Who had?

My experience from looking at how men presents themselves to gauge "the competition" back when I was single was that most guys have absolute garbage photos on dating profiles.

> When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.

You're never going to make the bottom 5% look like the top 5%, but you can certainly move yourself very significantly up. To take your examples, if you're short don't post pictures of yourself next to things that highlight how short you are. If your face is ugly, don't highlight it, and so on.

What is cope is to dismiss that your failure to get responses can't at least to a very significant degree be mitigated by presenting yourself better.

It's how guys decide to keep posting the utter shit pictures most men put on their dating profiles.

Seriously: Ask women to help you pick photos or for advice on how to do better. Worst case, hire a female photographer.

As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.

In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.

Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.

It's perfectly valid for women to want men who are willing to put in more effort than the barest minimum.

Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.

After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.

The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.

I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...

[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.

They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.

You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.

For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.

It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...

"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.

I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.

I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.

Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.

> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.

The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)

[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.

Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.

That's okay - keeping track of all the sites Match Group have bought and trashed is difficult.

But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.

Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.

And that was exactly my point. You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.

> IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.

I didn't come even close to suggesting otherwise.

As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.

The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.

I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.

You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.

And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.

But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.

That matters when considering what to regulate. A lot of people pushing for regulation are pushing for blocking data centres instead of regulating the externalities they claim is their issue.

But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...

Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.