On Friday night, author Scott Galloway was on Bill Maher's show talking about online dating and how it's been a disaster for men and women alike. He offered some numbers that are fairly illustrative.
The first thing to know is that men outnumber women on dating apps at least two-to-one, and it's worse on hookup apps like Tinder. So the chorus of people saying that women are getting more attention than they can address, and men aren't getting hardly any -- that's pretty accurate. Based on this you would assume that half of the guys are going to be disappointed, but it's actually worse than that.
The traffic data indicates that 90% of the women are ignoring 90% of the men and focusing all of their attention on the most popular 10% of men. So, say in a given town at a given time there are 100 men online and 50 women. 45 of those women are responding to just 10 men, and the other 90 men are competing for the attention of the remaining 5 women. Your can see how a lot of people are going to be disappointed in this scenario.
Galloway referred to the resulting dating patterns as "Porsche Polygamy": the women are only interested in rich/gorgeous guys, who can then effectively use the app as a harem. The women end up disappointed too, because they are seeking relationships but the only men they show interest to are exactly the ones who are going to hump'n'dump them.
So women claim they can't find good men, and men claim they can't get any attention from women, and they're both kinda right. Like many things, it is a system that works pretty well for the very very privileged, and is kinda shit for everyone else.
E: there's a lot of advice in this thread along the lines of "lose 20 pounds and dress better and you'll get more attention". That's bringing a knife to a gunfight. You aren't trying to escape the bottom 50%, you're trying to reach the top 10%. The bar for admission is more along the lines of "six-pack abs and a $75,000 SUV". Or better yet, get off your phone and try to meet women offline.
I think the biggest problem at its core is that people, men and women, aren't getting the instant negative feedback they would get from live interactions.
Of course it's women that control the interaction and get to decide what happens. But they don't mingle and see that they really don't have a chance to capture that one guy's full attention (for more than one friday night). She doesn't get the discouragement of seeing 3 models with him in the same room.
Though it's true that women would rather share an alpha than have their own beta, this is a generalization and seeing the other women around him can be a sufficient blow to her confidence that she wouldn't waste her time on shooting too high. She just sees a profile from someone that already sent her a message. It seems like it's just the two of them, so she obviously is getting his attention.
For men it's similar. If you don't wade through a sea of rejection, which is the truth for most men since forever (there is a reason getting a hookup was called "getting lucky"), then you don't develop the skills to learn to strike the iron when it's hot. It's easy for men to have too high standards too, because men almost always date down. Because it's not and never has been an equal system. Men date down, because women want someone better than themselves and women get to choose.
Online dating creates illusions, whisps of reality where men and women are following sirens of the unattainable. It's a mirage of an oasis and it makes the regular world looks like a desert.
It's attractive because of the high promise and low investment. There was a brief time where using online dating was being ahead of the curve, but now
it's a mousetrap for most.
E: there's a lot of advice in this thread along the lines of "lose 20 pounds and dress better and you'll get more attention". That's bringing a knife to a gunfight. You aren't trying to escape the bottom 50%, you're trying to reach the top 10%. The bar for admission is more along the lines of "six-pack abs and a $75,000 SUV"
Sure, but wouldn't your rather have a knife than nothing? Nature is brutal and dating is nature. You're not going to be reincarnated as a better genetic version. You can give up or give it your best and see if you can compete.
The reason people point to these is because they're universally attainable, but there are a lot of things one can do that aren't.
