked out on a date face-to-face goes out, but I don't think so. Seems like face-to-face asking results in maybe a 30% success rate, and while that is higher (and your own success rate might be higher but for the same reason), in face-to-face interactions, you've already passed on quite a few people.

But to me this hearkens back to the days of John Alden and Myles Standish, 1620 CE in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. That might have been before the days of the internet. I can't remember if Shakespeare also had a similar plot in one of his plays.

Re:cool

[Dread_ed]

Not mad. You brought that from your own internal frame of reference. Also, down modding someone incorrectly is way different than people not laughing.

Equivocation and false attribution aside, I can't seem to find anything to what you wrote except an exhortation about sleeping well at night. I do, and will continue to do so. Thank you for your concern. I wish you health, happiness, and good rest as well, sir.

Cheers!

Re:cool

[Aighearach]

No man, you're whining about mods, you should really not try to defend that like an idiot. You got mad because you down-modded and your joke wasn't funny, fucking deal with it.

Whining about getting downmodded is exactly the same as getting mad because people didn't laugh at your joke.

You're new here. You're being an idiot. So figure it out. Moderation is the right of the moderator, when you're wrong and whine about their choice that's just you not understanding moderation. Don't be that guy.

Re:cool

[Dread_ed]

Wow, ok...We will do this your way.

This is how I definitively know, without any doubt, that you are the idiot in this interaction:

I didn't post a joke. I wasn't down modded. You still haven't figured this out. You are going to have to go back and look at the post history to figure out how much of an idiot you are. I will do my best to help you realize this in my post, but I fear there is little hope for you. You are so bankrupt of real intelligence, adaptability to facts, and the flow of interactions between humans that the best outcome for you and the rest of the world involves a headstone with your name and today's date on it. Would that fate were so capricious that she, for once, could bless us all so infinitely in that way.

My motivations for commenting on the down mod were not related in any way to me being mad because IT WASN'T ME THAT WAS DOWN MODDED, YOU COMPLETE AND TOTAL IDIOT! You were so eager to jump on someone, so self righteous and self justified in your attack, that you couldn't even stop to read the nick of the person that you were replying to. You could say that no one is that stupid, and you would be right, for once, in your whole life. It takes a special kind of stupid, combined with a powerful and rancorous degenerate character, to plow mindlessly ahead, being at once completely unfounded in your accusations, wrong on every possible metric, completely self absorbed, and unnecessarily rude. You are, truly, in a class by yourself.

Further proof that you have overflowed a stack internally and your imagined internal world is executing code where reality is supposed to be: My user ID should give you an indication of how long I have been on this site. It obviously hasn't. I'm not new. Are you sure you are ok?

After considering all of the incomprehensible fuckups in your communication with me, I think you may have had a stroke. I am having a hard time conceiving of a circumstance where I could make such series of colossal mistakes, blunders, and oversights which reveal such deep internal flaws, shortcomings, absences, and voids in my character, intelligence, emotional stability, perception, and processing ability, without referring to brain pathology.

What I am trying to say, and I am sorry, I should use words you can understand, is this: There is a very real possibility that there is something seriously wrong with your brain. Get yourself checked. Please contact a responsible adult and ask them nicely to take you to the doctor. If the MRI of your cranium doesn't reveal a seeping artery, a blood clot, a tumor, an abscess, or cyst on your prefrontal cortex, or widespread atrophy and degeneration I will be surprised.

Fortunately, if it turns out that you are just such a worthless piece of shit that your behavior pattern matches exactly with someone who has a serious head injury or dementia, you won't even care. If you aren't pathologically broken in some way on a physical level, the only other answer to your behavior is as result of solipsistic narcissism, possibly complicated by borderline personality disorder. Plainly, you do not have the capacity to give a fuck about anyone other than yourself, and even that is questionable. You proved it here undoubtedly. All you wanted to do was lash out at someone, to demean them, for some unknown internal payoff. The motivation, desire, and impetus to do this is so deeply rooted within your own psyche, such a product of your internal world, and so divorced and unrelated to the other person and the outside world, that it was entirely unnecessary that you got the right person. In your rush to get the rush that you get from attacking people when you feel justified in doing so, you couldn't even be bothered to get their name.

Think about that. You didn't even get the name of the person you intended to insult and demean, and as a result, you attacked someone else for no reason at all. That right there is proof of what kind of person you are. Now, go sit with that for a while and decide if your c

Re:cool

[Aighearach]

I stopped reading when you claimed to have not told a joke.

If you write more words than I did, at least spend the time to comprehend my words before spewing.

When you accuse people of not having a sense of humor, you are engaged in the idiocy of complaining that people didn't laugh at your jokes. It doesn't need a lot more parsing than that; you can expect in that situation to receive that response, and it is not an inaccurate response. Nobody cares about your take on the semantics; don't whine about other people's sense of humor, and don't whine about mods. Easy peasy. See, now did you really need to spew all that?

Re:cool

[Dread_ed]

"by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) Alter Relationship on Saturday April 28, 2018 @04:20AM (#56518309)
As multiple women told me, "women don't know what they want and they won't stop pestering you until they get it". Maybe that was it?"

What's my Nickname? Who wrote the post with the joke in it?

The only joke here is you, and everyone in my office is laughing their ass off at how incredibly vapid you are! Thank you for being so obtuse. It's beautiful! I thought you were trolling, but no. You can't fake your kind of stupid.

LOL! Thank you, i'm dying!

PS: read to the end of my previous post, you missed the best part. Also, as much as we enjoy laughing at you, please seek medical attention, your brain is not working right.

Weird

[war4peace]

I did this once, non-professionally, when a couple American friends came to visit me last year. One of them gave me his phone and asked me to help him talk to Romanian women on Tinder. While that didn't lead to getting his dick wet (due to lack of time, they only spent 3 days at the seaside), it was fun to talk to them as him and realize how much locals change their attitude and willingness to talk and meet if the person on the other end is an American.

Eventually he got his dick wet through means of a professional :) but that's offtopic.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're telling us he has Skene's glands on his penis? Pics, or it didn't happen.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how this is rated informative... Sometimes I wish we had a "too much information" rating option.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

got his dick wet

Sounds like someone's been watching The Wire (season 3 or 4?) recently?
What's wrong with using the phrase "got laid?" It's fewer syllables, it's less obscure.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably simply some literal translation from Romanian language.

Re: Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

'Got his dick wet by a professional'? Does that mean a waiter spilled his drink on his lap?

Re:Weird

[arth1]

What's wrong with using the phrase "got laid?" It's fewer syllables, it's less obscure.

It reflects back on puritan values, where it was unthinkable to have sex other than lying down in bed.
"Had sex" is even fewer letters.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not, some morons say that in the US, probably other places as well.

Personally, if we're going to bother with a euphemism, perhaps something a bit less nasty would be appropriate. If you're going to go gross, you might as well just say he fucked a hooker.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between TMI and yawn you know.

Re: Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^ Spotted the stereotypical /. basement-dweller...

Re:Weird

[ShanghaiBill]

"Had sex" is even fewer letters.

It is still a clumsy phrase, combining the passive voice, an irregular inactive verb, and a noun. Sex should be something you did, not something you "had".

English needs a simple transitive verb for this. Of course we have "fuck" but that can't be used in polite company, and is often perceived as derogatory. "I fucked your sister last night" sounds offensive even when said by her husband.

Re: Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

It means he was either hooked up by a matchmaker or he gave up and hooked up with a hooker. I'll assume the former.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

"I fucked your sister last night" sounds offensive even when said by her husband.

That's your opinion.

But given that you are a consistently idiotic fucktard, your opinion means nothing.

Re:Weird

[arth1]

English needs a simple transitive verb for this. Of course we have "fuck" but that can't be used in polite company, and is often perceived as derogatory. "I fucked your sister last night" sounds offensive even when said by her husband.

There's copulate and fornicate, but they are bound to get you even stranger looks. Depending on where you are, "shag" might be a less loaded word than "fuck" and "screw".
Then there's just "do", but it makes it sound like a chore.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

it was fun to talk to them as him and realize how much locals change their attitude and willingness to talk and meet if the person on the other end is an American.

That's slightly confusing. I'm a native English speaker not from the USA (although I do hold a US passport), so that puts me firmly in the "better than USA" category in most tests. Why do I not get this treatment?

Re:Weird

[war4peace]

He said it, I learned it. We're not shying away from being explicit 'round here.

Re: Weird

[war4peace]

I'll ask him next time, who knows, they might have done that role-playing thing too.
Thanks for the idea though.

Re: Weird

[war4peace]

The latter.

