Oh, I was wrong about the Tinder thing, it is that bad

I was wrong, and you all (as well as my younger friend) were right. Some context: a younger guy I know through work recently got what he perceives to be a nuclear breakup, in which his girlfriend of four years’ standing just dumped him… without any warnings that he picked up. More likely, he is an oblivious younger guy who thinks he is the man and had started taking the chick for granted and/or ignoring her subtler signs. Or who knows, maybe she did just wake up and drop him one day.

He was devastated for a month then signed up for online dating, like everyone else, notably on Tinder, and… it was not good for him. I’ve met his ex and she’s quite attractive, although I suspect she’s going to run to fat due to low discipline… probably a low 8 today and might have been higher when they met. My friend got on Tinder and a few weeks ago started telling me how bad it has been for him. I said that it can’t be that bad, relying on my four, five year old memories of it… I bragged to him, “I will make a Tinder account, lie about my age, and I’ll show you how to do it.” Mentally, I thought, “It can’t be that hard, especially with good pictures.” I also told him to Google “daygame” and read the Neil Strauss book, but I don’t think he’s done either.

I did make the Tinder account and it has changed. The number of matches I got, even with very similar profiles, dropped majorly. I paid for the version that shows me who likes my profile, and my Tinder reaction is, “Where are all these fat chicks coming from?” While I too have read about how half of Americans are fat and another quarter “overweight” (polite term for fat)… I have never seen so many fat chicks in one place. I guess they are invisible to me in everyday life, unless they are blocking the sidewalk or I have to sit next to a sugar addict on a plane.

I ought to apologize to my colleague/friend and to the guys online who I privately doubted… RP Murphy / Red Pill Dad has been writing about the misery of swipe-on-demand online dating, and I’m glad I didn’t say anything publicly to chastise him, because he is correct and I was not.

(Added subsequently: If you want a shot at making Tinder work, see Andy’s guide, “Get Laid a Tonne on Tinder [Part 1] – Improving Your Looks & Taking Photos.” I have not personally attempted Andy’s strategies, but they seem plausible, and his guides are comprehensive. By the time you are a high-value-enough guy for Tinder to work I think offline, real-world will work too.) 

Tinder is owned by a company called Match.com, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing Match.com and Tinder for fraudulent business practices, including fake profiles and fake expressions of interest. Match.com is almost certainly doing the same thing on Tinder, possibly by leaving old and out-of-date profiles up. Back when I used to do online dating before the swipe app revolution, it was easy to run out of attractive, active matches, even in a city. Tinder never seems to run out, which means that there are either thousands more attractive women online at a given time (unlikely), or Match.com is lying, fudging profiles, and holding some attractive profiles in “reserve” for subscribers. The level of backend manipulation is outrageous.

I was on Tinder for like 10 – 12 days and two girls of note came out on dates. One of them had a Snapchat listed, so I messaged her on there… she replied (surprising, as she was hot) and quickly told me that she is “sort of” a “model and escort girl.” I told her that’s fine and then told her that I’ve dated girls who are sex workers before (this is true, albeit non-monogamously). Sent the Tinder girl some pics of me + one of the sex-worker girls together. Tinder girl asked me how much they charged an hour!… and how much she should charge. I laughed and told her that she was thinking about it all wrong and we should talk about it over drinks. She said okay.

Over drinks we talked about why she wants to do it, what she’s doing with her life (kind of in school, but her answers are flakey enough to make me think not in school), and I am studiously watching her eyes and not her prominently displayed tits. After a while, at the second bar, I tell her a little bit about what I understand about the sex work business.

Being an escort who makes good money and (ideally) avoids bad situations is only partly about having an available pussy and a good body. The rest of it is a mix of psychologist, customer service, and understanding the male mind. Most guys are not looking *just* for sex… Nash has been talking on Twitter lately about how guys are emotional about chicks, just not in the way that many chicks expect. Most guys, even guys who don’t want to commit are not seeking totally mechanical casual sex where they nut, roll over, and leave… they are seeking to connect with the chick. But many chicks are too f**ked up to let the proper connection happen. There is some more to this argument… I hope we get a Nash post on it soon.

