Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps

https://qz.com/1247382/online-dating-is-so-awful-that-people-are-paying-virtual-dating-assistants-to-impersonate-them/

by imartin2k • 8 years ago

371 276 8 years ago

laurieg3• 8 years ago

It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was.

Almost every person would match with me. Everyone would message me straight away. If I didn't reply most would message again in a few hours. A few would get very angry/upset that I didn't reply.

I think Tinder is a real stroke of genius. All users, men and women, get given the same interface and the same choices. But of course things are not really equal. Men shotgun and women pick and choose. Tinder has essentially made Bumble, but they have plausible deniability. No need to enforce any rules about women messaging first when that emerges naturally.

zitterbewegung• 8 years ago

To be honest I think this is true of dating sites in General.

cblock811• 8 years ago

It sounds accurate for Grindr, Scruff and Hornet in the world of gay 'dating' apps as well.

tanbog• 8 years ago

This paper does some interesting work to try and unpack why that is the case: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf

nikanj• 8 years ago

Bumble is an interesting platform. The promise is that women have to message first, luring in men who are frustrated with lack of replies, and women who are frustrated with endless spam.

From what I’ve heard from my friends, 99% of first messages on Bumble are ”hi” or a single emoji, kicking the ball straight back on the men’s side of the field.

I wish dating as a research subject wasn’t so wrapped in weird MRA activism and other politics, there’s a lot of fascinating phenomenoma to be observed.

temp-dude-87844• 8 years ago

Even with the immediate passing of control, the premise still works, because women perform the first pass of filtering, giving them an opportunity to preemptively reject the most undesirable of the pool before they have a chance to reach out. It's also an effective tool to fight the sheer volume of spam.

The same kind of invitation plays out in real life with eye contact and body language.

majormajor• 8 years ago

IME even a "hi" or a wave emoji is far better than on other platforms in terms of the reply rate I get after sending my own message. It gives the woman a double-filter, yes, but it doesn't take much empathy to see why a bit of an imbalance in that direction might result in a better overall environment given the frequency of bad actors/spammers/dick pics on the male side of the fence.

You have to be quicker/better at texting-style communication, though, compared to something like OK Cupid which was a bit more email-like back when I used it last.

rogy• 8 years ago

I used Bumble for a while a bit under 3 years ago and id say 85% of my matches fell into the bucket of 'hi' first messages.

I found that if I only responded to people who actually sent me a 'real' first message it was an actually good experience, good conversation and led to easily the majority of my dates.

stronglikedan• 8 years ago

Anecdotally, I have a real problem striking up conversations with strangers, but even a simple "hi" really seems to put me at ease. I think they're onto something for a subset of the population with my problem, and that's why I prefer Bumble to Tinder.

aphextron2• 8 years ago

I worked for $large_dating_site for a number of years. The real genius of Tinder was giving women the power. We came to the same realization as well: that no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there. Online dating business models are exclusively based around enticing men with sex, and giving women the power to choose precisely who they want.

baron816• 8 years ago

What I’ve long wondered is how women react in the real world now that they have all the power on dating apps. Why would they try to find a date in any other way?

There were a few articles that came out a few years ago arguing that, no, dating apps were terrible for women because it makes men even more noncommittal with such easy access to dates. My hypothesis was that the women they interviewed for those pieces were all going after the same small group of elite men. Thus, ~3% of the whole male population is sleeping around with ~20% of the female population. Makes me wonder if polygamy is the natural course of things.

bartread• 8 years ago

And on that note I'll be cancelling my dating site subscriptions immediately.

Double_a_925• 8 years ago

they will use the app endlessly if real women are there

Do they actually? I've spoken to many men and those apps don't seem to work at all. Usually gets deleted after a few days of usage. Like what's the point of being there if absolutely noone wants to write?

stared2• 8 years ago

The general dynamics tends to he highly tilted, with men doing all the work. It matches with some online experiments:

- "Men on Tinder Explain Why They Swipe Right on Literally Everyone" (https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/ae55xk/men-who-swipe-...)

- "Cupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons" (http://jonmillward.com/blog/attraction-dating/cupid-on-trial...)

A larger context in the "taking initiative" section of "Dating for Nerds (part 2): gender differences" (http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differ...).

dajohnson89• 8 years ago

tinder isn't giving women the power, since the user experience is identical for both genders. what gives women the power is the dynamics of the dating market.

acct1771• 8 years ago

no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there.

Awful to see it written out like that.

Throwaway1987242• 8 years ago

When I was using dating sites, I did the same on OkCupid, and signed up a fake account with the photos of a woman that was slightly above average in appearance. I was curious to see how many messages I would receive, but more importantly, the type and quality of those messages. I thought that would give me a better idea of how to write my own messages (e.g. if 90% of messages were asking the same question, I didn't want to also be asking that same boring question).

The first day I was surprised at the amount of messages I received. I think it was at least 10 in a few hours. However, it quickly faded, and after a few days, I was lucky to receive one message a day. That gave me a little confidence, knowing after the first day, the average woman was not receiving hundreds of daily messages.