Re:Weird

[war4peace]

Maybe you're looking at the wrong tests?
Now seriously, I should have replaced "American" with "Westerner".

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: The phrase also implies that it was his first time.

And water might be wet...

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: The sky is blue, and I'm being told that water might actually be wet.

Everything on the internet is fake!

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case though he needs his genitals put in a blender for this deceit

Math doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flirts for 10 min with each woman. Makes $1.75 *if* he gets the number. Even with a 100% success rate, that's $10.50 per hour. Not much of a "profession".

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Desprez]

There's no reason he can't be flirting with multiple women at once in a single 10 min block.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Hognoxious]

In the old days that was called two-timin', and you could get horsewhipped for it.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are we to judge if they prefer getting whipped while flirting with multiple women?

Re:Math doesn't work.

[zifn4b]

In the old days that was called two-timin', and you could get horsewhipped for it.

It's no different than interviewing for multiple jobs simultaneously. It increases your odds of success. Those who don't do it are just purposefully hurting their prospects on their moral and ethical high horse.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes

The author disagrees with you or one of you doesn't understand the meaning of "every ".

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

The term is "plate spinning" and women are notorious for it. Between the multiple men they'll be messaging, they'll likely have other "just friends" which are more like "just in case" friends that will get to do most of the work of being a boyfriend, but won't ever become a boyfriend unless she hits the wall and can't find anybody else.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[Aighearach]

If somebody ever comes in to interview and they take a phone call to do another interview at the same time... I'm going to honestly mean it when I thank them for their time, because I'm going to get at least 5 minutes of solid belly-laugh out of it.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[zifn4b]

If somebody ever comes in to interview and they take a phone call to do another interview at the same time... I'm going to honestly mean it when I thank them for their time, because I'm going to get at least 5 minutes of solid belly-laugh out of it.

No one would ever do that. That's a bad strategic maneuver. Everyone knows that when you're a job candidate you must appeal to the employer's grandiose ego and worship the ground they walk upon by making them think they are your #1 choice. After all, they blessed us with the opportunity to be considered for employment. Everyone plays the same game. Women all make you think you're their #1 choice and so do employers but the reality is they are considering multiple "candidates" for the "position" too. It's a game. Play to win.

Re:Math doesn't work.

[mentil]

In the old days that was called 'dating'. After you chose the most likely suitor and decided to be in an exclusive relationship with them, that was called 'going steady'. It's only 'two-timing' if you're supposedly going steady.

moD do3n

[Anonymous Coward]

you all is to let fiwle was opened

No all he needs is a fiddle and a rooftop...

[_Sharp'r_]

Hodel: Well, somebody has to arrange the matches, Young people can't decide these things themselves.
Chava: She might bring someone wonderful----
Hodel: Someone interesting----
Chava: And well off----
Hodel: And important---

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a match, Find me a find, catch me a catch
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Look through your book, And make me a perfect match

Chava: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, I'll bring the veil, You bring the groom, Slender and pale.
Bring me a ring for I'm longing to be, The envy of all I see.

Hodel: For Papa, Make him a scholar.

Chava: For mama, Make him rich as a king.

Chava and Hodel: For me, well, I wouldn't holler
If he were as handsome as anything.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a match, Find me a find, Catch me a catch, Night after night in the dark I'm alone
So find me match, Of my own.

Tzeitel: Since when are you in a match, Chava? I thought you had your eye on your books.

(Hodel chuckles)

Tzeitel con't: And you have your eye on the Rabbi's son.

Hodel: Well, why not?
We have only one Rabbi and he has only one son.
Why shouldn't I want the best?

Tzeitel: Because you're a girl from a poor family.
So whatever Yenta brings, you'll take, right?
Of course right!

(throws scarf over her head, imitating Yenta)

Hodel, oh Hodel, Have I made a match for you!
He's handsome, he's young!
Alright, he's 62.
But he's a nice man, a good catch, true?
True.

I promise you'll be happy, And even if you're not, There's more to life than that---
Don't ask me what.

Chava, I found him.
Won't you be a lucky bride!
He's handsome, he's tall, That is from side to side.
But he's a nice man, a good catch, right?
Right.

You heard he has a temper.
He'll beat you every night, But only when he's sober, So you'll alright.

Did you think you'd get a prince?
Well I do the best I can.
With no dowry, no money, no family background
Be glad you got a man!

Chava: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, You know that I'm Still very young. Please, take your time.

Hodel: Up to this minute, I misunderstood, That I could get stuck for good.

Chava and Hodel: Dear Yenta, See that he's gentle
Remember, You were also a bride.
It's not that
I'm sentimental

Chava and Hodel and Tzeitel: It's just that I'm terrified!

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Plan me no plans
I'm in no rush
Maybe I've learned
Playing with matches
A girl can get burned
So, Bring me no ring
Groom me no groom
Find me no find
Catch me no catch
Unless he's a matchless match.

(Lameness Filter is Lame - Longer lines than in the original courtesy of the not enough characters per line filter.)

Re:No all he needs is a fiddle and a rooftop...

[Anonymous Coward]

NO, YOU are the lame in this situation. No one wants to read that crap you posted.

You should kill yourself now, you worthless piece of subhuman waste.

Slashvertisement

[SpzToid]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...

I suspect some dating app do this too

[Anonymous Coward]

I have more than once got nothing , no response, (as a man this is nearly routine - too many men for women), then i stop coming for a few day, and strangely enough somebody contact me - to never answer me. And lest you say the problem is me, I have no problem getting answer or free dating app. This happens only on paying dating apps which ask you for money for each contact. Now add 1 + 1 ....

Re:I suspect some dating app do this too

[umghhh]

Not sure about other jurisdictions but in EU companies are obliged to write it in terms of service if they use staff to animate the discussion. Guess what - most of them do.

Funny, but not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

So essentially all the mass-market "apps", be it "social networks", "dating apps", or free-to-play (pay-to-win) "browser games", end up more or less scammy deliberate timesinks.

In the case of dating apps, it's actually not surprising that males --the ones that get rejected most-- are now turning to paid impersonators. Females were fake from the get-go. So you end up with paid impersonators chatting with paid impersonators. Hm.

Chatbots

[sanf780]

On colleague of mine showed me some talks with chat bots on Tinder. It was interesting to see they can fool you through the first stages of the conversation. However, at some stage you notice something is off. At that point my colleague started foul mouthing, something that the bots do not usually respond properly. It was a fun read.

Every once in a while

[93 Escort Wagon]

I run across a story that makes me glad I’m an old guy... and this is one of them. I don’t know how you young’uns navigate these waters. I had a hard enough time just asking my now-wife out, way back in the day - and that was before all these peripheral complications existed.

Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!

Re:Every once in a while

[Bearhouse]

Well, I'm an older guy too, and totally agree with you (for once).
After my divorce some 15 years back I put myself on the market the only way I knew worked for me - I hit the beaches, the bars and social events.
Been happily re-married now with a kind, smart, funny and really beautiful lady.
We did not meet on-line, but in a jazz-dancing class.

I don't believe in this online dating crap; get out from behind the screens, girls and boys, and hit the floor. Learn to dance, you'll love it. Top tip - people tend to make love the way they dance....

Re:Every once in a while

[cascadingstylesheet]

I run across a story that makes me glad I’m an old guy... and this is one of them. I don’t know how you young’uns navigate these waters. I had a hard enough time just asking my now-wife out, way back in the day - and that was before all these peripheral complications existed.

Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!

Same here.

My wife and I still laugh about the humorous "list" of requirements she passed around to her friends, when she asked them to steer someone her way.

These days, some fool would claim they had algorithms to actually try to fulfill the list ...

Re:Every once in a while

[zifn4b]

I don't believe in this online dating crap; get out from behind the screens, girls and boys, and hit the floor. Learn to dance, you'll love it.

I guess you haven't heard of the latest new dance craze? It's called the touch screen finger tap boogie. All the cool kids are doing it.

Re:Every once in a while

[oakgrove]

Can I get in on this?

*Ahem* Back in my day, most people met through mutual friends/acquaintances. Somebody knew somebody that was just "perfect" for you and you dated and dated until something clicked. At least that's one version.

These days, alas, if I were young single and lookin', I'd just write a Python script to automate the whole thing until I ended up finding a real live girl. I know. Romantic.

Re:Every once in a while

[arth1]

Learn to dance, you'll love it. Top tip - people tend to make love the way they dance....

Wot, you think I make love with bells on my legs wielding a stick and handkerchief?

