Are we the baddies?

Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.

Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:

1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.

2. Attractive man in the pictures.

3. No icks.

Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.

As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.

Or just stop playing the game. Like a parasite, dating apps only survive while their host is alive. You can pay for pictures, spend hours a day scrolling, pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”Maybe you’ll eventually win if you keep pulling the lever. But then you’ve just contributed to the problem.

It’s just not worth it in my view. I gave up. Being a singleton is going to become the new normal in the next 25 years, many Western countries are going the way of Japan and South Korea.

The good news for George is he’s a high profile, decent looking, wealthy dude. He’ll be fine.

Looksmaxxing discourse on HN, things are getting really bleak.

He is spot on tho

I’ve come to realize that dating apps are just outright hostile to honest newcomers who don’t know the implicit rules.

It starts with picking the “right” pictures, then saying the “right” things then choosing the “right” place and then confirming at the “right” time. Eventually you are just going down a checklist rather than being your authentic self. If you find yourself minmaxing in this way, take a break.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I'm not talking about only dating apps. Wherever there's an algo, there's someone manipulating you. I just deleted and disabled my Youtube history. It's incredibly liberating!

More importantly than this, George Hotz is very influential (has a self-driving startup and made the news for a Twitter internship) and presumably quite rich as well, there’s probably easier ways than swiping through Hinge like everyone else.

HN crowd is not what it used to be. It's full of normies, projecting their unproductive form of world-view

To be fair, society and social interactions are full of implicit rules. Put a bunch of people in a room(/train/company/island/club/cult) and they will make up some rules along the way.

Someone catch your eye at a party? You'll probably take a moment to choose what you want to say to them there too

Playing devil's advocate: embellishing one's own features is a common tactic for attracting a mate in the real world as well. Courtship is a game, not just for humans. During this phase you rarely get to know the other person. You meet their best facade first, and then slowly get to know the person behind it. If you refuse to play this game, then you're just lowering your chances of attracting a partner. Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of this.

What GP is suggesting is simply making an effort to showcase your features. The most attractive person on Earth could be rejected if their pictures are of poor quality. That's just common sense. Being genuinely attractive by modern societal standards is important, but the first step is making an effort.

Dating apps can be a good way of finding a partner. After all, they're just the modern equivalent of making the initial connection. Their problem is the same as with any SaaS: companies are incentivized to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, which they do by engaging in shady tactics like artificially controlling the visibility of user profiles, while squeezing out as much profit out of users as they can. This is bad news for men, who are overwhelmingly the ones using these services and are willing to accept the downright predatory tactics of these companies.

But in theory, there's nothing wrong with the concept of dating apps. They're just corrupted by the usual user hostile incentives. A dating service with the right incentives could appear tomorrow to disrupt this rotten industry.

Dating apps prey on the weakest of us all, selling hopes and shattering egos. Not everyone can get good pictures, not everyone is a 10/10 attractive man, and "no icks" is such a vomit inducing term. They are perfectly happy that you don't have a good picture and you don't get matches, because then they can sell you boosts and superlikes and whatever bullshit they've made up today.

Tinder, Hinge and others are directly responsible for tens of thousands of cases of depression and in building up a perfect breeding ground for misogyny and misandry. Everyone involved in their self-worth-destroying app has blood on their hands.

Do you really need to be a singleton just because you reject dating apps?

What's exactly looksmaxing and why is the above comment a suspect? It seemed normal to me.

> pretend to be someone you’re not, blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”

You don't have to "pretend" to do anything, or try to get rid of what others consider "icky", but generally I think most people aim to at least be neutral (if not pleasant) in the eyes of others, either by social pressure or because life just gets easier and less frustrating then.

I'd probably wager that the whole pretending thing you think is required, actually backfires as people eventually learn who you are, so better to just be yourself upfront.

mating has historically almost always been a pretty hostile and unfair experience. That is why female ancestors outnumber male 2:1.

> blunt every aspect of your personality that may be an “ick.”

That’s not what was meant and you know it.