Similar to what you said, a few people would get angry if I didn't reply. A third of the messages hinted at sex, thinking they were being clever with winky emojis.

In the end, on my real profile, I think I was decent with messaging. I sent out 200 messages on OkCupid (I focused on roughly the top 10% of profiles over a large radius), and had over 50% of those turn into conversations. My first messages were always similar. I would write one or two sentences that joked about something in their profile and asked a simple question. The idea was it needed to show I read their profile, it needed to make an attempt at being funny, and most importantly, it needed to be easy to reply to within a few seconds. When you write long messages with complicated questions, people don't want to invest the time in a reply, so they'll respond "tomorrow", which never happens. The other thing I did was almost always message women that were online at that moment, and I tried to turn the messages into a real-time conversation with instant replies.

As a simple example, let's say a woman's profile said she liked the Fast & Furious movies. I would write a first message saying, "If you had to choose between me and Vin Diesel, who would you rather date?". There's a high chance she would respond saying the obvious, "Vin Diesel :P", and then I would reply, "Would it change your mind if I said I had 100% more hair than Vin Diesel, and I go for ice cream on first dates?". These type of messages are very easy to reply to, innocent, and people can be creative and fun with their responses. In that example, I'm even hinting at a date, and it doesn't seem pushy. In this case I would then keep writing playful messages and then ask her to meet up for the ice cream like I originally suggested.

EGreg2• 8 years ago

You guys are good. But I have a suggestion. Have your friend reach out first and say he knows someone she will really click with. If she doesn’t go for it, THEN you reach out.

Dating as it stands is only a recent phenomenon. It is far better when three people with different preferences keep the others in mind when out dating. Far better to do introductions than always be out for yourself.

rosege2• 8 years ago

Your comment also reminded me of something I saw. Some guy put the photos of a male model on his profile then started messaging women with really crude/direct messages that there is no way the average guy would have got anywhere with or would have been shouted down - from what he made out nearly all of them sent him their number straight away

wycy• 8 years ago

Pedantic: there's a good chance you have infinitely more hair than Vin Diesel, not just twice as much.

swyx2• 8 years ago

threads like these make me despair about ever dating ever again. as a society we should be concerned about what tinder and bumble are doing to us, but -no one- has the power to stop it because it appeals to such base instincts.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

What are they doing to us?

welly• 8 years ago

I met my girlfriend on Bumble. We have a great relationship, now almost a year in.

Bumble, Tinder etc. are only tools, it's how we use them and plenty of us are quite capable of using them in a "moral" and savoury way.

So it's "doing" nothing to many of us.

mrguyorama• 8 years ago

As a single guy who has little interaction with women, it terrifies me. It's pretty much the only way I'll ever meet someone, but it doesn't fucking work for me.

alexashka3• 8 years ago

Real stroke of genius would be making prostitution legal, and family a big deal.

It'd solve men's natural urges, and women's constant insecurity that they're going to be abandoned, once they get wrinkles. It'd remove so much undisclosed resentment and tension within families and society.

It'd free up people involved in billions upon billions of dollars worth of industry, to do something useful, instead of preying on people's monkey-brain urges and insecurities.

I'm a dreamer, maaan.

tomcooks2• 8 years ago

You mean something like southern Europe 40 years ago.

Wasn't that ideal, for what concerned family and societal tensions.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand and we have exactly the same problems with dating culture that people have been commenting about here.

lumberjack• 8 years ago

The "natural urge" is to procreate, not to simply have sex.

magduf8• 8 years ago

No, what we really need is common acceptance of polyamory, and people getting together in 3-6 adult households. It'd make affording housing a lot easier, it'd solve a lot of loneliness problems, everyone would get more sex, and people could finally get past this idea that their partner needed to satisfy all their check-boxes.

Interestingly, if you look at the polyamory community, you find that men are much more accepting of this lifestyle than women, even though women stand to benefit from it more.

The landlords wouldn't like it, though.

xor1• 8 years ago

I don't understand where the "men only want sex" thing comes from. I think most men want companionship. I know I do.

mirimir• 8 years ago

I'm reminded of RFJason's Craigslist experiment. He posted responses and images. Much hilarity ensued. Until he was sued by a guy in Illinois, and lost ~$75K.

Double_a_925• 8 years ago

Men shotgun and women pick and choose.

The problem is that that is a vicious cycle. The more men shotgun the more women have to be picky. So nobody answers and man have to write to even more women...

Usually this get's "fixed" by limiting the amount of messages men can send. But that doesn't really work.

There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky and men for being desperate. Maybe publicly show the ratio of received/sent messages, or so?

heartbreak• 8 years ago

There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky

I don’t want to misinterpret you, so is this what you meant to write?

magduf8• 8 years ago

Usually this get's "fixed" by limiting the amount of messages men can send. But that doesn't really work.

Tinder has a bit of a mechanism for this: you can only right-swipe on 100 people per day (as an unpaid user). That helps limit the "shotgun" approach to an extent, though it's probably not enough.