Re:Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

I run across a story that makes me glad I’m an old guy... and this is one of them. I don’t know how you young’uns navigate these waters. I had a hard enough time just asking my now-wife out, way back in the day - and that was before all these peripheral complications existed.

Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!

Yeah, back in the day you had friends who would introduce you to "someone you might like to meet." This is especially useful because friends and their friends tend to have intelligence compatible with yours, and that's a big issue for some of us. (There are boob men, leg men, booty men, and brain men.) If you're looking for more than a one-nighter, the singles bar scene leaves many of us "beam me up Scotty, there's no sign of intelligent life here."

I had one such introduction 45 years ago. Six weeks later, being hopelessly stupid over her, I told her "You do know that you are going to marry me don't you?", wanting to know if she would say "it's been great fun, but I really don't see this going anywhere," or laugh and say "well, we'll see about that" (what I earnestly hoped for.) Instead she simply said "yes." I'm still hopelessly stupid over her.

Re:Every once in a while

[PPH]

I'd just write a Python script

She seems nice. But it's just empty space in her head.

Re:Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that we don't have much of a choice. Here in the shithole that is Seattle, nobody talks to anybody else in public, which means you don't really have the option of going up to somebody you might like and starting a conversation.

So, folks, have taken it online. The problem though, is with those Amazon-holes being so over paid, it's extremely hard to compete on the money front for most of the people who were born here. And Amazon rarely, if ever, hires locals to do any of the well-paying jobs.

Getting dates isn't necessarily that hard, but finding women that are interested in things other than money is rather tricky. Doesn't seem to matter how well the date goes, or how closely the guy matches what she claims to be looking for, it's never really enough because there's a long list of other potential dates in her queue. And that's for women in their 30s, I can't imagine how women in their 20s ever get laid as I doubt they're any more willing to commit than the banging up the wall ones are with so many more choices and so much more time before hitting the wall..

Re:Every once in a while

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Lol, same here. Yes, I'm an old guy, happily married, and I shudder at the thought of going back into the dating pool these days. I'd fuckin' hate it and I'd probably just not participate.

Dating seems much, much shallower and more commoditized now, but that may just be my perspective.

The enormous expansion in potential mates brought about by apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, etc has actually worked against the people that use them- they're buried in way, way too many choices.

The mechanics of using the app wipes away the perceived "value" of a person...because there are another 500 or 1000 or 50,000 possible partners just a swipe away.

For example, he or she seems perfect but doesn't message you back in 5 seconds? Hi ho, discard them like a used tissue and you're off to click on the next one.

Dating has been reduced to the level of a crappy video game. It seems very sad to me.

Re: Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Top tip - people tend to make love the way they dance....

Yikes, I hope that's not true! Based on what I've seen at many junior high dances, most guys would be going left-right at the shoulders. ;)

Re:Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, this practice in general is OLD and everyone fucking complains about it even though that is absolutely the only way to get user engagement on a dating site. I used to run a dating site and commented here once that I had to create fake user accounts(no interaction, just photos and a name) to get users to even sign up. Lots of people here got butt-fucking-hurt about it and tried to wreck my site in the process. In retaliation I decided to setup a site completely devoid of user accounts to show how long it would take to even get 100 user accounts. I left the experiment running for a year and got a whopping 8 accounts. Before when I created 1000 fake accounts I got thousands of users to the point that the fake accounts didn't matter any more. After only getting 8 accounts, I just shut down the site because my point had been made.

Whiny dipshits are gonna whine like dipshits. You can't have it both ways, people. I'm not super keen on the paid impersonators thing but I know exactly why they have to do it. Without a few fake accounts, you will get nothing and neither will any users. You have to generate interest to get people interested.

Seriously, would this be any different if the dating site just offered the first 1000 users free lifetime accounts for interacting with, say, 100 people regardless if they're interested in them, instead of paying them? You'll find people will soften their tones when you change it even though technically people are getting paid.

Re:Every once in a while

[93 Escort Wagon]

Well, I'm an older guy too, and totally agree with you (for once).

If we (all) were in agreement on everything all the time, it would be pretty boring - even though the disagreements can sometimes be maddening.

But I’m glad to hear we found something we agree on!

Re:Every once in a while

[93 Escort Wagon]

Rimmer, is that you?

Re:Every once in a while

[ShanghaiBill]

If you go to a bar you are going to meet people that like to drink and hang out in bars. I have zero interest in doing either.

If I go on-line, and filter for "technical/scientific/engineering" in the "profession" field, I can see pages and pages of nerdy women. Just to be sure, I ask for a code sample before the first meet-up.

Re:Every once in a while

[oakgrove]

Ha! I love it!

Re:Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Neat, so you think it's better to choose your life partner from one of the dozens of people who happen to be within eyesight than the millions within your city.

Re:Every once in a while

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never married and rarely dated. A friend of mine met his wife on eHarmony and asked me why I don't join such a service.

I told him, "If I want to be ignored by women I can do that at the bar!"

Vote Hillary in 2020!

[HRC2020]

Every man, woman, and child wants to date Hillary. Those beautiful Eyes. That smart Demeanor. I'm with her.

Vote Hillary in 2020.

Re:Vote Hillary in 2020!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheâ(TM)s the most qualified caddate in history. Itâ(TM)s her turn! If you donâ(TM)t vote for her in 2020 you hate women.

Re:Vote Hillary in 2020!

[lucm]

Forget 2020, it will be a landslide reelection for Trump (biggest landslide in history). But #Oprah2024 could happen, if she doesn't get caught trying to steal purses again.

Wrong audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds do not flirt, nor do they date. They stalk, harass, molest and attempt rape. Ladies, if a nerd is after you shun him and ask for help. Do not become a victim. #metoo #nerdcultureisrapeculture #saynotonerds #neveravictim

Cyrano de Bergerac

[nospam007]

Chloe should be named Roxanne then.

Old News

[DaMattster]

I think this has been going on for many years. This can't possibly be new news as I am sure there have been paid impersonators for match.com and others.

Re: Old News

[reanjr]

Professional matchmakers have always existed for the wealthy. To me, the news is that these services are moving downmarket. Dating apps make it easy to automate much of the time that used to go into building (real life) social networks, keeping in touch with a stable of clients or opportunities from both sides, etc. Now it's just one dude with mad texting skills taking on ten clients in an hour. The price point has dramatically changed.

My impersonator may be chatting with yours

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't know what happens if two employees impersonate speakers at both ends of the conversation.
And what happens if it is the same employee at both ends? That could lead to some fun situations.

Re: My impersonator may be chatting with yours

[Anonymous Coward]

You up?

I'm so glad I'm married

[DalM]

Being single has always sucked. Being single in the internet age sucks even more than ever. Whenever I hear stories like this, I remember how happy I am to have gotten married before all this crap.

Re:I'm so glad I'm married

[Anonymous Coward]

I have friends that have sent out hundreds and hundreds of messages and have never received a reply My old roommate when he was unemployed treated it like a full time job. He met one girl in person in five months of hard work. He lied about his height (he's 5' 10" instead of the 5' he claimed) so she told a cop that was in the same Tully's that he inappropriately touched her to get rid of him.

Re:I'm so glad I'm married

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the worst when you're in 40s and divorced. The problem being that there are a lot of women on sites in late 30s/early 40s who have the attitude that they aren't necessarily super keen on finding a man, they just have a dating profile up based on the one in a million chance that Mr Prince Charming will contact them.

I.e., "if a guy doesn't completely blow my socks right off with the first message, then I'm not even interested in taking a chance."

And this isn't me sour grape-ing it, I've had multiple female friends tell me this is their approach and there has been research done on it establishing it is quite common. With divorced single moms in particular, well they've gotten used to not having sex and they've got kids that keep them busy so they aren't lonely for companionship.

The problem is of course the people that do blow your socks off the first time you lay eyes on them, funnily, they are frequently terrible people (and I mean that of both men and women). They blow your socks off because they are exciting high-drama types but those do not necessarily make for good long term partners.

Nothing new here - was same on French "Minitel"

[Bearhouse]

I once visited a potential software agent in France. They had a good accounting suite for IBM S/36 at the time, but I could not figure out how they had such an impressive office complex based on their small customer base.

So, I got the technical manager sauced-up one evening and its turns out the basement was full of "Minitel rose" (pink, i.e. pron) servers. This was the 1980s, and it seems that online "Johns" were spending hours - and hundreds of bucks - every month hammering away on a tiny keyboard and getting all steamed-up over scrolling black and white horny text on an equally small screen. Rather sad.

The joke was, the "best" online "sexters" were.....men! Easy money, working from home. Kinda like Chinese theatre I guess - women's roles are traditionally played by men, since "only a man knows how a woman is supposed to react". Equally sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/c...

