Isn’t the entire point of the profile and matching system to filter incompatible people out? Why can I match with 50 people and not a single one wants to get a coffee or something after exchanging a few pleasantries? Everybody hates these things and yet they refuse to do anything IRL to get off them. Is there some Manchurian candidate activation codeword that I’m missing? I feel like everyone treats this shit solely as an ego booster and actually gets pissed off that anyone tries to interact with them. How do you meet people in hellworld if you don’t drink?
Me after dozens of dead-end back-and-forths that lead to nowhere despite having shared interests and presumably being attracted to each other since we matched: 
Hmm, maybe it’s the extreme commodification of relationships and atomization under capitalism that prevents you from getting anywhere with this garbage 
Nope, must be because @[email protected] didn’t say my favorite “The Office” quote and send me a playlist with 50 of the greatest songs I’ve never heard that made me instantly fall in love with them. I have no idea what other people expect from these things but I’m not doing labor for someone that I don’t even know is real. Thanks for reading my rant, any advice is appreciated.
-The worst fucking take on online dating I’ve ever read on a previous thread about online dating.
It is worse and I truly don’t know what someone is supposed to do about it; back when I was single it was far less enshittified and to some extent people were actually interested in taking a risk and talking to the other person rather than getting addicted to perfectionist swiping.
It’s definitely worse. My spouse and I met via OKCupid in the before-time, before enshittification (and the Match dot com buyout) took hold. We’ve been together ever since because we’re both fuckin’ weirdos. Yes, the personality quiz shit was just stripped down Myers-Briggs with a coat of paint, but hey – some of those scores were great as early warning signs and/or red flags (the not-fun kind). If nothing else, the random questions (and associated match scores) were at least somewhat predictive of whether one might get along with a prospective partner, or if they might have shared interests or views.
That initial version of the site right after the re-brand from The Spark (2004 to mid-2005) was decent overall, but then they started fucking with the matching algorithm by hiding or skewing results based on attractiveness and so forth. It went from a conversation starter to an incel factory.
Dating sites failing at bringing people together with lasting satisfaction is, I think, working as intended now: repeat customers, pressured to pay more, pretty much forever because even the “premium” matches are clickbait more than satisfaction-driven.
It’s like decades of fast food technology where it’s intended to be as unsatisfying as possible while giving little rushes while it’s eaten.
You could actually look through the questions and saw what they answered to see if there were any deal breakers, or deal makers for that matter. You could even get some idea of sexual compatibility early on, even though that’s not a first date conversation. It used to be a lot better.
I think this was actually the best system. Is a better system even possible? Removing it means I have to wade through 100x as many dick pics and manually performed interrogations just to find the non-red-flag.
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“People complained about” doesn’t magically banish the possibility that something became worse in some ways, especially because online dating services are tweaked regularly to keep people paying.
People have complained about war for thousands of years if not longer, but chemical warfare, machine guns, white phosphorous, and nuclear weapons are worse than spears.
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Chemical warfare, machine guns, white phosphorous, and nuclear weapons were not constant for all of those thousands of years. They came later, which is exactly my point about how things do change over time and can get better/worse in different ways.
You still have the untenable claim of “things are only exactly as good and bad as they ever were” and it’s thought-terminating and useless. There’s no purpose to saying it except maybe a false sense of superiority.
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Still not seeing a point to your apathy advocacy here. It just seems self-congratulatory and based upon impossibly unlikely presumptions about things being exactly and only as good and bad as they always have been over time.
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That’s some sheer Pinker-brained smuglordery right there. Telling people that are having a bad time that nearly every single other thing is supposedly better therefore they should never express their frustrations with the here and now is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche for your own benefit.