Back to the story, two bars, some kissing between bars, some making out in bar #2, and she comes back but is a little skittish. She is also young and maybe not used to hooking up with adult guys in adult guy spaces, so I pour the wine and after some wine do the kissing again. I can tell that she’s nervous and I call it out. She admits she’s nervous and I tell her not to be, but I’m getting kind of weird energy so I pull back and do a “back to college” move and suggest we watch something on Netflix… I have an account for a reason… so I pick Sense8… seems to be my go-to for some reason, and we start watching on a computer. It seems to work because she relaxes. The escort talk is mostly gone and after ten or 15 minutes we’re f**king and it’s actually quite nice.

After she re-opens the escort talk… and I’m thinking, “Has she just ‘paid’ me for more advice about sex work?” To be honest I think the answer is yes. I go on with the spiel, guys are there for sex but also for validation, for a pretty girl to tell him he’s handsome, he’s good in bed, his wife doesn’t appreciate him properly, his boss should give him a promotion, etc. etc. Not as crudely as I’ve put it here, but good sex workers do all those things… and are usually seeking more like a monthly allowance situation, which means less sex (mileage on her pussy) and more money. All things that guys who have been consultants of any kind understand… you want to get out of the “commodity service provider” category and into the “essential business practice and improvement category.” Like the consulting things discussed here.

She seems impressed, although she won’t let me shoot nude pics (how is she going to escort??), and she stays over. We have another two sex-dates together. I learn her parents are divorced… not good… she admits she is between schools right now… she reminds me a little bit of Low-cut top girl, although hotter and less combative, but a little bit lost and with f**ked up intersex dynamics. Despite her physical attractiveness I could not get into her and during the third date suggested that we go to a sex club together. I’d seeded the idea a little bit with the concept that monogamy is strange if you think about it… but she was not receptive and then ghosted me. That is fine. I was using sex clubs as a filter.

The other chick was a high 6 or so, not as attractive as her pics, but had a decently bright and bubbly personality. We told a lot of dating stories, then moved into more life trajectory and emotional ideas… she seemed to vibe with it… two venues, back to my place, we start kissing again and she stops me to say that we can’t do this if I’m just going to ghost her. I tell her my views on ghosting, articulated at the link, but then I also turn into a girl and say, “You’re right, we shouldn’t do this tonight.” That’s often a line from game, but I mean it… at that moment I don’t want to bang a girl who’s going to get hurt by it after… I can tell she is wrong for me (not hot enough, smart enough, personality not good enough), and then the script reverses and she says she really wants to and that she wasn’t trying to stop me. I tell her honestly that I don’t think we’re right for each other… she then gets on her knees and starts blowing me, to recapture momentum… I’m saying that I don’t think we should do this and I don’t want to set bad expectations that I am not going to live up to… she has stopped talking and keeps performing… it does feel like a performance, which is not my favorite feeling, but in the end I am still a guy and go with it.

We do date two… it’s also okay… before we have sex I just break out the idea of going to a sex club (also prematurely, as with the wannabe escort)… she is not into it either and looks like she’s going to cry as well… and she talks bitterly about how guys just want to f**k and no one wants a relationship. Two chicks off Tinder, two sessions in tears or near tears. I’m kind of depressed, but I ask her about what the guys on Tinder have in common… she doesn’t know… I give her a version of “Mismatched sexual market value (SMV): Diagnosis and cures,” and I tell her that she’s probably like most people doing online dating and trying to get guys who are at least 20% more attractive than her, and that’s almost always going to lead her to disappointment.

Like most people, she is dumb and wants to know if I’m saying she’s ugly. She’s not ugly, not at all, but attractiveness is a spectrum… if she is trying to date guys higher than her… guys who look good online… she is going to have problems. I don’t think she is receptive to this and it probably just makes her angry. I tell her she should just stop doing monogamy… this doesn’t seem to make her happy either. We have sex anyway, about an hour later, and the next day I tell her that I like her but that I think she is looking for someone who is not me. She doesn’t reply. Ghosted again.

These two are out of probably 100+ chicks I have liked or messaged via Instagram or Snapchat. Neither count properly, in my opinion. Most of the Instagram ones did not reply. Makes me think about, Could Instagram be becoming an important adjunct to game?

So what do I think about Tinder?