Ten years into a relationship, I sometimes leave my dinner dishes in the sink and wash them in the morning. Had I done that early on in my relationship—or had those dishes in a photo on a dating site—I’d sabotage my chances with a lot of people.

The same is true for interests. Maybe you really like guns: marksmanship, customizing them, restoring them, and so on. If you have guns front and center in your dating app pics you are going to alienate a lot of people. Plenty of those same people would enjoy being introduced to that hobby once you are in a relationship! But guns being a photographed part of your dating-site-identity is not going to help your chances. The people who swipe left are avoiding gun nuts, misogynists, etc. Putting guns in your picture only sabotages yourself.

That’s not “I have to totally be someone I’m not and remove every single thing someone might find objectionable”. That’s basic social awareness and understanding that there’s a time and a place for presenting different parts of yourself.

No that’s fair - I don’t think I articulated the difference between normal social rules and dating apps.

What I’ve found is that the first couple of interactions (up until the second date) can be completely formulaic - and what can look like outward success is just a treadmill.

If you get too good at optimizing the dating apps funnel you can find yourself on a regular rotation of dates without actually connecting with anyone.

Are you asking me specifically or in general?

I'm in my 20s and the way a significant portion of relationships start in this generation is via dating apps. If you aren't using dating apps, and don't have social circles, there's just no social fabric to build from. Believe me, I've tried activities, they don't really work. It's extremely difficult to build enough rapport with someone in the space of 1-2 hours that they'll care enough to ever meet up again.

>That’s not what was meant and you know it.

I believe the zoomer interpretation of "icks" refers to childish/petty reasons to give up on perusing someone, not something like lack of cleanliness.

If you're in your 20s you should change your life so that you live a lifestyle with easy social connections and ways to find partners. Being alone too much in your age will give you permanent mental damage.

So change careers, change city, change country, change whatever is needed so that you can have a decent life.

What do you mean by the permanent damage part?

I actually go out a lot, and moved across the world to Tokyo four months ago. The problem is not meeting people. I can make surface level connections every day of the week. The problem is finding people who want to stick around.

If it's only been four months, then you don't have to worry. To make deeper than surface level connections, find a group activity and show up repeatedly (this can be work or school as well). But perhaps the Japanese aren't too interested in making friends with foreigners? The part about moving I mentioned is also about moving to a place where people are more sociable, I don't know if Tokyo is it.

Permanent mental damage is rather from years spent in loneliness, or lovelessness, or poverty, or any other kind of unsustainable personal situation.

Yea, that group of people is insufferable and wrong about almost everything. Dating apps are the one place where they kind of have a point; which really raises the question "Are we (app developers) the baddies?" Dating apps are not a nature preserve, they are a created environment.

Also, there's all kinds of maxing stuff, and there's basic advise, like wash your face and get a haircut before you get your picture taken.

The zoomer interpretation of "ick" is just an extension of patriarchal attitudes. It means "anything that does not perform masculinity to an adequate degree". Fruity drinks, splitting bills, wearing strange colors or patterns, even having well-groomed nails.

It's childish, it's petty, and it's self-defeating. Most women I know are in a vicious cycle of misogyny because they actively optimize for misogynistic men without knowing it. They then come to the conclusion that men must suck, so they tighten their "standards", which inadvertently results in even more misogynistic men going for them.

We often hear about gen-z men becoming more conservative but anyone who is paying attention knows that gen-z women are also becoming more conservative. And, a lot of the conservatism in men is in response to growing conservative attitudes in women, and vice-versa. We have trad wives and bio-essentialist ideology because conservative men exist. And they exist because they meet our arbitrary patriarchal standards, even the small ones, like paying for the bill.

There is also an alternative strategy. Cut out the bullshit and doomed-to-fail relationships by putting your 'icks' front and center. That is a fishing for the niche situation though.

From what I read in comment threads like this, dating apps don't really work for the majority of 20-something men, either. So your choice is between paying for an app that doesn't work and going out and doing IRL things that don't work. Why would you pay for the app, when you can get the same result for free?

It seems his LinkedIn dating profile isn't working out.