Re:Nothing new here - was same on French "Minitel"

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story bro.

Missing from dating apps.

[kurt555gs]

Why don't profiles on dating apps have user reviews like restaurants on Yelp or similar? It really would be helpful. Things like [ 40 lbs more than her picture ], or [ put's out on first date ] would be great to know. I really would like to know why this feature is missing?

Re:Missing from dating apps.

[tomhath]

On the internet, the women are men and the children are FBI agents.

Re:Missing from dating apps.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be sexist and promptly attacked by the SJWs. Doing it the other way around, the first woman to find your profile interesting would tear you apart in her review. Just to keep other women from considering you.

Re:Missing from dating apps.

[mentil]

Because people with undesirable reviews would delete/abandon their account and make another. Or jump to another dating site/app, if they're unable to do that. Also, someone with many reviews would be implied to date lots of people, therefore one's chances of something long-term are lower than with someone who only has a few.
Also, the reviews would be filled with endless drama/bitching/doxxing/overly personal stuff/creeper posts and it'd be impossible to moderate. At best you'd get some kind of star rating in a few categories.

obCasablanca

[cascadingstylesheet]

I am shocked, shocked that there might be deception on online dating sites!!

{your duped user winnings sir}

Thank you.

I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I had a Match.com account for 21 years. I paid for it for about 10 years of that. I'd go to cancel and magically someone would start messaging me. Nothing ever came of it. I joined OKCupid and Plenty of Fish within a year of their launch and, by last February, I was to some degree active on 10 dating services.

I've read books about how to game the systems. I've paid photographers and tried to get feedback on my dating profiles from tens of friends, acquaintances and even total strangers. I tried all manner of strategies in making first impressions, created multiple profiles and basically I've spent two or three hours a day trying to meet someone for over two decades.

I'm not messaging models. I'm not holding anyone to any ridiculous standard; my sole filtering is that my partner be childless (which, admittedly, is much more difficult as I am now a person in my forties). But across platforms and years of effort, I might get a reply to one out of approximately 300 messages sent on a dating site. One out of ten of THOSE might lead to an ongoing conversation.

I've been on seven dates in my entire life.

And before anyone says that I need to work on myself: I have over the last 20 years gone from an obese BMI to a healthy one. I do work out and dress like an adult. I have solid academic achievements, a good job and a life-long interest in fine arts. I can carry a conversation. I'm not terribly attractive but I'm also not ugly. Fundamentally, I would call myself unremarkable but certainly not unacceptable.

I did finally outsource Tinder, Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel to a sympathetic friend, albeit mostly because I refuse to agree to Facebook's terms of service. I paid for her to get a new phone in exchange for her work on my behalf. It didn't help. No better luck was had.

I cannot think of an activity less rewarding. Dating sites seem to be actively hostile to almost everyone who uses them. Women are barraged with harassment. Ordinary guys might as not even exist. No one is happy with the state of affairs, but I'm not a person who is going to do well in a bar or other traditional meeting-space and I already teach adult education, I don't see what other choice might be available. I have a great deal of free time now that I don't spend time on dating sites. I get a lot more reading done, but I also have a lot more anxiety at the parts of life that I have failed to experience. There doesn't seem to be a way out of this particular loop. I wish I could have those many thousands of hours and all of the hope of my life back.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. You can meet woman whenever you shop for groceries. Chat them up. Join a yoga class. Chat them up. Do other activities where woman congregate. Chat them up. Above all else, be causal, not desperate, and shut the fuck up about yourself. Woman *like* going to movies and dinner and shit...just ask them. Like not until youve casually talked several times first, usually. The worst that they can do is decline. Again, be casual. Its no big thing to you. That's your fucking mantra. Literally.

You can do this.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

You think all that's bad? Try being married.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow I am sorry to hear that. But from what I see it's not all that uncommon, I know several guys who have given up on dating. Some because they couldn't get dates some who couldn't maintain a relationship. Some gave up just to maintain their sanity.

My daughter had a lot of trouble dating, she would get asked out about once a semester in college. She's not great looking, but good enough. She makes a lot of money as an engineer, was a competitive ballroom dancer, could manage money very well. She seems like a pretty great catch to me. It took a while but fortunately she's happily married now.

Not to diminish your situation, but I put this all in the category of general loneliness. While I'm married we don't have much of a social circle. My wife and I are very concerned about when I retire. It could be a very scary time. I hear there are even "dating sites" for friends now.

Life can be quite cruel and sometimes things are just bad luck. I do admire your accepting situation and trying to move on as best you can. I wish I had something comforting to say other than you're not alone.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I have married friends.

They'd say you dodged a bullet.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

but you still need to work on your self. Now hear me out, you just need to work on your self confidence. Dating is a numbers game, as in the more people that you talk to, the more that you will find to date. The other problem is that you are more than likely coming off as someone who is hunting for a date. This is the biggest problem in the dating world as most people want to feel special and how can they feel special if they feel like they are interchangable with the next person you try to talk to.

You said you were spending 2-3 hours a day looking for a date, why not spend those 2-3 hours on something you enjoy and while you are doing that, try to make friends with various women (especially if they have boyfriends). If you are just trying to be friendly and not trying to angle towards a date then it generally relaxes the entire conversation from the get go. The other benefit is that women who are into something have friends who are into that same thing, and there is nothing better than a personal recommendation from a friend.

Stop trying and work on your self more, and by that i mean your enjoyment of life by your self. Stop looking for a date and enjoy the single life because the confidence of being single and enjoying your life is what will garner interest from other people. Show the world that you are complete on your own and people will want to be around you, then you will meet more people and be able to network better to find the woman that you will want to spend all of your time with. Remember people looking for mates are looking for someone to complement their lives not complete it.

I wish you luck, but you still have more work to do on the man in the mirror. Once you stop looking for dates, they will start coming to you.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

From this brief description, you sound like a decent, nice guy. Dating is a skill, like many others.

You need to be going on a couple of dates a month, minimum, in order to become effective at it - to understand what behaviors are correlated with success, to get over nervousness, etc. If you had 7 dates in 20 years, it's a sign of 1) poor marketing (the audience is missing the product because they just aren't seeing it) or 2) a product/market fit problem (you are marketing yourself to an audience that isn't a good match for you, the product).

I am a nearly 40 year old dude, not so physically attractive or anything, living in Silicon Valley (dude-central), divorced, etc. I'm not going to say online dating apps are awesome fun or that I loved everybody I met, but for the 6 month period I was doing it actively, I was going out on one date every week or so. Most of these went nowhere, sure, but in the course of 6 months I had quite a bit of success in terms of outcomes, and two actual relationships that came about.

Market yourself, my man. Do A/B testing and experiments with your dating profile - I did this regularly. Emphasize different interests and see what works best. Try more positive language. Experiment with using the "coded phrases" that are endemic to online dating. Try different pictures - show yourself as active and engaged in things you actually like to do outside of work (maybe at an art gallery event or a museum, in your case). Make sure you have good product/market fit - that the women your profile is speaking to are the ones you actually want to go on dates with and are likely to go on dates with you. For me that meant divorced women, with kids, between the ages of 30 and 45 or so - single 28 year old women may be physically attractive to me, but they are not going to want to deal with a divorced guy with kids - a woman in a similar situation with her own life complexities is a far better match and is likely to be more understanding that I have a crazy work and family life schedule.

It *is* possible to make online dating work for you, it's just a pain in the ass and a lot of work.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I have a large number of female friends. The problem is that they're all gay and/or 20+ years younger than I am. Someone who is in my age cohort at this point is almost certainly married or at least in a long term relationship at this point in their life. I actually don't know any women around my age. I live in a place where I'm definitely a demographic outlier for a lot of reasons, but my job is unique and I really couldn't give it up unless I knew I'd be getting something better.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[frank_adrian314159]

Sorry dude, if you don't have a Facebook site to check, most women will assume you're there for nefarious purposes. Only weirdos on't have Facebook profiles to check.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[joe_frisch]

This and similar stories make it sound like there is a real market for a breakthrough dating app that actually works at matching people. Its hard - but maybe no harder than self-driving cars and computers that teach themselves to play go.

Maybe humans are getting involved too early in the process. Really - people can be extremely shallow and pick partners based on the wrong sort of things.

Some sort of multi-person optimization might work - it doesn't just try to match individuals but looks at entire sets of matches that will make the most people the happiest. (OK, where's my $B for a startup idea).

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

If I had the option to get a date once a week, I absolutely would. My average is probably closer to "once per Presidential term" because of the talking-to-a-wall experience of using online dating services.

