27: women interviewed
25: middle age
11: Interviews That Were First Dates (the girls knew what they were getting into, it was actually a grand opening)
8: Average application usage in hours
1: Sometimes I spit out my false tooth in front of an interviewee
0: Average number of dates a woman had per week
Qualitatively:
I found a deep longing for a parental model of business relationship coupled with a stubborn refusal to submit to that kind of role, at least for the caliber of men they encountered.
They wanted to date their dad, or someone’s dad, and they were taking dick pics instead
I found great frustration with the uber-engagement model of app design, a funneling of high volumes of low-quality superficial leads, undermined by an unspoken addiction to that dopamine hit of being seen as a desirable one and again and again and
I found young people trying to reinvent the rules of the game from utopian first principles, so that they were allowed to run, conflicting with their socially conditioned models of whores and jackasses and so on.
(I was one of those young people, but my hobby is being an old man)
The preference expressed by women was to meet a guy to whom they could be reciprocated
Her revealed preference was playing Farmville with a rotating crop of random friends she never met
It was his fault, but the apps and the culture made it hard to do otherwise
Anecdotally:
A woman was afraid to get on the subway and went on every date (thanks Saudi Arabia)
She had a serious college boyfriend before moving to New York
She hated the forwardness of boys
After a few drinks he told me he had enjoyed the degradation of being a disposable hookup
One woman was 33 years old, extremely hipster, had been in a few relationships and admitted that she had selected guys who “weren’t ready” and also hadn’t communicated her real desire to get serious for fear of being seen as herself . square, boring, not independent
A 22-year-old woman had just dipped her toe into the world of dating apps and immediately retracted because it was like exposing her romantic Disney princess and stuffed animal self to a molten, scalding crucible of demands callous and mediocre phalluses (phalluses?)
In terms of UX:
Almost all the women were lazy
In contrast to Sankey’s meticulous charts of guys representing their nine thousand hits, these women were actually hoping to be matched with a guy who made sense.
Instead of making sense of the man they were paired with
(To meet this need, I ended up building an app with the help of another phenomenal freelancer that inferred your fitness interests from your location history and made matches like “You both went to Soulcycle this month , maybe you can go together”)
The design of the app made it unnatural to form a real connection. The best apps were for gays: The best app was a gay cruising app called “Squirt” that had features such as user-written fiction, news articles where they discussed issues in the comments.
You know, real community.
Sociologically:
It was difficult for these women to work against the headwinds of app design and dating culture
These headwinds existed because they operated in a vacuum, in the absence of community
In the absence of community, the only factors shaping the dynamic were market forces and libido. There is no human connection but what you have brought.
And bringing human decency to these apps where you were rejected or propositioned ten times a day was like connecting the vagus nerve to a car battery.
Some apps like Hinge tried to make friend-of-friend dynamics to counter the toxic effect of the community void. It didn’t work.
The best-performing apps brought their own community with them: J date, Christian Mingle, Farmers Connect. Harder to dehumanize someone on common ground
When you want to make a movie that appeals to everyone, tap into the common denominators: sex, action, humor, romance.
Similarly, when you try to create a social app for everyone, they are forced to engage with common denominators
People’s expressed preference was for ~2012 okcupid. But writing reading sifting is a lot of work! In a natural community, the expression and sifting is done for you, just by participating in the community
So his revealed preference was to buy Tiktok for other humans
It made sense that straight apps couldn’t do what gay apps did to allow for free and open communication, creating a community.
Because gay guys who believe are uniformly turned on, while every woman online knows the result of broadcasting your availability
(People today are not joking and they are not wrong when they say that Twitter is a dating app. The truth is that every community is a dating app. That’s what communities are, or at least how they are generally perpetuated)
Personally:
I thought myself very wise and very tired after listening to all these women.
I saw them using boys for emotional validation, just like the red pillers said women were wont to do. They were self-deprecating about it, about getting free drinks and dinners
I watched them suffer, wanting treatment they knew they deserved, becoming more cynical every time they didn’t get it, exposing the next one to more hoops and disqualifying and dehumanizing.
(The boys, of course, were already objectifying)
I saw a feedback loop going on
I learned that it’s not possible to create a dating app that works for a culture that doesn’t. People persevere: Millions are on apps despite everything, but millions more aren’t
Ask our boy Robin Hanson how the birth is going
I won’t get into the larger Society stuff about young people needing stability to be able to safely make long-term relationship commitments and not finding one.
On women’s expectations of a potential partner’s earnings, height, in a world where young women are overachieving
This has all been done to death anyway. The effect of these trends in dating apps is only to make them even more toxic, to drive people into progressively smaller enclaves that are sheltered from the bitter emptiness of a society without community.
And that’s probably a good thing!
Do you want to meet someone? Find your micro-solidarity at your local running club or skee ball league or research group or Twitter feed. They are the only contexts where the guidelines for being human to each other are incorporated
I have rained enough. /EOT
If you’ve made it this far and have questions, I have stories and stories and
• • •
Missing a tweet in this thread? You can try
force an update
English 
Español de Venezuela