I tried the shotgun approach for a very short time once on Tinder. I stopped soon after because I got so many matches from women that I just wasn't interested in or attracted to, and I felt really bad about popping up as a match for them, and then disappearing suddenly, which I've seen women complain about. (Plus I ran into that 100-person limit.) So I only right-swipe for women I have some interest in now.

amelius• 8 years ago

when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was

You should try dressing up as a woman and walking down a random street. I bet it's a totally different experience as well.

sli• 8 years ago

It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was.

It sounds like I'm joking, but if you're a moderately attractive male in a smaller city, a Grindr account will give you a very similar experience. Within an hour I had quite a surprising number of, let's say, risque images sent to me.

Nowhere near the same number of weird or inappropriate messages, though. Some of them were pretty blunt, but nothing I didn't mostly expect, and nothing like the awful things I sometimes see being said to women on the internet.

freeflight3• 8 years ago

It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender.

Don't even need a whole profile, as a teen in the 90's I'd regularly mess around with different names on an online chat system, didn't even have user profiles back then.

Just the name alone would make a major difference how interactions with people went. Barely anybody was interested in talking to "RandomMaleName", but once you logged in as "Tina21" everybody would be all over you and if you played it right, they'd tell you all kinds of personal details about themselves, while I only revealed made up information about a fake persona.

Juvenile me would get an extra kick out of hosing all those guys asking Tina21 for sexting/phone number for phone sex, I'd start sexting with them and after a certain point just write them really weird, off turning stuff, usually ending the whole interaction by notifying them that they tried to jerk off to a 15-year-old dude.

To this day I'm not sure if that was a good thing to do or a bad thing? I guess, at least I taught a couple of people a valuable lesson about the Internet and anonymity.

flamtap• 8 years ago

Sexism aside, the morality of this service is interesting. What if this service was involved in a match, and some time later the couple married?

DoctorOetker2• 8 years ago

simply keep up the appearance that everything was "sincere" from the get go?

ggm• 8 years ago

Ah yes, because relationships founded on white lies are the best ones.

partycoder2• 8 years ago

This should be considered fraud.

saryant• 8 years ago

partycoder2• 8 years ago

Except that some dating apps have micropayments in them. e.g: they sell you the ability to bump you in search results.

Keeping you engaged with fake activity to increase the chances of becoming a paying user seems very questionable.

throwaway_2346• 8 years ago

I guess unless your good looking to hot as a guy Tinder is crickets as girls filter you out.

I'm bi so i use all apps .. i sure as hell wish Tinder was like Grindr and Scruff are for me. Open either app and have tons of messages .. pick and choose who you want to chat with and boom you have a collection of potential guys to meet up with for fun when the mood hits you. I guess that's what its like for average to good looking to hot women ... have a collection of guys to pick, choose and chat. Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys.

Not surprised about paid dating apps and their fake news scams. Match.com suddenly sends you a ton of winks and messages just as your subscription is about to expire yet there all fake or paid impersonators. Not sure how that is legal?

noobermin5• 8 years ago

Even if it is legal is definitely not moral.

throwaway_2346• 8 years ago

Well it's the Internet where half to more of what we read and experience is made up crap to make someone else and their buddies rich.

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys.

Unless you don't meet the minimum height requirement. That's more important than looks.

legionof72• 8 years ago

I honestly feel that IRL, height is less important than a lot of people think. I'm a 5'5 man.

graeme3• 8 years ago

Eh. I'm 5'6". Tinder worked quite well for me. (I look good, to be clear)

I'm sure it would have worked even better if I were 6' and looked the same. But looks on their own do very well.

This was even true on okcupid, where you had to list height. I also got a lot of attention, and routinely got that "congrats, you're attractive" notification the site would send.

(If any short man is reading this, my advice would be: Get lean, and get muscles. This matters far more for you than for taller men, who can coast.)

sp527• 8 years ago

The most important takeaway from this article is that knowing how to flirt IRL is a bigger competitive advantage than ever.

neves• 8 years ago

If I create a dating app I'd use the VC money to contract some sex professionals to create a great atmosphere.

noobermin5• 8 years ago

The resemblance to the career of the lead character from Her is undeniable.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 8 years ago

As we grow accustomed to foisting more and more complicated emotional tasks onto digital butlers, we lose our ability to tolerate inelegance or find value in social failure. Moments of awkwardness and heartbreak are an inevitable part of the dating experience, and they are essential in our evolution into mature adults.

That is a very recent, Western view of finding a partner. For much of history, and even now in large parts of the world, a person's family had/has the job of finding a suitable match often with the aid of "professional" matchmakers. I wonder what percentage of people who grew up in this current Western model of individuals dating and finding partners would trade it for the other model if they could?

noobermin5• 8 years ago

This is not like courtship or arranged marriages. In what you call "much of history" it was done openly and it was clear that you were arranging a marriage for you son or daughter or what have you. This is more covert and deceitful.

magduf8• 8 years ago

The main problem with the non-Western version (epitomized probably by how it's done in India) is that it enforces a very high degree of social conformity: everyone must have the same relationship model, and the same life goals (monogamous marriage, children, etc.), with very little room for variation.

