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Notes -
When did the first larger-scale dating app launch? I was also there in the 2000s, apps weren't really a thing until very late in that decade as I recall?
I am also not very good at dating, but things were more or less along the traditional lines where 'go out drinking and/or dancing, occasionally you will meet somebody' was pretty much true. I even landed a wife!
Now AFAICT there isn't really even anywhere to do those things, and if you find somewhere I'd certainly expect a high concentration of Chads and/or skilled PUAs -- so the apps are all there is, and it doesn't seem that great.
No idea. Maybe OkCupid was around in 2012/2013?
Good for you. Didn’t happen for lots of people. See “Radicalising the Romanceless”. There were absolutely lots of lonely young men, most of whom were perfectly decent looking and dutiful, who didn’t appear on women’s radars.
Lots of people didn’t have anyone to go out drinking or dancing with, or were too low down the hierarchy and therefore repellent. Newspaper ads and then later dating sites came into being to serve this demographic, which is why they were originally called ‘lonely hearts’ ads.
I am quite prepared to believe that dating apps have made this worse. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing - you need a sufficiently large number of angry young men before the problem even becomes visible. But modern dating was working badly for a lot of people a long time before the apps.
How old are you?
Early thirties.
I think you are a little too young to remember the before-times -- this is what bars were for. If you didn't have anyone to go out with, you could go to one, sit down at the bar, have a drink -- and start talking to people.
You probably still can (if you can't find a bar that hasn't gone out of business yet), but it won't get you laid unless you are into aging drunks.
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I have honestly been reading this whole subthread with the early dating websites rolled in with dating apps in my head. I wonder if that changes the dynamics, or if "dating app" has to specifically mean mobile apps and not just any Internet dating service.
I do know people that found partners on those site -- also quite a few guys who used them to fuck around, but I think the difference is that this was before the people running the apps figured out that people finding partners only shrinks their market, and changed their focus accordingly.
I also recall the transition in which finding a partner on the internet shifted from "kinda weird" to "kinda OK" --maybe it's just a shorter walk to "swipe right" from there?
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