The promise of algorithmic dating

The most common and at the same time simplest kind of algorithmic dating comes in the form of swipe online dating (SOD), most prominently tinder, where sexual success is heavily tilted against most men.

The promise of algorithmic dating: to find your perfect match, a soul mate with the same values and goals as you, which sounds like a nice deal.

What this notion overlooks, howeber, is that the sexual marketplace is highly competitive. All individuals engaging in screening for sexual partners compete with one another for the most valuable resource - everyone wants the best mate. The market is governed by immediate satisfaction. Short-term mating strategies rule the market. Men are therefore searching for hot, young women. Women search for adventurous, high status men. Men are much more open to dating outside of their status or income class or with different social or cultural backgrounds. A man can spend decades dedicated to sexual conquest of many different partners without long-term commitment and still being fulfilled. However, short-term mating doesn’t make women as happy as it does men.

Women select sexual partners based on short-term signals, i.e. attractiveness, perceived status and emotional excitation (ALPHA traits or hypergamy strategy), but what they want in the long-term is stability and (real) status or money/access to resources (BETA traits or monogamy strategy).

On the other hand, men screen sexual partners mostly based on their short-term signals, i.e. hotness (Whore aspects), which is their primary strategy anyways (polygamy) but what they want in the long-term, supposing if they want that, is care, compatibility and mental stability (monogamy). What both want in the long-term may be similar, however, their urges tilt towards entirely different outcomes: hypergamous search for a monogamous long-term relationship in women (which is a contradiction in itself and enough material for an entirely different article) and polygamy in men.

Women, on average, are more interested in committed relationships where they live together with a high-status male and make a living by extracting his resources. This essentially leads to two entirely different markets: the long-term mating strategy for women and the short-term sexual strategy for men, which causes a clash of interests and imbalance in outcomes.

Together with the more open mindset of males to engage in sex with women irregardless of their background and the more picky nature of women to want partners socio-economically above them, a false scarcity of men is created. Herein, all the women compete for the minority of high status men only. These several opposing markets which are summarized under the header “online dating” or “sexual market place” (SMP) form a weird equilibrium.

The results: The clash of the two opposing sexual strategies, much more freely and casual male strategy and status and stability-oriented yet fleeting emotion-based female strategy, which leads to winners and losers. Naturally, in any creative, competition-driven or goal-oriented process, about 20% of causes account for 80% of the consequences.

This law is universal and has many names: The Pareto principle, related to Zipf’s law or Price’s law. Applied to the sexual market, it says that 20% of men have access to 80% of women. The 80/20 principle often cited here has, however, at least in the Western world, heavily shifted even more towards the highest status men, and the law can be adjusted with each passing decade: it used to be 80/20 in the 2000s, proceeded to devolve into 85/15 in the 2010s, and it's currently estimated to be 90/10 in the 2020s. (This assessment is based on one guy's personal estimation stemming from anecdotal evidence and incomplete knowledge but is also based on many findings in scientific research)

As we have seen with filter bubbles in social media and the last US elections, algorithms only showing the user’s preferences will lead to a self-reinforcing process. The supply of information is heavily skewed towards even more extreme content as the days go by, the like buttons are clicked and the feed filtered by preferences. This is especially true since the world was in lockdown for the most part of the last two years, and dating-oriented interaction has shifted almost entirely towards online dating.

The top 10% of men which successfully display their muscular body as well as their socio-economic success on dating sites have access to all the women. In principle, there is no limit for them. They have a harem of women applying for dates and wanting their attention and the men don’t mind going on dates with all of them several days of the week. There is essentially no cap for these men, they corner the market and are on top of the hierarchy because they are what all the women want.

The men themselves aren’t nearly as picky and would love to go on dates with all sorts of women, no matter their background, as long as these women are attractive enough. Since attractiveness forms a Gaussian-like curve, the average man cuts the female population in half and divides it almost equally into attractive and not attractive.

Women on the other hand rate around 80% of men as being below average in terms of attractiveness. Thus, only 20% of men are considered as attractive to women. However, being physically attractive is not enough. Men, in addition, ought to have high status to be considered dating material.

All the cards are on the table for attractive and successful men while men in the middle and bottom are not getting any opportunity. The Pareto-winning men have no incentives to settle down and all the women who they go on a date with hope for their commitment which they won’t receive.

Women cannot get the long-term relationships they want, because the high value men will not commit. Dating as a whole is pushed towards promiscuity since the men at the top who land all the dates are not incentivized to settle down and the men at the bottom don’t even get to play the game at all.

Online dating reflects the most primal urges of what men and women want. Women want someone who is a good father and provider but filter men by who is sexually attractive and induces emotional excitation. Men in constrast want to spread their seed with little consequences and maybe an emotionally stable housewife as an upgrade (a long-term relationship can also be seen as a downgrade, depending on where you are coming from).

In case I wasn't clear enough, I've got your back, here you go, listen to a woman and a gay dude explain what I just told you.

Actually what the West is currently going through, the decline in culturally/religiously enforced monogamy/matrimonium to unleashed female hypergamy, female sexual selection, catalyzed by birth control and focus on career for both sexes and at the same time the rise of the incels is not a new phenomenon. Essentially this is a digression back to the days before humans started forming larger communities and built the first civilizations. Hypergamy was the status quo in prehistoric times. The only new thing is presented by the internet and the possibilities of internet pornography as well as incels being able to form communities and rebel to some extent. In some sense, the difference between now and then comes down to women being able to screen for attractive men globally now instead of only locally and men being able to jerk off to pixeled videos of attractive women from all over the world now instead of relying on finding a real girl in the local community.

You may now wonder what there is to do to solve this societal problem and how to return to the conservative times where monogamous relationships were enforced and promiscuity was followed by social punishment. You may also wonder why I am telling you this and how I, the author, feels about the whole issue. But you won’t find any of those here. It’s neither my intention to present a twelve-step-solution to this problem nor to put blame on women.

I can only blame the insecure and ill-informed reader who is probably still going through the anger phase and puts blame on women or society or on anyone else than himself. Yes you heard that right, don't put blame on anyone but yourself. This here right now is the situation at hand, a situation which you cannot change. It will only get worse out there. This is a gentle reminder that you should strive towards the top, to fulfill your potential, be a Pareto winner and achieve personal goals, or your mission or whatever, since this is where the fun zone starts. Utilize this situation and become the most attractive version of yourself, use this knowledge and maximize your sexual success for your own best outcomes and enjoy the decline. After all, sexual strategy is and should always be amoral. To all the other readers who want to know how to utilize this situation to the fullest all of this has been said and retold countless times before. As always, consult the sidebar, before this community is burned in the memory holes by the reddit ministry of truth.