It's impossible I think to say either one is "better", unless you can specify what exactly your goal as a society is. If your goal is a very stable society with everyone following the traditional monogamous marriage + kids path, and minimizing divorce, it seems that the Indian way probably produces better results. If you desire more freedom as an individual, it doesn't.

andrewfromx• 8 years ago

it's like that scene from the movie Hurt Locker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OOI6m4b7c where he's trying to decide which cereal from so many choices. Old fashion family arranged marriages make so much sense to me now. JUST PICK SOMEONE!

6cd6beb2• 8 years ago

I figured something like this would exist, but I don't think it's very useful.

I've walked the dark path of trying to implement "pickup artist" material(can't imagine that'll be received well), and I can say that:

  A) an objective approach works (if you're humble and willing to recognize/adjust for failure)
  B) there's a torrent of snake oil out there
  C) you learn a lot when you try this stuff. A lot.

A lot of that material is laughably bad, but the general formula of "know your value, be confident and unapologetic about what you want, be ready to accept 'no' quickly and gracefully" is the buried gold. Maybe it's just me but grinding through failure after failure after failure taught me those things.

You can't buy them, and if you don't have them, it shows in your behavior.

You can't have someone Cyrano de Bergerac your way into a date by behaving that way, because in the end the girl shows up and meets you.

Furthermore, the proposition that this is a service for people who don't have time to send messages in these apps doesn't hold water. Not having the time to respond promptly is an asset. Bailing on some conversations is an asset. You're a busy man with a lot going on, not a desperate man glued to every prospect.

That's my two cents.

hackits4• 8 years ago

Here is my two cents.

A) Is superior in every way.

Now let me fill in the gaps a little bit and maybe some-one else will find this information useful.

First step is to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself `do` you find yourself physically attractive? Do you have good posture, Do you have a low 10%-16% body fat percentage? Are you dressed to impress or just dress just it over with?

If you answered no, then 10000% work on those aspects of yourself first before wasting time with dating apps and also meeting people in person.

For the remainder or if you're curious keep reading.

You're going to have to come to the realization there are going to be certain percentage of women out there who want to have sex with you. You're going to appeal to a group of women, Hispanic, Greek, Asian, Caucasian, Indian and age groups. How are you going to find this out? You're going to put yourself out there and be judged by women. It sux's, you're going to get some women who're going to receptive to you and there are some women who literally will run away from your approach to them. Though that is going to be the only way you're going to find out what type of Women are attracted to your personality and your appearance.

Finally, forget dating app's. Unless you're the top 5% tall guy with a six pack and a fantastic smile you're wasting your time and money.

Time that is better spent approaching women and learning.

freezepeaches• 8 years ago

First step is to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself `do` you find yourself physically attractive? Do you have good posture, Do you have a low 10%-16% body fat percentage? Are you dressed to impress or just dress just it over with?

I've had exactly none of those things and I have had a fair degree of success with women. In fact, when I started bodybuilding/lifting, I found that my sex drive became unbearably strong and would scare away many women due to how aggressive I had become.

The key is not trying too hard and becoming a good conversationalist/wordsmith. That's what I like to call the right hand path. Of course, there is also the left hand path as well. That involves using pharmaceutical agents such as nootropics like Phenibut or GABA PAMs like Etizolam, but the cost is possible addiction, so I wouldn't recommend it.

adam-a• 8 years ago

I think there's some truth in that. If you're dating you should definitely be putting your best foot forward and part of that means exercising, buying some nice clothes, getting your hair cut etc. When I was dating I also made an effort to work on my "social" presentation. For me that meant trying to take in some relatable media: seeing popular films, reading more widely and just trying to make sure I had topics I could talk about which weren't videogames and sci-fi novels.

I don't think you need to be in the top 5% physically at all. Perhaps if all you want is a hook-up that helps, but I got plenty of dates and I'm now engaged to a woman I met on Tinder and I definitely am not some greek sculpture.

Retric2• 8 years ago

The biggest player I know is/was short and overweight. He however was always looking, fairly charming, and had reasonable expectations.

Swizec• 8 years ago

C) you learn a lot when you try this stuff. A lot.

It basically teaches you how to do sales and run a lead-to-conversion pipeline.

nojvek7• 8 years ago

I knew a guy who ran his own personal CRM.

hrktb• 8 years ago

Of course you learn a lot by doing something day day out until it works.

One important part IMO is that you are optimizing a very specific skillset, and depending on your goal it might not be an optimal for you.

It’s the same as driving for days around town in your car to learn how other people drive, how they react to your car, how your town is structured and dramaticaly improve your driving. You’ll gain invaluable insight from the experience, but from your perspective for instance you could have prefered grinding on tinder instead.

