This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Plenty Of Fish and others are owned by one giant company called Match.com. You are not ugly, a monopoly just puts you down the pile by algorithm to prompt you to pay to increase your chances of more likes (that's not to say that making your profile look good doesn't matter). There are independent dating apps like Coffee and Bagel and Bumble, but either those apps don't have many people or copying Match's anti-consumer behaviour like Bumble does.
Tinder, Azar, Her, Hinge, match.com, meetic, Ok Cupid, Plenty of Fish, and The League are all owned by a single company.
The ratio of women to men on their dating apps are also wack.
Good lord they own basically all the major ones.
Also all the different “X People Meet” apps, but no Linux People Meet? 😭 /s
We meet here bro 😘
I met my girlfriend on IRC, we've been living together for 7 years now. She was trolling people with goatse pics and we started talking about philosophy and poetry etc and then it turned out that she's a super cute canadian girl. This is usually not the story we tell people when they ask how we met.
How is that not an anti-trust issue? Each one started as an independent company trying to add value by bringing something new to the table, and they bought them all up to eliminate the competition and enshittified them all with the same profit-gouging algorithms.
Not to mention the concerted effort they made to make in-person dating a social taboo so that everyone literally depends on the dating apps to find potential partners.
Back before I gave up on dating, when I was still on reddit, I can't tell you how many times I heard the same advice. "Don't approach people in person, nobody wants to be bothered. Just use the apps where you know they want to be approached."
That with the systematic minimization of the shittiness of the apps, and the victim blaming "just work on yourself bro, you must be a shit person if you can't find a partner, so you'd find a partner if you could just stop being a shit person."
Looking back, I wonder how much of that was astroturfing by the Match Group marketing department...
How is that not an anti-trust issue?
Because we live in the bad place. Conservatives are unlikely to pursue anti-trust unless they're using it as a tool to hurt out-group (eg: they might try to break up an organization they perceive as being too queer).
We don't have a strong left in the US. You get glimmers every so often - Lina Khan was trying to do anti-trust work, but then trump returned and that's all moot.
A lot of problems would go away or be less bad if we stopped letting power consolidate. Unfortunately, this is the bad place.
Dating apps should be publicly funded like a kind of public utility. And private dating apps heavily regulated and prevented from advertising. Because currently they making profit by keeping you single.
Like water and air, love should not be for profit.
We need 3rd spaces, online dating is just worse in general. People meet at trading card places and card shops because that's just where people hang out, but that doesn't exist anywhere else really besides bars.
People are becoming more isolated and more online, it's way easier to see if you like someone (and you'll be exposed to many people) if they happen to be in your vicinity rather than typing in text on a dating app.
I spent years getting frustrated on the apps, now I'm ending up marrying my best friend's sister who I've known for 16 years and I was always too afraid to ask out. Turned out she was feeling the same way.
Life's weird when you're socially awkward.
And they're fake hikers and travelers too. I met somebody irl who said one of their interests was eating food but they just go to the places for the vibes and not for the food. Whereas I'm the complete opposite, I would go to a crack den for the best food.
A date I had said their hobbies were walking and hiking among other things. Our 1st date was at a local park with a 20 step stair case that took her out... It was my first exposure to this bizarre labelling that goes on here.
There wasn't a 2nd lol
Humans are just animals at the end of the day. This is all a sexual display of fitness. Hiking and traveling tell people you're physically and financially fit. You can move around no issue. You are social. You are socially and physically healthy.
They lie a ton and show pics of hiking from 5 years ago and act like they can still do all that. Or they never could and the pics are deceiving... Regardless, it's just a game all genders are playing to show sexual fitness. It looks like carbon copies because it's the best way to communicate "my body moves well and I can afford luxury".
dating app companies have different incentives than you, and you cant afford to pay them enough to align the two. I think this is inevitable and it always greatly surprises me when people actually find love over these apps
What's this "Helen Keller wasn't real" meme? I've never heard (or seen) it
I honestly can't afford to lose my wife because there's no way I would find another partner in the modern dating scene. I feel like the bar is way higher than it was in the early 2000s.
social media has convinced folks anything less than perfect means your partner is a total loser.
and everything you possible do is wonderful and perfect and above and criticism.
it's literally insane and the reason why most people are single. they want their partner to be like an elite marathon runner while they can barely walk 5 blocks without getting winded.
people were way more humble and chill before social media brain rotted everyone, but that was over a decade ago at this point. also has nothing to do with dating apps, it's just how folks thing about relationships now. also the popularity of toxic gender war bullshit is off the charts.
I felt exactly this way, and then my wife left me in at the start of this year. The apps are now a complete shitshow compared to when I last used them in ~2020, and I'm not in any kind of scene adjacent to dating. This isn't directed at you (good luck in your marriage), but to anyone else reading this there is hope. I randomly bumped into a girl six weeks ago, plucked up the courage to ask for her number (I've literally only done this once in my life) and we've been going steady since. I now believe in karma and am happier than I've ever been.
Years ago, a friend of mine once had: "Seeking partner skilled in armed combat for the coming apocalypse. Must not be averse to cannibalism" as their bio.
Got 'em a couple DMs I think
and think Helen Keller wasn't real
wat? I'm not on any dating apps, is this a real conspiracy theory people believe?
"Hellen Keller wasn't real" is an immediate swipe away from a profile. I don't care if they're joking or if they're actually a nut job conspiracy theorist. If the latter, obviously we're not gonna vibe, and if the former, that entire joke/line of thinking is prefaced on ableism and the idea that a deaf and blind woman could not have accomplished what she did, not to mention the erasure of a prominent socialist, suffragist, and activist. I fucking hate that joke.
This is the first I've ever heard about it, and I'm so confused
It started as a joke, and now there are actual people who believe that she was either not a real person, or that her accomplishments were faked. People with disabilities are already assumed to be lesser than able bodied people, and this particular trend is stripping away one of the most prominent examples to the contrary. It is also erasing one of the most prominent examples of a famous socialist woman in American history, and a southern American socialist woman at that. Her story is amazing, but more importantly, she is historically significant. She is an example to so many people, and she has been liberal-washed for a century, and now she's being erased entirely. It's disgusting.
A VERY prominent and UNAPOLOGETIC socialist. The way history has defanged her and turned her into a simpleton who learned to speak is an absolute appalling insult to the strong, principled woman she was.
Dating apps are the worst, the absolute worst, way to meet people. I met my husband in a chat room and that's fucking awful right? Dating apps are worse. Go on blind dates, set your friends up, go and scream in the middle of a park, all of those are better than dating apps. Humans don't work like catalogues.
Probably just messaging fake accounts/bots to make it look like women use the app but then real women get the flack for it
at least "designed to be deleted" part of it is truthful. Nothing else to be done with that garbage program.
He's got a point about carbon copy profiles, they all blur together after a while, and it's very difficult to find something interesting to talk about in a lot of them.
"fostering men until they find their forever homes."
I see this one at least 10 times a day.
I mean.. most people are kind of boring. It's not surprising that most profiles will thus be kind of boring.
The biggest factors I think are
The apps suck and are a capitalist nightmare, but there's stuff you can do to improve the odds as a free user.
I just remembered some guy on lemmy that was like "i can't get any dates on these things!" and when pressed, he revealed that he'd talk to women on there for a couple weeks, and then was surprised when nothing happened. No shit. You gotta ask people out.
I met a handful of people on dating apps, had some sex, and the relationships went basically nowhere. Every solid, long-term relationship I have had has come from going places and doing things with people. If I was single I'd start climbing again.