TL;DR The flaw is in how dating platforms are designed. The online dating companies remove, or restrict room for users to display, mental and emotional traits and instead highlight looks. Women have nothing else to go off of.

I've been interested in giving dating advice for most of my life.As the years have progressed and that most people are using online dating, the problems that men need solutions for with dating, are much more puzzling.

I think of dating like a video game for Nintendo. Online dating is like when trying to stick a video game for Nintendo into a console for PlayStation. It's not that the video game doesn't work. We just don't have the compatible console.

Whenever dating advice for men is discussed online hypergamy gets thrown out there. I have always wanted to be open-minded to this theory but it just doesn't sit right with me. Typically I see it always brought up in the context that makes women out to be the bad guy. Slut shaming vibes. And it's also generally only referred to with regards to online dating. So therefore I tend to junk mail who ever is tossing that in.

The sex shaming problem. And the online territory problem.

A lot of people may have missed this book published by one of the three founders of Okcupid back in 2014. Probably because you all were already beginning to migrate to tinder by that year and so had began your first descent of losing your ability to hold an attention span longer than 30 secs. But the author, Christian Rudder, shared some eye-opening truths.

Little background. Okcupid became a giant in the online dating territory with hipsters because it was FREE.

Yeahhh, you remember free?

Also unique because it was designed with an algorithm heavily reliant on data that users could manually modify and rank importance according to themselves. If you ranked and answered 100 questionnaires the fun part would be finding someone else who ranked and answered the same 100 questions. Allowing both users to be able to determine more personal and emotional compatibility. You were allowed to also modify your ranking any time if, for example, your position on pineapple on pizza changed from day to day.

Whereas, 2025, what major dating app is free, allows you to see (plus message) every single user on the website, and allows you to see when others users look at your profile, and shows you 100 to 10000 personality questions they've ranked with a calculation of your both percentage of compatibility?

I'm waiting.

As far as I know, that's not existent. Not even on OkCupid 2025. But even as far back as 2014 Christian Rudder revealed a few of the things that show why online dating was flawed.

One, that the amount of men that are registered heavily outnumber the women.

For every woman a guy messages a cute, respectful, humorous pick up line and a flirtatious suggestion to chat, there are probably 50 other men within the same area code sending her the exact same approach.

I've read on occasion reviews "I live in a big metro area but I've run out of women to see." But I've never read women anywhere discuss that they've seen every guys profile or ran out of profiles to see.

Christian Rudder admitted that okcupid created bots to test the users and the algorithm.

But you have to wonder if they had to keep their male users sucked in believing there was just one more hot girl left? After tinder began monetizing and pulling in millions, Okcupid was purchased by Match and all of the free shit went away.

Essentially all of the dating websites caved and adopted the swipe model and removed emphasis on the personalized profile model. Because they all realized that, though, those ways allowed people to get to know others and communicate with people they never otherwise would have had the ability. Despite all that, they could make millions if they just focus on monetizing, or paywalling the most basic functions.

Eliminating the search profiles option and limiting how many profiles you can look at everyday is what killed online dating and is responsible for the behavior men see and mislabel as hypergamy. Because women, just as much as men, don't want to pay these websites for communication tools that are free on websites like Instagram. The companies also know that the male userbase is 80-90% of the users, so they just need to them to rely on to generate revenue, not women. Advertise to men, create a few bots that look like a Swiss Kim Kardashian, and say sign up now and get 50% off your first 1 year subscription. Get 50% off your instant lightning straight to the top of her inbox button.

Women see these subscription models too. It's been proven before women are offered cheaper subscriptions. T'he kicker. They most likely will never pay and the websites don't need them to pay either. Because Christian Rudder already proved in 2014. There's only so few women using online dating. It's mostly just dudes walking around in a room with no windows or doors.

And of the few women who use online dating that are attractive -- the ones that are not bots created by the website -- they are real women but, they are using the website with the same agenda as the companies. Manipulate the desperate men that haven't realized the hustle yet to paying them money for a chance to talk to a girl.

Now of course there are other women, between attractive and not so much. But after men have started their journey shooting their shot at 2 fake profiles, had 2 more women try to scam them, the remaining self-motivation for men to curate their messages and approach the next woman is low. So then they just fall back on low-effort approaching to the lesser than Kim Kardashians and that just makes those few women feel undesired and quit using the website altogether. Because, again. The websites aren't giving the women any kind of section of your profile that says more about you or how the two of you are compatible they just see a hey message from you and four pictures of you smiling.

The websites at this point are responsible for making people more shallow. Not responsible for making people find more love.

So I think the answer is just finding the right console. Whatever that is or can become.