TLDR: people choose their battles

Toast_252• 8 years ago

"I could totally do that if I tried"

xarball• 8 years ago

While I agree with the general thrust of this, and am perfectly fine with the consequences and outcomes that redpill might land you if you're showing responsibility and taking steps to flirt with someone to such length -- I genuinely loathe appealing to a stereotype of women that are interested in this, because the kind of person it appeals to, or the kind of relationship it generates doesn't get me anything I like when it works!

That is to say, unless I feel like being more plastic than a Ken barbie doll, and less significant in identity, emotion, and purpose than the next 5,000 Ken models off the factory line, then I don't see how I couldn't possibly feel any more alone after applying redpill?

What I found after taking redpill and succeeding by their standards, I didn't find myself in any way happier or more at peace with myself, or happier in the company of anyone that is attracted to that. Maybe it has just been highly successful at producing traumatic experiences, which does help me grow. But there has been nothing redpill or the women it has been able to match me with that has been able to counter the type of gutless, "take-take", or just purely sexual tension-oriented relationships it seems to encourage men to get involved with! Those are highly destructive experiences if you're not careful.

My peace of mind is worth so much more than that.

I can respect redpill, because I understand what it's for. But I don't enjoy the people it connects me with. I think it boils down to a lack of a proper examination of personal happiness in redpill's promise at large, and i don't think they contend with that subject nearly as much as they should! (Though I can understand why the women like it, because it encourages men to not care about what they need to grow as a person, while essentially demeaning them to the point of being uncompensated and emotionally-deprived and ego-devalued sex servants =P)

mattmanser• 8 years ago

Redpill is the extreme end of that path, not the middle ground.

duwease• 8 years ago

Exactly. I think there's a huge flaw in even the toned-down version of that that both sexes buy into -- making a dating profile (or just their public personality) as generically appealing as possible. Yes, highlighting your travel and exercise pics to the exclusion of all else will probably get you more dates.. but how satisfying will the connection generally be? "Likes: food, laughter, exercise, travel, dogs" tells me maybe 1% of the information I need to know to determine compatibility.. especially when most people are exaggerating the importance of the travel and the exercise in their daily life. So the 'matches' made on those generic terms, in my experience, are largely unsatisfying and based on physical attraction -- not exactly the recipe for a rewarding long-term relationship.

Meanwhile, the people who were bold enough to actually talk about their more individualized interests got my attention and resulted in some great conversation and dates, even if they didn't result in relationships.

I fell into the trap in my 20's of being generically appealing. I did very well in the 'dating' market, had attractive partners, married a particularly beautiful one. Then I realized that 'success rate' meant squat other than a minor ego boost, and I was stuck with a person attracted to generically appealing me and not ME. And physical attraction fades.

Luckily I got out of that situation, started representing myself accurately, and I live in a large enough city to be able to find at least some women online who do the same. The conversation, dates, and relationships have been SO much more rewarding, because the people connect with ME and not a generically appealing version of me.

I think being generically appealing does build confidence, and confidence is important. But hopefully redpillers and all the generic profile creators online can eventually see the value of specificity.. and attracting quality over quantity. I think it'll breed a lot more happy relationships.

Toast_252• 8 years ago

I've also applied PUA and redpill is toxic, mysoginistic trash. It's nearly impossible to find PUA stuff that's not toxic and mysoginistic.

The only reason I call it PUA is that I don't know what else to call approaching strangers I find attractive in a respectful and honest way, especially because it seems that where I live or the people I go out with never meet new people.

6cd6beb encapsulated it wonderfully, if PUA is taken as only this and not the manipulative alpha male b/s that is taught, I believe it can teach men a lot of perspective and respect towards the opposite sex:

[...] the general formula of "know your value, be confident and unapologetic about what you want, be ready to accept 'no' quickly and gracefully" is the buried gold. Maybe it's just me but grinding through failure after failure after failure taught me those things.

gerbilly• 8 years ago

I think the real "strategy" is to be comfortable being alone and to meet people in real life.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 8 years ago

I've walked the dark path of trying to implement "pickup artist" material(can't imagine that'll be received well)

It's really kind of a shame that the entire pickup community is judged by the scummy, the scammy, and the worst of the MRA/Redpillers (themselves judged by the worst among them) because they really do have the ability to help. Society has given us a completely broken model of how attraction works, and if you don't learn that that model is just something people talk about as a form of virtue-signalling, you try and apply it and find out just how crap it is. You get frustrated, angry, and depressed because the world doesn't conform to your broken model, and when you turn to people for help they feed you back that same broken model.

The real value of pickup isn't techniques, 'game', or tricks, it's showing you how utterly ridiculous that broken model is and helping you to construct a more accurate one.

mathgenius• 8 years ago

I can see the evolution of this: ripe for machine learning disruption. Then in a few years all we have are AI bots chatting each other up, and then informing us who we are to mate.

