Dating apps suck for women, too

Because men and women are different

It's widely known that dating apps suck for men. We talk about it all the time: women only want guys who are 6’3” and “in finance” (honestly, what does “in finance” even mean¹), the apps enable and encourage more superficiality among women who are inundated with matches from men who cast wide nets out of a hope to get any bites at all, they give women an inflated sense of their own “sexual marketplace value” because dudes don't have standards for sex and will happily fuck anyone above a hoe_math 4, and so on.

But what J. Allen says in the last half of his note here is true (and ironically negates the point he opens with):

All those Alpha Chad matches that are making her so delusional aren't wifing her up. Like Stella at The Human Carbohydrate says rather succinctly in her excellent piece On The Desperation of Female Neediness:

You wanted to fuck me, I wanted you to love me.

Being wifed up is probably, statistically, what she's after, not the casual sex on its own. Come on, guys, we know this. So what's she actually succeeding at, exactly?

Average swipes/likes and passes between men and women

(Here’s the YouTube video with the stats from the above images and the article where I found it.)

It's been long established that men are much more likely to say yes to spontaneous sex with a stranger than women are. This study has been replicated time and again and that phenomenon factors in here when we consider just how little this “success" actually matters for women in general. Women may do the casual sex, but they do it with the hope that it'll turn into more. Men enthusiastically do the causal sex with little care if it goes further — with many not wanting it to go further at all.

Women may get more sex than men do on these apps, but it's not what they want. The only people who really get what they want are the top percentage of men who are using the apps for casual sex and the much smaller percentage of women who want the same thing.

Women's relative “success" on dating apps is based on men's metrics.

J. is responding to Rohan's comment on a recent essay in which

eurydice

says that dating apps are still, effectively, built for (and by) men:

Dating apps aggressively reflect male preferences, sexuality neutral. They’re long on photos, short on text. They filter primarily on location, which has some usefulness, but is most useful if the question is “who’s geographically close enough to me that walking to my place for sex is a realistic option” .

Rohan Ghostwind

makes a good point that, while that may be the case, women actually make up most of the leadership and decision making for these apps and that the user interfaces and engagement prompts are designed with women in mind. Like Rohan says, “are we under the impression that men talk about the “Sunday scaries?”

But while some parts of the UI are built with men clearly in mind (see Eurydice's list above), and while it's been established that women need more than photos to determine whether they actually like someone enough to fuck them or even genuinely find them attractive, it's obvious that the feminization of the rest of the user experience is to keep women using them since they're not at all designed with women's natural attraction habits and patterns in mind and wouldn't otherwise attract enough of them to make them usable for heterosexual people. There's a reason women get into clubs for free and why “ladies’ nights” exist, isn't there? As I've talked about with my own experiences, many women often just get frustrated and overwhelmed with the inorganic marketplace experience and often just stop using them, or aren't doing so enthusiastically. Since most women aren't satisfied with a series of eternal one night stands, getting them to use the apps that are built exactly for that — that men use in such a way, even when the app is specifically designed for long-term relationships, like Hinge — is going to require some incentives, even if that means stupid little questions in baby language about being scared on Sundays and integrating astrology into the experience.

Interestingly, groups that have the highest success rate in terms of users wanting the same things and finding actual success in their goals are the ones with niche or kinky interests.²

source

One more time for effect:

Apps rarely benefit anyone but the small percentage of successful men and the small percentage of women who only want causal sex (and some marginal groups for whom it's actually easier to find people like them online).

Everyone else needs to go the fuck outside.

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1. See, the fact that I am only vaguely aware of what this means probably explains a lot about the kind of dating advice I randomly give and why I don’t understand you people and your often self-imposed problems sometimes

2. I had stats saved somewhere showing this to be true but I can’t find them anymore. Just Trust Me, Bro