I do have friends half my age and they appreciate an occasional dinner or movie, but they're not appropriate for my interest, nor are they interested in me. As a pragmatic matter, they're off the table.

I live close but not close enough to a big city in one of those flyover states, such that my location is definitely a factor, but I've been looking all over the USA for 15+ years. Moving is a touchy subject in my case. I have unique job that I wouldn't give up for anything but absolute assurance that I'd be getting something better out of the deal.

I definitely tried making different profiles just to see if one got more response than another. I tried selecting different geographic locations, wildly different photos (sartorial choices, professional vs. candid photos etc). I have to say that I never saw a difference.

My experience with dating sites is such that I can absolutely believe that the overwhelming majority of contacts made on them are by people or software working for the sites rather than actual humans. Some sites are so overrun by obvious bots.

I don't know where the people are, but there is no way in hell that I believe meeting someone once a week or once a month from a dating site is within the realm of possibility.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

this comment should have gotten more love

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I object to the Facebook terms of service. I'd be happy to explain to anyone why that's the case, and why filling out a profile with misleading information doesn't meaningfully overcome my objection. Most people aren't sophisticated enough about what Facebook is or does and act as if it's some sort of public utility. Those aren't people I'd want to date anyway. I'm actually grateful for all the negative attention Facebook has been getting lately, since some of these things have finally come in to widespread awareness.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I thought very highly of the OKCupid approach, when it was run by its creators. I thought they were on to something with the data-driven tools and matching. I believe most of its user base ignores all or most of that in favor of simple profile creation and chat, but to the extent that someone has put data science forward to address compatibility, I think OKC did.

I'm also fairly convinced that humans don't actually know what they want or, in my case, lack the experience to properly say. It may be that nothing short of individual behavioral modeling can crack this problem. Self-reported data just may not be trustworthy in this domain.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you are not wrong about Facebook, but simply making that observation puts you in the most thoughtful few percent of humanity. Most are not. This will naturally narrow your potential pool quite severely.

It sucks, but it's how things are.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[rundgong]

One of the fundamental problems with dating sites is that it is not financially good for them if you find someone. That is a lost customer. Their highest revenue will be when you don't find someone serious, but it still looks like you have a chance. That is how you stay a customer the longest.

If they display ads it is also important to get as many page views as possible. There are many ways that dating sites could be improved, but most of them would involve creating less activity, i.e. less income from ads.

Examples:
Popular people (mostly women) get too many low effort messages. They want to receive less bad messages, but less activity is bad for business.
Unpopular people (mostly men) send too many messages that get no response. Some transparency like stats for the other persons response rate could help the user here. But if we only message the people where we have a chance of getting noticed, that means less page views, i.e. it is bad for business.

All this extra activity that is good for business but bad for the user, that is why we get services like these paid impersonators.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

That's true now, but the vast majority of my online dating lack-of-experiences predate Facebook substantially. I don't actually believe that's the issue, nor does every dating service, even in 2018, integrate with Facebook such that it's a requirement.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience when I canceled eharmony.com, suddenly I was getting more contacts than I'd gotten in the entire previous year. I immediately thought "yeah these are almost certainly paid shills."

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that they...

Your initial post and all of your replies have this same theme: "I'm right, it's everyone else who's wrong." The dating sites don't work, the women I know are gay, my town is no good for finding a mate, etc., etc.

Someone offers you advice and your response is "No, you're wrong." You want to know the problem? Look in a mirror. You spent 21 years on dating sites without results. That's crazy; you should have given up after six months and tried something else.

My advice is to find a counselor - a licensed psychologist or licensed social worker and talk about your life. You'll learn a lot about yourself.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I've been trying for decades. Believe me. You're right that the advice given would normally be helpful, but in my case, it hasn't been. Nor was therapy. Everything about the process of dating relies on finding a willing and appropriate party to date. In this matter, it doesn't matter what insights a therapist or self-help book can share. If I can't connect with anyone who might be interested, all the self-reflection in the world isn't going to do me any good either.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy to explain to anyone why that's the case, and why filling out a profile with misleading information doesn't meaningfully overcome my objection.

That might be a clue as to your problem.

1. People aren't rational or reasonable. Don't present an appearance inferring that you expect or need them to be- whether you do or not.

2. Previously you said that you were unremarkable. Being an unremarkable man is worse than being an ugly, hostile woman. Worse than being entirely unattractive. Be remarkable in some way, give people something to hold on to, even if its a lie. They expect it.

3. Dating women is all about misleading information sad to say. They put forth their best face and hide their worst aspects and expect you to do the same. If you have the slightest bit of neutral or negative information, they will assume that is the best you have to offer. Remember that OK Cupid statistic, the average man is rated very undesirable to women while the average woman is rated desirable to men.

You have to appear to be in the top 20% or you will get nothing. So far, you have not breached that mark. Mislead a bit on your profile, but don't blatantly lie, or be alone. That is the game. Reasonable people hate it and lose at it. When the people you are competing against are cheating, gaining an unfair advantage and setting normativity higher than your reality can provide, you must cheat to win.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot think of an activity less rewarding. Dating sites seem to be actively hostile to almost everyone who uses them. Women are barraged with harassment. Ordinary guys might as not even exist. No one is happy with the state of affairs, but I'm not a person who is going to do well in a bar or other traditional meeting-space and I already teach adult education, I don't see what other choice might be available.

I whole-heartedly agree... and have been disappointed in the culture and environment of dating sites... uncounted times. And I've tried different ones over a period of maybe 4..5 years. It did result in going to restaurants and cinemas with many people, it did result in interesting conversations and one good friend, who eventually faded away to distance for reasons unknown to me... it surprised me with some fun observations about human nature (both myself and others)... but it seems like no place where to meet someone whom one might have a sustainable relationship with. I did eventually find a friend with whom romantic tension has developed, and what could be called a close relationship has followed... but that encounter was in real life, and that find was not preceded by a search. As for the hours wasted searching, yes, if I had them back, I might do something of great use to human kind, but alas. :D

Re: I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

There is literally nothing wrong with dating a chick twenty years younger than you.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

As you've learned, apparently painfully, the online dating industry is beyond broken. Its commercial incentives are all to cock (if you click, they lose a customer), its demographics are incurably screwed, and not one person in a hundred is being honest. Even those who aren't just looking for random sex are, at the very least, meticulously curating their information and glamming up their profiles. (How often did you update your profile pictures?)

Worst of all, everything has precisely one thing on their mind. That's no way to meet people.

You want to know a better way to meet people, including romantic partners, online? Usenet.

First off, you join a group discussing something you're interested in. So you'll have at least one thing in common with everyone you meet there. Then you communicate with pseudonyms. When you first "meet" people, you don't know their age, nationality, sex or anything else about them. Just start talking. That gives you a chance to decide who you like and who you don't, without hormones getting in the way.

And people talk about something other than themselves. That's important, because "yourself" is the subject that you're least likely to be honest about. Even if you try, most of what you think you know about yourself probably doesn't match what others would say of you. So if you want to know someone, listening to them talk about themselves is absolutely the worst way to learn about them. Pay attention to what they say about other subjects (that you know something about), that will tell you if you really want to know them better.

I got onto Usenet, by the sound of it, about the same time you started online dating. It took a couple of years, but pretty soon I'd hugely broadened my romantic experience, and five years later I was married to one of the people I met that way. I had to travel 12,000 miles to meet them, but it was totally worth it.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised you didn't try the Russian/foreign bride route at some point. The few I've met seem normal.

Word verification: liberals

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

You have my sympathy. Why do you think it is that you've had such poor success in this area of life?

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[mopower70]

I've read books about how to game the systems. I've paid photographers and tried to get feedback on my dating profiles from [...] total strangers. I tried all manner of strategies in making first impressions, created multiple profiles [...] Ordinary guys might as not even exist. ... I also have a lot more anxiety at the parts of life that I have failed to experience. ... I wish I could have those many thousands of hours and all of the hope of my life back.

Well that's not creepy. That's not creepy at all. That doesn't sound the least bit creepy and there's not one bit of creepy vibe here that a woman would pick up on. My friend, this is the kind of neckbeard/nice guy talk that makes woman of quality run the other direction. If this is any indicator of how you communicated in the online dating sphere, you have nothing more to do than read what you've written here to understand what the problem is. Luckily there are a lot of ways to fix it, but believing it has anything to do with the way you look or dress or how well-educated you are is not one of them.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a millennial without facebook and had no trouble dating. Your lack of a facebook account isn't relevant.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you are in an area where potential matches are very limited. You are not willing to move so you need to find someone who will move to you. I know people who have had great success with foreigners. The culture in other parts of the world can be very different. It may well be that a foreign culture suits you better.