Casseres• 8 years ago

You might like the TV series Black Mirror. Especially Season 4 Episode 4.

sanderjd• 8 years ago

One of my favorite episodes of the whole run, actually.

alex7o• 8 years ago

What they are doing doesn't even require ai, you can just look for the keywords and output the given phrases. But yes generally Ai can probably get you better results than humans can, it can probably give us some insights about dating.

minikomi• 8 years ago

This is a major part of the Japanese "dating app" experience - they're known as "Sakura"; same as the offline version of people who are paid to, for example, play pachinko and win or stand in line excitedly to buy something. Most Japanese dating apps also don't have a free mode, and require you to use coins or some such token to message or even view profiles. They use Sakura to run down your coins, and then message you saying they want to meet up -- "Message me back! Let's make plans!". Rinse and repeat.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

I don't even get this. If you don't have time to date, how would you have time for a relationship?

laurieg3• 8 years ago

"I don't have time to do x" is almost always code for "I have other things that I want to do more than x"

So it sounds like these people would make time to go on dates, or have a romantic partner, but they find online dating tedious so they pay to have someone do it for them.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

I definitely agree the surface excuse is a lie.

But in this case, I think it's insane. It reduces to, "I don't want to spend getting to know a person I might spend the rest of my life with, so I'm going to jump right to paying somebody to lie to them." It's contradictory, at least for a real relationship. I think what it really means is, "I want a woman in the same way I want a new car: as enjoyable, status-enhancing property. But they insist on talking. So fuck that."

JoshCole5• 8 years ago

I think your confusion comes because online dating isn't dating. A date takes potentially a couple of hours at max. Online dating refers to the process of searching for someone to date via the internet. A date can take an hour or two. Looking for a date online can take hundreds of hours without any results save for a few catfish scams.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

I think you've confused "going on date" with "dating". The process called "dating" has always included the initial part of sorting through possible prospects to go on a date with. Online dating is more efficient than what went before.

The process has also included getting-to-know-you conversation and trust-building, neither of which this impersonation accomplishes.

A date does take a couple of hours max. But if it works, it blossoms into a relationship, which takes significant time. And that same sort of significant time can be applied to dating.

xkcd-sucks2• 8 years ago

Relationship is eating, sleeping, and other stuff complimentary to dating?

bandito11• 8 years ago

Am I supposed to be utterly shocked this happens?

siliconc0w2• 8 years ago

Standard 'its a three legged stool' spiel. Photos, profile, and messaging. Really messaging is the easiest part. Here is a high-conversion-rate formula:

    0) playful message about profile/photo
    1) flirt for one or two exchanges
    2) pivot to drinks.  I like the highly elaborate, "Sounds like something we could take about over drinks, are you free this week?"

Photos are probably the easiest way to stand out. Most guys seem to just do the 'house selfie in a t-shirt' thing. If you try a bit harder and maybe hire a friend for a sunny afternoon with a few changes of clothes to take some creative pictures you can generally do better than 99% percent of guys in your 'range'. This is to say if you're a 7, you gotta date <=7s. This, like the speed of light, seems to be a hard constant of the universe.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

If you're a 7 dating a 5, didn't the 5 break the constant?

Reminds me of this story:

One day in September, in a conference room populated with about 25 members of the Mac team, Steve [Jobs] was lecturing on how to hire.

"A players hire A players," he said. "B players hire C players. Do you get it?"

Apparently not. Somebody in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, "so how do you hire more B players?"

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

siliconc0w2• 8 years ago

Like the speed of light, reference frames matter. The 5 convinced you they were a >=7.

Liron• 8 years ago

Founder of Relationship Hero (YC S17) here.

We also help with online-dating messages, but we'll help you to improve your own communication skills. Text flirting seems like such a trivial thing, but getting better at it can be life-changing, because it ultimately leads to better relationships.

topranks• 8 years ago

New Turing test-like challenge...

Build an AI to automate this process using the same guidelines.

chrischen5• 8 years ago

Honestly if you're lazy enough to rely on the superficialness of online dating apps like Tinder, you're already in a gray area. If you're judging people purely by looks (which would be an inefficiency since in real life in person looks aren't as important), then someone else is justified in re-balancing that inefficiency by doing something like hiring a text writer.

kowdermeister• 8 years ago

looks aren't as important

That's not true for the majority. Looks are the first signal you notice of the other person. Unless you are after poets, artists or other people whose work reach other people without "the looks" then I don't see how - even subconsciously - it's not important. Pics are furthermore do indicate personality.

I agree that Tinder is an industrial scale meat grinder, but the advantage is that wide exposure is better for your chances. It's like saying HI to a tons of people on the street you otherwise wouldn't meet.

magduf8• 8 years ago

The thing about Tinder that sucks is that you don't get a very good idea about a person from it, because all you get is a few pictures and if you're lucky, a very short free-form text session where hopefully they wrote something substantive about themselves.

However, the thing that makes Tinder great (and also Bumble, though I haven't tried that one yet) is that both parties must "like" each other for any messaging to occur. This still isn't the norm on "traditional" dating sites, for some reason. The traditional sites are bad for men, because they're encouraged to put forth a lot of effort to write meaningful messages to women, but almost all the effort is simply wasted because most of them go to women that have no interest in those men, and the man has no way of knowing this.

