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What about the Tinder trap? The goal of Tinder is to keep you using Tinder, not find a stable partner. Any company that creates a personal AI will similarly want you to use that AI instead of going hiking with your new friend. Natural selection will ensure that the AI service that people talk to the most will win the AI service wars.
But if you go hiking occasionally the AI can sell you tents and backpacks and cabin rentals.
Really, outcomes in most markets aren't nearly as perverse as what we see with Tinder. Chrome, for instance, doesn't intentionally fail to load web pages so that Google can sell me premium subscriptions and boosters to get them to load. Unlike Tinder, Chrome is monetized in a way that doesn't provide an incentive for its developer to intentionally thwart me in my attempts to use it for its ostensible purpose, and there's enough competition that if Google tried this people would stop using it.
I wonder if Tinder isn't so bad but gets blamed for the dysfunctional Western dating market. In the poor country where I am living, I use Tinder and another local app and I get dozens of likes and multiple messages per day. (This is coming from someone who got maybe one fat-chick like per day in America. BTW this is an experiment you can do yourself, if you are willing to pay for Tinder gold or do some VPN shenanigans to spoof your location. Try setting your location to Manila, PH and see how much attention you get.)
That sounds more like PH women being super-interested in marrying a white guy and moving to America, or just being interested in someone taller, richer, and hairier than the local men. The local dudes might still be being treated poorly.
I'd be interested in stats that indicate that Tinder in places other than the USA/Europe is "healthier," but I'm not sure what those would look like.
I never heard any of these girls express any interest in moving to America (and even if I had the perfect loving wife, I wouldn't want to live in the US again.)
I don't think the local dude are treated poorly here. My theory is that poor men tend to immigrate to other countries for work, creating a male gender bias in rich countries, and leaving a female gender bias back home. This combined with some of the psychological effects of wealth (such as more feminism) causes the wildly distorted dating market in rich countries.
Something that constantly shocks me is just how many young women there are here. It seems like every business I patronize has 75%+ female workers. Where are this country's young men? Sure there are male dominated professions like taxi driver, and maybe there are lots of men in industry or farming but I don't see them. I'm not sure.
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I was passing through KL and got 100 likes in 24 hours. I'm lucky to get two a week in my western country.
Granted some of those are escorts, bots and scammers, but still..
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