From your other posts it is clear you live in the US, and have for at least 15 years. That suggests to me you are a US citizen. There are women all over the world who would love to marry an American and move to the US. I recommend looking in a country that is on the US visa waiver program so she can visit you in person before you start down the path of marriage and immigration.

If you aim for a foreigner one big concern will be scammers that are just looking for money or a ticket to the US. One key rule is to not send any money (you can make an exception for customs duties and immigration fees). Another is to make sure she spends a couple hours per day chatting with you online. If she has to spend a couple hours per day working on a relationship where the only return is the possibility of a long-term relationship she is probably the real deal. If she is just using you to get to the US it will likely be evident during the months of online chatting the two of you would engage in.

Also take note of the site/service you meet your mate on. If it is classified as an international marriage broker certain steps need to be followed or immigration will not let her into the country.

To immigrate you have to prove the two of you have a bona fide relationship. So you should keep a log of all email/texts/instant messages you send, a log of when all online chats start and stop, keep a copy of all receipts especially travel related. You will have to prove you have met in person (unless your religion prohibits it) so take lots of pictures together. You will need other documents as well. Visa Journey has great documentation on the whole process.

I also recommend you read How to Win Friends & Influence People. It is a classic book and a great read. It is aimed at salesman but the advise is good for everyone. I have seen it quoted by celebrities, politicians, and even a US Supreme Court justice. Some of your posts would have been written very differently if you had applied the book's advise. There is a good chance many of your online dating messages would have been written different as well.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

You, literally, just did it again. "It isn't my fault, it's because 'dating relies on finding a willing and appropriate party to date.'"

I'm sorry to tell you - but you ARE the problem. If you are hanging around with gay female friends who are 20 years younger than you, then where are you learning how to be a man? A dog can't teach a cat how to be a cat; and a lesbian can't teach you how to be a man.

If you have only gotten 7 dates after decades of trying, you are doing something wrong. If you haven't tried something different, then that is on you. Since you haven't had more dates, then I can only assume you haven't actually changed what you are doing - even if you have "gone through the motions".

You want some real advice? Read "The Game" by Neil Strauss. Read the "The Red Pill" subreddit. Look into the manosphere and listen to, AND ACT, on the advice! If you aren't willing to do that, then you will have to enjoy being single forever.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

No, based on what I've read on reddit, women do NOT want to be approached in a grocery store or at the gym or whereever. They are there to shop, work out, etc. - not to be approached by random creepy dudes.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

Pick up Artist/NLP bullshit is, so far as I can tell, all about teaching someone to be an asshole. Maybe the people who follow that advice get what they want, but I still have to live with myself and that's now how I want to treat other people.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I suspect I'm a little older than you and I do have fond memories of USENET as a watering hole. I've also made friends with and met people from other forum sites like Fark, SomethingAwful and Imgur. More broadly, I know of at least one lasting relationship that grew out of an MMO and another that came from, of all things, Etsy.

The idea of people being drawn together through some kind of general social interaction is not new to me and I will say that two of my longest and deepest friendships originate from chatting on forums, but I think the people who actually meet up and make a full relationship work that way are relatively few and far between.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

I've also come to this conclusion, but as far as I know there's nothing to be done about it. The only online alternative (was?) Craigslist, which was also a wonderful way to get dick pics and had approximately the same sketchy vibe as writing your phone number on wall of a public toilet.

I really don't think online is the right way to meet people. Maybe it works for attractive people in urban areas. Maybe it works for someone who ONLY wants to get laid. But dating apps seem to encourage the worst behavior from both the participants and the site owners.

On the other hand, what else is there? Especially for those of us who don't live in urban areas, whose cultural, political or religious leanings don't align well with our location?

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend who for years complained of similar issues with online dating and the guys she met in bars. Apparently they only wanted her for sex. It turns out - as I told her repeatedly and unsympathetically - that if you pick people (and they pick you) based only on their looks and facile one-liners you'll likely have little in common other than wanting a quick fuck. Perhaps the best way to find somebody you can share a life with is to find them through your hobbies and activities - if music's your thing, go to concerts; dancing, go to dance classes; art, a gallery... yada yada. Funny thing is she misheard the message and screwed her boss thinking "work" was a suitable common interest. Bless.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts

[slaker]

For what it's worth, I was trying things recommended by dating coaches and recommendations of experts of various sorts with regard to online dating. With over two decades of working at it, I wanted to demonstrate that I had put time in to trying to make the services work. I've never been the guy who just writes "Sup?" and expects a response.

As for the content of what I would write, on services where there's a profile to read (e.g. OKCupid), I'd most likely read what's available and formulate about three sentences that would demonstrate that I read their profile, that we have interests in common and which would include a question to invite a reply. The slightly longer introduction also gave me a chance to demonstrate some level of intelligence and literacy.

OKCupid used to let users track profile visits. Mine almost never rose past the lowest level, 1 visit per month. That told me that even the people I was writing weren't bothering to visit my profile. I suspect that real women on dating sites get so slammed with messages that there's no reason for them to go looking at random messages or profiles. I have no way of knowing.

I'm not creepy, nor a neckbeard. I'm isolated from certain common human experiences and I am deeply depressed about that. I'm venting about it in what I suspect is a relatively sympathetic setting. I'm sorry for whatever set your default expectation of a human in distress to that particular set of assumptions.

Professionals chatting with professionals

[bradley13]

It seems that lots of these services don't actually have very many women online. So they create fake profiles, and - no proof, just suspicion - probably pay other professionals to keep those profiles active: to chat with guys and give them false hope they might actually be speaking with an actual woman. Given the huge number of fake profiles, it is understandable when the guys to pay another professional to weed out all the fake profiles. Of course, it's a shame for the real people out there, whose time is being wasted.

Alternatively, one could try to meet women in the physical world. What a concept...

Re:Professionals chatting with professionals

[arth1]

Alternatively, one could try to meet women in the physical world. What a concept...

Scary. Give me Solaria.

James? Is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're fired.

--Google SJW

I knew a guy who did that

[swm]

Cyrano something.
Cyrano...de Bergerac.
Yeah, that's guy.

Dueling Impersonators?

[devnullkac]

And what happens when a paid flirter interacts with other paid flirters? Can an entire relationship be developed by paid proxies?

Re:Dueling Impersonators?

[Aighearach]

Can an entire relationship be developed by paid proxies?

Yes, they'll exchange phone numbers very rapidly, stop talking, and consider it a wonderful relationship.

Relationships have stages, and this only exists at the pre-phone-number phase.

Re:Dueling Impersonators?

[mentil]

And thus we come full circle to Blind Dating.

Volunteer

[Anonymous Coward]

Best place to meet good women for the following reason: they're inherently giving their time in an activity, you can socialize and get to know them, and you can tell if they're there just to date because you keep going to volunteer and they join you.

This is exactly why online datating sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Its so full of narcissism and hypocrisy that only leads to hurting people, for example:

"Once you mix in the vague rules of netiquette and a healthy fear of catfishing scams, it's easy to see why someone might want to outsource their online-dating profile to a pro, if only to keep themselves sane."

In other-words; I'm scared of being cat-fished so i am going to catfish someone else. I am going to outsource my online dating to keep my self sane while driving other people crazy.

If you want to meet someone then get a hobby, join a beer league, volunteer or join a class. Do something that gives you both a common ground to start a conversation and stop being so picky about all the little things (hair color, eye color, clothing style, etc.), its only the big things that really matter in long term relationships. For anyone complaining about the dating world, the first place they should look for making fixes is in the mirror and a service like this will not help your situation. If the reason is that you are too busy to do it yourself then you are probably to busy for a relationship. If you are too scared of rejection, or worried about being cat-fished then go do something about your self esteem. The final piece is to understand that a relationship isnt just about what you want, it involves another person so if the only thing that you care about is your needs then the relationship wont last.

Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a high class escort in the UK and have used dating sites to find love in my personal life but buy and large most dating sites are full of men looking for a free fuck or men I wouldn't look twice at.

The way I view this is simple.You could spend hundreds or even thousands chasing love online via an agency or pay a defined amount for the GFE (Girlfriend Experience) I offer. Like, imagine me as a timeshare girlfriend. I always wear decent makeup and something nice with style and taste. Sex is not an issue. If you want to stick your cock in stick your cock in. If you prefer a chat or watching a movie or visiting a museum I'm more than fine with this to. I'm as genuine a person as I can be and do the best I can for you on the clock. If... If a guy wants an exclusive relationship similar terms apply. The only difference is how and how much.