Tinder gives paying customers boosts up and beyond whatever they say they do, so I bought the premium features. One of them lets me see who has liked me. Almost everyone who did, was fat. Literally, where are all these fat girls? They must be all around me, and I just don’t notice them at all, unless they’re in my way (to be fair, they often are). I’d guess that you need to buy the better versions of Tinder to make a go at all.

What happened to Tinder? Some possibilities include…

1. I’m doing it wrong somehow. Maybe I need longer conversations. I’m not and never have been a fan of long online conversations, because ten minutes in person will reveal compatibility far better than ten hours of online conversation, but the market may have shifted in that direction.

2. My profile is/was too tuned to jackass party boy. I changed it halfway through.

3. Lack of Instagram presence is holding me back.

4. I didn’t put enough time in: in my defense, this was a low time commitment… previous forays in this world have shown that 90% of the output emerges from like 10% of the time, and that if it doesn’t happen fast, it’s time to move on and try another strategy. It took the belligerents in WWI way too many years to learn that horses are worthless and charging into entrenched machine gun positions is stupid. Humans are resistant to reality and I am not an exception, however much I want to fancy myself one.

5. Something else I’m not aware of.

Out of the ten or so acceptably attractive and seemingly normal chicks I matched with, two wanted to go on dates apart from the 6, both were bad (see below). Generally, I unmatched if the date wasn’t going to happen, or removed them from Instagram if that was the contact point. My sense from talking to people in real life is that many people let matches sit there and linger for weeks and months… this seems to provide chicks with a sense of unlimited possibility, which is bad (for guys as well as the chicks themselves, I think). Guys should un-match or block the chicks if it’s not moving forward.

Also, I hadn’t 100% appreciated the extent to which some chicks are into Instagram. A large percentage of chicks appear to be chasing Instagram attention; how many deeply understand that online attention is garbage? I don’t recall this from long-ago forays into Tinder. To do online seriously, I think need an Instagram thing as an extension of online dating. Fortunately, I don’t want that.

One entertaining girl I messaged on Snapchat, a standard opener. Opened, no reply from her. Then I did a Torero-like recovery text, figuring that I’d see what happened, and she replied, “You have to understand I get a million messages a day, I only reply to the pictures.” Incredibly bitchy, but also maybe good advice. I replied the same is true of me (it isn’t, thank God) and wished her luck. And then removed her.

My impression from interacting with people in their 20s is that a lot of guys retain random chicks on social media accounts when they shouldn’t… this is bad for the guy (his brain incorrectly thinks he’s got a shot) and addictive to the chick (cause chicks love attention). I did message some chicks (on Instagram, it appears you can message chicks without following them), and then removed them when they didn’t reply or didn’t want to go on a date. Perhaps this is the “wrong” thing and chicks watch guys’s feeds, then message the ones they find interesting. If so, that seems like a terrible way to be in the game, but, again, I could be wrong on this.

If this online thing is really how 20-somethings are trying to pair off, I understand why they are all miserable… I don’t mean to be an old codger, but something has gone seriously wrong. The number of articles about social and emotional problems in Gen Z is enormous. If they are on Tinder, I see why… it is so damn depressing, far more depressing than I could have imagined, far more depressing than daygame (or maybe I have enough practice to not to be too hurt by blowouts?). And the number of fat chicks… it’s like a zombie army of them. Chicks must also be unhappy because so many of them are too fat to attract a man’s attention and lack the fortitude to implement the simple systems needed to be height-weight appropriate. I have long disliked the arguments about modern life being fundamentally f**ked up, but using Tinder makes me think they have some validity.

I can see why some non-elite guys get radicalized by attempting Tinder, since it’s a depressing and yet awesome display of female privilege… female privilege has always existed, of course, but it’s not been so in your face… a huge parade of attractive chicks, all implicitly saying “no.” Worse than them is the even larger parade of not-so-attractive chicks, all also saying no.

Apart from the two chicks I told stories about, I did go out with two other random chicks who turned out to be fatter than I thought. Did chit-chat for an hour… I will say that fatter chicks are way more engaged and work harder to impress me, but it just… doesn’t work. I can’t be bothered. I feel bad for fat chicks. Just not bad enough to try and bang ’em.

How many guys stay with a woman not because they’re excited about her, but because they don’t think they can do any better? Bet a lot of guys do.