Tinder/Bumble fix this by forcing the woman to "like" a man's profile first, before he wastes any time and effort writing her a message. It also helps women by massively reducing the amount of unwanted messages they receive from men: if they get unwanted messages, it's partly their fault (and entirely under their control) for "liking" those men, and encourages them to be more selective with their right-swipes (so maybe they'll come up with some strategies for avoiding creeps, such as only right-swiping people with something meaningful written in their profile, and not just guys with gym selfies and backwards ball caps).

chrischen5• 8 years ago

Looks are the first thing you notice in a person, online, but not true in real life. In real life people meet based on mutual interests, serendipity, or simply having the balls to initiate convo. In those situations looks take a back seat.

People can adjust to looks given enough time, and their physical attractiveness to certain types are shaped by their positive interactions with a person. Apps like Tinder basically force looks to be at the forefront, despite all that.

golergka• 8 years ago

This messaging “blast” technique may appear lucrative compared to the average neighborhood yenta, but it has occurred to me that good matchmaking may not be in the company’s financial interest. When a client pairs up, they leave the service.

This is only true if client is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship.

fimdomeio• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure we're very close to getting a I'll Have Sex For You As A Service. I love how the article tries to show the moral dilemas but I see none... you're getting paid to impersonate someone else in a kind of interpersonal relationship. That is just plain awful, I don't see how a dilemma can exist there.

factsaresacred• 8 years ago

His blog may not be to everyone's taste, but the writer 'Delicious Tacos' pioneered this with OK Cupid years ago. On his blog he shares his online dating exploits along with some nice openers ("You are attractive, and I want to go out with you. Basically" being one that I stole and overused).

Anyway, all that online dating made him horribly cynical. But damn if it doesn't make for good writing:

If she doesn’t give the number, if she ignores your request and tries to continue the conversation– it’s dead. Maybe means no. Hesitation means no. I’ve had a few exceptions. But frankly, if a woman wants to make you work for it, it’s an insult. And all online conversation is just a chance to f%ck up. The point of OKCupid is that we are dehumanized slabs of f%ckmeat and there are a million of us. No individual matters. Move on.

For more: https://delicioustacos.com/2014/08/04/okcupid-starter-kit-co...

watwut5• 8 years ago

Maybe means no. Hesitation means no.

Not sure it is cynical. It might just be interpreting contemporary human communication correctly. In other contexts, "maybe" tends to be used when the other person don't really want to do whatever you want them to do. If you just spent two days trying to convince someone to go white water kayaking, then it normally means he dont want to be kayaking, it is the same.

car_invasion• 8 years ago

Such thinking work as a quick filter so you don't get to get committed a lot.

girvo• 8 years ago

His later writing is a lot more cynical. And brilliant.

noir_lord2• 8 years ago

I heard the horror stories about online dating however my experience as a man was nothing but positive.

I got responses maybe half the time and a date (coffee, nothing involving alcohol) maybe a third - I probably messaged 15 women over a year.

Two proper relationships and one that is two years old in July and I plan to spend the rest of my life in.

I did not use the shotgun approach, I excluded any woman who didn't fill her profile in with information (if they don't tell you about themselves how the hell do you know if you have anything potentially in common), excluded ones with terrible spelling and grammar (I'm not Chaucer but again it shows effort) and then only replied to ones where we had at least some interests in common (the two relationships where cycling and heavy metal respectively).

I wasn't looking for one night stands, didn't push for dates, asked questions relevant to their interests and discussed mine.

And it was all fine.

My current partner showed me her messages after we'd been dating for a while and it was just a sea of "hey Babi, want sum fuck?", I mean she speaks three languages and has a degree in finance that approach was never going to open a conversation.

My bar was "if I didn't find this person attractive would I want to be friends with them?"

If the answer wasn't yes then it was a pass.

I wasn't on there just for sex, if that was the goal I can just go out on the piss on a Saturday night.

I also avoided tinder like the plague, it's just too shallow (for me), I did like OKC though (where I met my current partner).

graeme3• 8 years ago

Okcupid adopted a Tinder mechanic recently. You now have to swipe on photos and match before you can send a message.

virgil_disgr4ce• 8 years ago

OK, so... since no one else has asked... are you really hot?

chatmasta• 8 years ago

About eight years ago I knew a teenager making over $100k a month sending dating site affiliate offers through Chatroulette. He had a bot that setup a fake stream and then pushed the affiliate links in the chat.

This is not new. Back then it was affectionately called “e-whoring.”

walrus016• 8 years ago

The new thing with this is hiring offshored clickfarm workers (basically the same recruit pool of people who would be farming gold in WoW for $1.25/hour in a developing nation, or working in an IRS-scam call center), who multitask and use a set of pre-prepared scripts and their own customizations to have a few lines of back and forth chat with the (mostly male) rubes, then send them an affiliate link to get them to click on. This has the advantage of putting a human in the loop to solve captchas, and enough randomness from the human's behavior that the bot-like behavior is not immediately apparent.

spodek2• 8 years ago

HN being mostly male and as a guy, I've seen this discussion on the frustrations of online dating and how the system evolves many times.