Re:Timeshare arrangements

[slaker]

One of my close friends is a well-regarded queer sex worker in Chicago. She contends that I just need to partake of a similar service, much as you and she provide. Here is my counter:

What I want is not just sex, or to have a dining or public companion. What I want is emotional engagement. I want the support and access to intimacy that can only be found in free will. I want to be considered genuinely worthy has a companion, to share a bed and a washroom and to be able to touch another person freely and without concern that I'm violating taboos of human interaction. That comes from having a full time partner, not a rental. Were I a busier person, or one less concerned about my long-term emotional health, or someone who was just horny, I absolutely agree: renting is a great option. But that's not what I'm looking for. I wish it was. Everything would be so much easier.

Re:Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I do agree. Emotional engagement is possible to a degree but largely lacking in the rental sector. Some client relations can be very toxic or exploitative too. I always dump a client if this happens or select out a new client if I sense issues. But for circumstances this job isn't my first choice and something I would never have considered beyond a wild instantly forgotten 5 second fantasy.

Away from clients I'm reading Slashdot. Wearing a boring pair of dark blue jeans with a sheertop, black lace bra and knickers, and a pair of old and smelly but very comfortable seude pumps. I'm sure I cut a pathetic figure depressing myself with daydreams of wedding dresses and days out walking together and cooking dinner and emptying bins together. Sex couldn't be further from my mind. Intelligent company and watching a movie and generally existing without tearing each others throats out is more my kind of thing given a choice. Chat about my upgrades and repairs with a client? I have tried but clients lose interest as quickly as their cocks stiffen seeing a flash of bare thigh and stocking tops. As much as I like a man with a good stiff cock twitching with lust life is much more than this.

Re:Timeshare arrangements

[slaker]

Sex workers have a particular set of issues in their personal lives. They are, in a way, low-grade therapists, in addition to whatever physical services they provide. Sometimes they are an outlet for damaged people. They have to break social conventions for the sake of their professional lives and they have to deal with at least low-grade fear and jealousy from any loved ones aware of their occupation. I don't envy your lot. Your job is much more difficult than the fiction or fantasy suggest.

My problems are 180 degrees opposite of yours. I have a lifetime of alienation and isolation, no hardened exterior for the sort of careful intimacy one might have from starting relationships and only the barest idea what physical relations entail. I am a stereotype and a punchline and the only thing I can say for myself is that I absolutely cannot give up the idea that one day I will join the rest of the species as a functional human being.

Re: Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

100% guarantee that this is a straight dude, maybe thirteen years old.

Re:Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you describe a recogniseable enough picture. I disagree with the term low grade therapist given how poor many therapists and sex therapists are within large health organisations especially if outcomes are considered. Any fool can learn a skill. So much depends on attitude and chemistry even with health professionals, or maybe I am just fussy and difficult to get along with.

Thanks for the chat. I appreciate candidness and honesty, and at least a smidgen of tactful empapthy. You've been very decent.

Re: Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because older women who happen to work as escorts (or snobby prostitute as one wit called me) don't read Slashdot? I was likely coding before half the Slashdot readership was born.

Re: Timeshare arrangements

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically, prostitutes have been unlicensed psychotherapists. The sex is merely an excuse for the therapeutic session. The more expensive the prostitute is, the less sex is involved.

How would that even work?

[Anonymous Coward]

So let's say person A strikes up a conversation with person B and they seem to hit it off, but person B is a paid impersonator.

At SOME point person A presumably gets switched to the "real" B instead of the impersonator, right? Well wouldn't person A immediately notice? Like yesterday they knew everything there was to know about zombie movies, but today they don't know shit about zombie movies? Or they suddenly don't recall things about a conversation you had just a few days ago?

I'm having trouble imagining how that could be successfully pulled off.

Reminds me of Mike

[Anonymous Coward]

Good old horny Mikey. Says he's muslim but looks like another middle eastern demographic stereotype.

I remember he had 10-20 chat windows open at a time. The first stages he had programmed responses by chatbot, but he would manually screen them shortly after. Later he'd go manual... but he'd have a slew of entertaining things to copy and paste in.
He never paid anyone else to do it but it sounds like when he sees this he will. Combine it with some AI next I suppose.
Ridiculous. But as he put it - it's cheaper and more meaningful than a whore!

I suggest the power of attractive thought.

Pathetic.

[Anonymous Coward]

If this shocks anyone, they need to be smacked. The web is not real life, people. Not in any sense of the phrase. People getting upset with and fighting tooth and nail with figments of their own imaginations sounds an awful lot like insanity to me. It's also learned behavior, and behavior can be UNlearned. Being that no one ever taught them anything, millennials are too young to understand this, even in their 30s.

Sad

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I find this whole thing to be very sad and disheartening. If I wasn't already happily married I'd probably stay the hell away from online dating, since 99% seems to be bogus.

Paid shills wasting your time by dangling a possible relationship in front of you for weeks or months? Sad and hurtful. Death to them for the misery they cause.

ZZ Top

[PPH]

"I been in love ten thousand times,
All you got to do is remember my line."

One of us should make a better dating site

[FeelGood314]

The dating sites aren't working for women either. In my area, Ottawa, Canada, the median age of an active POF profile of slim or athletic woman between 30 and 40 is 300 days. (You can sort the profiles by newest first, find the oldest profile that was on in the last 30 days and then message the women halfway between and ask them when they created their profiles)

Create a crappy woman's profile, see how many messages it gets bombarded with. Now imagine trying to get this woman's attention and keep it. It's almost impossible to do it with out sounding needy and desperate. Also every woman is remembering the best men she chatted with, the funny ones, the handsome ones, rich ones... It doesn't matter that all these are all guys ultimately didn't choose her, they inflated her sense of self worth, they raised her minimum standard of what she will date.

In the end we end up with most men sounding desperate and undesirable and we created a situation where most people would rather be single than date the bottom 80% of the opposite sex.

Re:One of us should make a better dating site

[mentil]

I recall reading about how a large portion of adoptive parents end up 'giving back' older children that they adopt, due to supposed 'behavioral problems' with the child that can't be reconciled. Turns out these problems are generally with the parents, being unable to adapt to life with that child, rather than anything inherent about the child themselves.

Dating websites revolve around the concept of 'compatibility' without daring to question the related assumptions about the mechanics of romantic relationships. It may be that some people just can't make romantic relationships work with their lives, or aren't willing to do what it takes to make them work. It doesn't help that these dating site profiles generally leave out one's expectations for gender/relationship roles. If a man strongly believes that women belong in the kitchen and should only speak when spoken to, that should probably be taken into account by other people or the matching algorithm. How dominant or submissive one is, and how dominant of a partner they want, is a good example of an important criterion that people are generally ok with sharing.

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts...ASL

[Anonymous Coward]

Find out if your local community college offers American Sign Language courses (ASL). I signed up for one (in Southern California) just for fun. I found that about three quarters of the students were women. By the very nature of the class, interaction among the students was encouraged; it wasn't necessary to find an "excuse" to approach someone, and since a language was being learned, there was always something to 'talk' about (even if it was only vocabulary exercises).

   

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts...ASL

[slaker]

I'm already involved in adult education. My students are mostly older men, but I had the thought that being on a campus would at least increase my available pool. It hasn't, but this is definitely an idea I've put in to practice.

Tinder?

[TechyImmigrant]

I met my wife on ICQ. That was 17 years ago.

The title should have read...

[Anonymous Coward]

"You Could Be Flirting On Dating Apps With Cops"

Re:I just closed all my dating accounts...ASL

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like you may be tense. Tension kills the vibe.

Also, you should probably work on your sense of humor, if you can make them laugh, you can get in the drawers.

Been going on for years

[seoras]

I did some consultancy work for an online dating company several years ago.
The alarm bells started going off when I discovered they weren't interested in marketing it to women. They were entirely focused on men.
I got access to their database for some of my work and couldn't find a single, real, female profile. All the female accounts were all "test" accounts.
I was also aware of a huge "marketing" work force in the Ukraine who's job descriptions were ambiguous and when I met one or two of them they wouldn't tell me what they did (they were all women).
One of them later confided in me that they had to sign an NDA about their job roll which was why they couldn't talk about it.
Most of the marketing they did was through the porn websites and they also re-marketed to the cam girl websites.
I'd guess that the "dating" websites are the main source of the online porn industries revenue.