Among the two non-fatties I met, the would-be prostitute is the more interesting one. Has the figure for it. But she is just not that smart, which I could tell by talking to her and trying to explain some about what successful prostitutes do (it isn’t just the sex).

She also wouldn’t let me shoot nude photos of her at all, even though shooting a chick nude is somewhat normal today, especially at the beginning of an affair, but refusing is strange for someone who is going to let strangers shoot loads into her for money.

With both chicks, I told them a lot about what I actually think, and that was probably “bad game.” I was having a Twitter conversation about “honesty” versus “social skills” or “palatability” recently, where one guy said you should be scrupulously honest with everything you say to chicks. It’s an opinion and I understand why he has it. But I think it’s also a good idea to have the social skills to know what you should say and when you should say it… to take a non-game example, if you have a junior colleague who wants to take an assignment he’s not ready for, you could say, “No. You suck.” In some circumstances that could be appropriate, but in many cases it will sting him and make him hate you.

You could instead say to him, “What skills do you think the assignment needs?” Lead him down that path. Ask him what he thinks he’ll be doing in that assignment. Ask him how he thinks he’ll handle some of the challenges that arise. If he can’t answer some of those questions… he’s likely to see the problems for himself. And then you can say, “Work on those skills, show me work product [x], and then we’ll talk again.”

Same effect, different outcome, right?

Sometimes being super blunt is the right thing to do. More often, it will alienate people, especially early on. With the 8… she lacks the internal ability to realize she’s not that smart and as a result has not thought through the various things that her job entails. Maybe she will learn them over time, but I’m not sure she has the intelligence to do that. Her emotional intelligence doesn’t seem to be particularly high either. I warned her that there’s a good solid chance she’s going to have some really negative experiences if she’s meeting totally unknown guys for paid sex off Tinder.

She almost started crying (second date). Didn’t quite cry, but almost. I tried to comfort her some… and told her to get a job as a hostess at a restaurant or something like that. She has had jobs like that, but the pay is not high and at the last one some guy working there was apparently chasing her around, thinking she’s a free bread basket and he wants to dive in for the goodies. Although her story was somewhat garbled. She seemed to be looking at me for moral support and I kind of shrugged and was like, “That’s guys.” Put your foot down. I don’t know, call the police if he’s touching her without her consent. She strikes me as the sort of girl who can’t say no properly, who will do so in a flirty way that says to men, “Come hither.”

Or… who knows… maybe she was f**king the guy, and some other guy was jealous and made things uncomfortable for her. This is another “narrative” thing. Most chicks complaining of “sexual harassment…” it’s bullshit. It’s abetted partially by the chick, like most guys who get conned are getting conned because they’re trying to get something for nothing.

Both these chicks are examples of how NOT to seed non-monogamy. To do it properly, a chick has to be invested in you and has to be largely in your frame. It should be done like 6 – 12 weeks after the initial sex. I used it here (and have used it in similar circumstances) as a filter for chicks I’m not 100% into… they can get introduced to the world, I can get credit for bringing new chicks in, etc. It’s a low probability play that I use in situations when I’m going to let the girl go anyway… so I might as well test to see if she has deep non-monogamous fantasies that I can engage. In both their cases, the answer is no, or I just couldn’t be bothered to do it right.

What a depressing experience… there seems to have been a “golden age” of online dating from like 2006 – 2014 or 2015… when being online got old enough to make online dating not be too weird, but before smartphones and the masses destroyed it.

I think I also haven’t properly appreciated an ecosystem advantage I have (or had, as I am pretty much letting it go, I think). The power of real-world meeting has always been large, but it seems to have actually grown as more people have heaved themselves online.

I feel like kind of an idiot for mentally scoffing at the guys who denigrate online dating apps… I dunno, maybe Bumble works better, because it forces chicks to make a decision. Overall, though, some of the anger among the Red Pill communities makes a little more sense… if my primary experience of dating were of online dating, I’d think women are idiots too… although I’d be wrong, I’d be basing that view off a limited number of women and a circumstance not favorable to guys. The anger of women towards men also makes a little more sense… women don’t actually like having to choose between 30 different, very similar appearing guys, I think. At the same time, they go out with the hottest-seeming guys… get f**ked… then the guy moves on… then the woman posts something online about how ALL MEN ARE DOGS… because she is chasing the OMG hottest guy, who has lots of other options. Truly a situation to breed discord. In real life, people who behave as dysfunctionally as they do online will fail.