Are there similar threads in mostly female communities to see their perspective?

pc86• 8 years ago

Any mostly female community on the internet inevitably gets overrun with men trying to provide their perspective. /r/twoxchromosomes on Reddit is now 75-80% male in the comments, or more.

spodek2• 8 years ago

Sounds like the boy scouts in real life. It seems to happen in both directions.

mynegation• 8 years ago

Shameless plug for a friend who described the experience of having virtual dating assistants in a book: "Dating Vandalized".

https://www.amazon.ca/Dating-Vandalized-Katerina-Lyadova-ebo...

vinceguidry• 8 years ago

I wonder if dating is one of the few arenas of human life in which tools and services to make it easier create invariably bad ethics. When you boil it all down, mating is an adversarial process dressed up as a cooperative one, making deception the order of the day. Tools and services, even with the best of intentions, wind up only serving those deceptive purposes.

In my own life, despite being an uber-introverted nerd, I've gravitated towards just the normal way of finding people I'm interested in in person and just asking them out. The advantage of this is feedback is much easier to intuit when the person you're asking out is right there in front of you.

I don't really see the point anymore in spending large amounts of time and effort to optimize a algorithmic online search pattern when daily life in a city gives one all the bandwidth one could ever need to find someone.

walrus016• 8 years ago

If you really want to see something weird (from an American perspective) take a look at "matrimonial" websites such as shaadi.com , and Indian dating apps. The selection criteria for ethnic groups and religions! In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad, in India (and Pakistan, and Bangaldesh) apparently it's the norm.

jasode2• 8 years ago

In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad,

Is that really true? I've never heard of the common phrase "swf looking for swm"[1] -- being called out in mainstream circles as racist.

Unlike employment or assigning bus seats in Alabama, the domain of romance was given the latitude for racial preferences without being demonized as "racism".

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="swf+looking+for+swm"

walrus016• 8 years ago

in south asia it's much more specific, because there is the unspoken requirement that whoever they match with has to be of suitable ethnic group, religion, caste, etc to be acceptable to the parents.

also language, because between the three largest south asian countries there's something like 25 languages spoken...

throw09843202• 8 years ago

I don't see what's wrong in being upfront about what you want and facilitating that. It keeps the process simple and works as a pretty good initial filter.

While you're talking about the melting pot in the western world, it just so happens that eventually most whites end up with just whites, and blacks just blacks. Most beautiful women end up with rich men, and religious people end up with religious people. Long term "melting pot" relationships aren't as common as you think. If sexual selection eventually filters all but those common traits, why not be blunt about them?

E.g., while the Indian dating sites you talk about bluntly list salary, western sites use complicated proxies (like interests == international tourism, or your profile photo with a tesla you own).

That dating has to be complicated and subtle and what you need has to only be "hinted" isn't any better than being blunt about what you're looking for, and being blunt about what value you think you'll provide to the other. At the least, you'll have saved time and heartbreaks.

walrus016• 8 years ago

I didn't say that it's wrong, just that it's weird and different from American cultural norms. Things americans do are weird and different to Indians. I think one of the main differences, and this is a gross overgeneralization, is that south asian dating sites and apps are much more aimed at people who are looking for marriage. Whereas Americans enjoy "casual dating" - good luck getting a casual dating app to take off in Peshawar, Pakistan.

2474• 8 years ago

Hold on... So there are companies out there that you can pay to do your flirting for you?

I don't know what this says about us as people, but damn... that's so sad.

lolc• 8 years ago

This is how it will end:

https://www.oglaf.com/performance-anxiety/

Not safe for work obviously.

And at least they're honest.

chmaynard• 8 years ago

This just confirms my strong distrust of online messaging with a stranger. Life is short. If you can't agree to meet me for coffee and conversation in a neutral location, I'm not interested.

twothamendment2• 8 years ago

Back in the chat room days, I jumped into one that I knew was frequented by a male coworker. I'm male, but picked a female name and started to chat with him. Since we were local he suggested meeting up. That would have been a bit awkward, so I gave him the address to my friend's all girls apartment and the name of her roommate. She ended up marrying the stranger who showed up unannounced at her door.

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

Now that's a hell of a story! We're you invited to the wedding?

twothamendment2• 8 years ago

Yes, and they made me stand up when they told the story.

misterbowfinger• 8 years ago

Oh my lord, these comments are really surfacing the number of incels and MRA's on hacker news. Wow.

When I hear criticisms of the tech community being so bro-y and full of insecure dudes, I tend to rebuff them because I don't personally see it as much. But man, that behavior is coming out in full force on this post.

forgottenpass2• 8 years ago

How lackadaisical has stereotyping gotten that that there is any overlap between the sets {incels, MRAs} and {bros}?

Aren't they mutually exclusive by definition? Or does "bro" now mean "any men I don't like"?

sorokod• 8 years ago

If you squint just a bit, these impersonators look a lot like headhunters / recruitment agents.

Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps

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