Siri

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual assistant + Phone sex

I don't/won't use online dating

[Anonymous Coward]

But surprised to see supposedly 1 in 3 marriages are the result of it

CPA

[wolfheart111]

There's much easier ways to make 1.75... every 2-3 minutes. Ya guys are easy. :)

Evolutionary success?

[clawsoon]

I've heard your evolutionary ideas most often from lonely men who take their cue from online dating gurus and pickup artists.

I've heard them least often from men with kids.

That doesn't prove anything, but it does suggest to me that it might not be an evolutionarily successful attitude.

Re:Evolutionary success?

[Ol Olsoc]

I've heard your evolutionary ideas most often from lonely men who take their cue from online dating gurus and pickup artists.

I've heard them least often from men with kids.

That doesn't prove anything, but it does suggest to me that it might not be an evolutionarily successful attitude.

Its complicated. And as far as that goes, I'm not remotely lonely, married and with a child - grown now.

This all depends on how far you want to take the idea that and differences between men and women are 100 percent social construct, and not based upon built in physical attraction.

Note these are general traits, and that of course there are outliers.

Some things are social constructs. We've seen that in the workplace that within physical limitations of both sexes, women are capable of doing the same work as men.

But the idea that physical attraction is a social construct is bullshit. It's funny how after so many years, homosexuals are accepted as a built in preference, and not a choice, that certain groups of feminists are pretending now that everything is a choice, because you can if you want, raise a child to be a male or female, and if you want you can take a child born with a penis, which the evil world of cisgender would demand that he be called a boy social construct, and by social molding have him identify as both a female, and a lesbian. A female who identifies as a lesbian can have sex with this lesbian with a penis. and not be sexual, but a true lesbian who has never had sex with a male, and is repulsed by males. In the world ot total social construct, that is completely valid - if not quite sane.

So men in general have been hard wired to a certain body and face, and the same with women, although they have some added inborn traits as well.

This is not an unusual thing in the rest of the animal world, I've yet to see a convincing argument on why humans are totally exempt. An empty slate that can be molded any which way.

Here is an interesting example - young children were given the choice of I guess what you would call cis gendered toys. Fluffy and soft toys versus wheeled toys. Infant interest versus rough and tumble toys.

The female children were largely interested in soft and fluffy and infant interest toys, while the male children were more interested in wheeled devices and toys they could engage in rough and tumble activities with.

You might say "This is merely the example of cis gendered enforcement of proclivities by humans upon their offspring. This proves our thesis."

On little problem though - these children were Rhesus Monkeys. sauce: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

I'm attracted to exactly what I'm attracted to. Tall slender women with long hair, long legs, and small to medium bosom, big eyes and pretty face. No one told me this was what I was attracted to. As early as I noticed young ladies I noticed that was my preference. Still is, and ummm, I can sorta still tell that - yaknow?

Re:Evolutionary success?

[clawsoon]

It's interesting that sex differences in play would be so much larger in monkeys than in humans, especially when it's human toys involved. For example, in this classic (n=102) study which "clearly demonstrate[s] that sex differences are in part biological in origin":

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321

...boys looked at the face 46 percent of the time; girls, 49 percent; boys looked at the mobile for 52 percent of the time; girls, 41 percent, which is not much of a difference when compared to the differences in the monkey study you linked. And a better-controlled later (n=48) study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096513001367

...didn't find a difference between boys and girls.

Or this toy study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X1200044X

...which must've had a really awesome tea set, because the boys played with it 53% of the time and the girls played with it 48% of the time. But thank god for the train, which rescued the testosterone-driven hypothesis in this n=42 study. This n=156 toy study must've had an awesome train:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25267577

...because the girls played with it 80% of the time. (The boys still played with it more, so don't worry. :-) )

It's interesting, too, that innate toy preferences seem to have changed over the course of a few decades:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/icd.2064

"Additionally, an effect of the length of time since study publication was found: girls played more with femaletyped toys in earlier studies than in later studies ( = .70, p Evolution is still happening, I guess. ;-)

I've little doubt that my attraction to women is a heritable trait that has something to do with my Y chromosome - no doubt something downstream from the SRY gene - but it seems suspicious that I'd have specific hard-coded genetic preferences which would just happen to be perfectly suited for half of the girls I was surrounded by when I hit puberty. Maybe imprinting has something to do with it?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691703/

...although, as with most of the science on all sides of the "which behaviour differences between the sexes are driven by biological effects of the Y chromosome" debate, the science in that study isn't very strong. Or maybe it's matching, and I was attracted to girls who were similar to me?

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-myth-of-buying-beauty/374414/

I have no idea how strong McClintock's science is. One thing that makes me suspicious of all of these studies - on all sides - is how often researchers confirm what they already believe and how rarely they convince each other with their data. (...and how often people on the Internet fixate on studies which support the conclusions they've already come to.)

One thing that we've learned from animal studies is that a lot of the proxies we've used for evolutionary success - attraction, frequency of mating, social status - don't necessarily map to actual evolutionary success as recorded in DNA. Given the sorry state of social psychology and the parts of evolutionary psychology that share its techniques, I think we're a long way from figuring all this out in humans.

FWIW, I spend a lot of time interacting with feminists, and I've never seen/heard one say that sexual attraction is entirely a social construct. Many of them do say that the precise form it takes is socially influenced. This makes some sense to me; why else would porn from the '70s do nothing for me, even though the women are just as young and healthy and big-eyed and pretty as the girls/women I grew up with?

Re:Evolutionary success?

[david_thornley]

But the idea that physical attraction is a social construct is bullshit.

It is, partly. Standards of beauty have varied over historical times. There are things that haven't changed (preferring smooth skin and symmetrical features) and things that have (preferred breast size).

It's funny how after so many years, homosexuals are accepted as a built in preference, and not a choice, that certain groups of feminists are pretending now that everything is a choice, because you can if you want, raise a child to be a male or female, and if you want you can take a child born with a penis, which the evil world of cisgender would demand that he be called a boy social construct, and by social molding have him identify as both a female, and a lesbian. A female who identifies as a lesbian can have sex with this lesbian with a penis. and not be sexual, but a true lesbian who has never had sex with a male, and is repulsed by males. In the world ot total social construct, that is completely valid - if not quite sane.

Um, huh? Where did this come from?

Re:Evolutionary success?

[Ol Olsoc]

But the idea that physical attraction is a social construct is bullshit.

It is, partly. Standards of beauty have varied over historical times. There are things that haven't changed (preferring smooth skin and symmetrical features) and things that have (preferred breast size)

Very true. At one time, a woman we would consider "chubby" today was considered the height of physical charm. Probably as a sign of health at a time when a lot of people were a lot less healthy than today. In men, a pot belly in older men was considered a sign of success. .

It's funny how after so many years, homosexuals are accepted as a built in preference, and not a choice, that certain groups of feminists are pretending now that everything is a choice, because you can if you want, raise a child to be a male or female, and if you want you can take a child born with a penis, which the evil world of cisgender would demand that he be called a boy social construct, and by social molding have him identify as both a female, and a lesbian. A female who identifies as a lesbian can have sex with this lesbian with a penis. and not be sexual, but a true lesbian who has never had sex with a male, and is repulsed by males. In the world ot total social construct, that is completely valid - if not quite sane.

Um, huh? Where did this come from?

Indeed - sounds crazy. But here is the thing. There are people who are raising their children genderless because they believe that gender is a total social construct. This is a typical one. https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

With the concept of society acting as the enforcer of gender identity - who individuals desire to mate with - the concept is that without enforcement, the child will choose any of the huge number of genders as defined by those who insist gender is a social construct.

The keywords are that the child will make a deliberate and conscious choice.

This means that there is no hard wiring, no natural proclivity, that all is a choice. The mind as a completely blank device that can be programmed any way society wants it to be programmed. Sex with goats? If society wants it. Homosexual behavior? If society wants it.

It is obvious that social mores will determine in several aspects the sexual practices of those societies. But in no way shape or form do they make the basic determination. repression, suppression or expression is not what determines gender "choice". So here we have people who just like fundamentalist homophobes, have decided that who a person wants to engage in sexual activiteis is a choice that that person makes all by themselves, that they think one day "I have come to the decision that I want to have sex with men, so I will train myself to be sexually aroused by men." In both gender as a social construct and religious homophobia, a person can believe the same thing.

Fuggidaboudit! I knew real young who I was attracted to, and what the physical characteristics of women I found exciting. My gay friends also knew early on, even if they were closeted. I think the traits are what we are born with. Some cisgender, some gay, some bisexual, some asexual.

Sign up today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, pretty sure I've seen this spam before.

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I suppose I could, but why would I want to?