I also don’t believe women who can’t find dates online. They are being unreasonable and not dating effectively.

A lot of younger chicks also seem to be social idiots, spending too much time online and not enough time in the real world, and their social idiocy becomes self-reinforcing. This applies to guys too and explains why so much of the Red Pill discourse is what it is… it’s being driven by guys who are spending 4+ hours a day online, instead of going out into the real world and meeting chicks. Or even other guys. A lot of younger chicks seem more socially idiotic than they did when I was like 20… Japan shows us where we’re going.

So many people are living contrary to human nature. Too much time online, too much sugar and simple carbs, not enough time exercising, no time creating. Too much consuming, too little creating. Half of teenagers have social/emotional problems like anxiety and depression… because of how we live now… and we are too addled to learn how to live properly. We are meant to interact with other humans in real life… not an infinite sprawl of their shitty pics online, working for social media companies without being paid for it.

There is a meta lesson here, too, which is that real experience beats theorizing. I didn’t appreciate how f**king bad it is. In a few relatively short years, the whole thing changed around. I also didn’t appreciate how mal-adaptive a lot of the female behavior seems to be online. Or is it that the adaptive chicks just get snapped up faster? Whatever the source is, I was just f**king wrong. It’s humbling to be so wrong.

I would guess that it can be useful to use online dating once every 2 – 3 months to pick up any easy pickings who are new to online… otherwise, not at all… and like I said, it’s just f**king depressing.

If I am a high-quality guy (I let others make that determination), I made the Tinder market a little bit worse when I deleted my account. Who is left when the high-quality people with good social skills and lives leave?

I will say that I feel validated in pursuing the non-monogamy dating patterns I’ve followed, as dating couples and some single chicks WITH a chick is way more fun than pursuing it alone. Doing so has also helped me develop pretty large social networks through friends and friends-of-friends. When a woman breaks up with her boyfriend, her first source of new dick is often guys she already knows… and ideally guys she’s already f**ked… meaning, me.

I knew that non-monogamous dating is a kind of force-multiplier effect: more sex with less work. Until this experiment I didn’t appreciate how much the force-multiplier works. I had thought it was like a multiplier of 1.5 or 1.75 or something like that. Now I think it’s like a 3 – 5x multiplier, at least if you’re a guy who just wants more sex with hot chicks… Nash seems to like relatively inexperienced chicks, with particular life histories… the kinds of chicks who are not going to end up at sex clubs, for the most part… so for someone like that, what I’ve done is the wrong route. For someone like me, this seems like it’s been an incredible deal, which I didn’t understand until recently. Seeing the conventional-dating online wasteland has changed my view. Now I think I am more of an advocate for this than I was, for a guy who wants sex with a lot of different women.

Maybe all the supposed Tinder hookup stories are about fat chicks.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong and need to tone down the fuckboy profile.

Maybe I should actually amp up the profile and make it all about bondage, paddles, and discreetly anonymized chicks who are tied up (that’s one way to filter). I speculate on this because Feeld has been okay for me, as I wrote above, though it does depend on starting w/ a hot chick.

It’s been a while since I’ve been this provably wrong.

This tweet is interesting… I find it almost unbelievable and wonder if this pattern is common. We may also be in a cycle where on Tinder chicks are shit to guys, so the better guys leave it… as the better guys leave, the better chicks do as well… and then the chicks are bitchy to the guys, and the guys are trying a mass-contact strategy, leaving everyone poorly off.

Despite a low or moderate amount of effort I technically slept with two chicks, but the escort one is too weird to “count” as a proper lay and the other one is not really hot enough IMO. While I’ve done worse I don’t see any reason to count her. It sapped my spirit… I don’t think f**king an 8 has ever sapped my spirit before… this is a new feeling.

Overall, this experiment points to the need for in-person approach over online. I see why people who do online become rigid, jaded, and unhappy. Something has gone terribly wrong w/ the online world in the last 4 – 5 years. I hadn’t appreciated how badly that’s happened.