Permanently Deleted
Dating apps as a concept are debatable whether or not good. But as the score/algorithm based, headshot swiping, 15 dollar per week otherwise you basically can't use it and it will actively fuck with your emotions to attempt to get you to pay them a decent chunk of change -in perpetuity- it exists as right now they're fucking really dehumanizing
I think it's like literally all other similar technology, it's cool and good but perverted by the profit incentive.
My friend is single and showed me the app and it was worse than I was expecting, they literally want to charge you for almost every button press.
Some things can get progressively worse over time. Even at a materialistic (tm) level, online dating has become more deliberately difficult (the algorithms are now known to deliberately make poorer matches, especially for free tiers and new accounts) because that means more engagement, more subscriptions, and people being dissatisfied longer to keep buying in. Dating fucking sucking and getting worse is to the benefit of Match.com style online dating interests. :the-more-you-know:
Enshittification is a term for this that seems to be really taking off. Cory Doctorow is the best techbro to leftist pipeline going atm.
As another example, Google used to be actually a quite good search engine that pushed the competition to obscurity and collapse because it was that useful and easy to use.
Over time, SEO bloat and monopolistic rot has made Google a worse product over time, to the point where the "Google it" :very-intelligent: thought terminating cliche has some actual exceptions to it, depending on what you're looking for now.
Especially when it comes to applications of the same technological paradigm (online dating compared to "riding down to the Sody-Pop shop to see if any boys want to buy you a malt" as you put it), it's a fairly predictable outcome that :porky-happy: will extract more and more profit at the expense of the actual product or service's quality over time, and the cycle repeats the next time something replaces the old technology.
I predict chatbots and related technology will have a similar "worse and greedier" trending rate over time in the near future, too.
I have favorites. There's a lot of emojis I don't remember the names of even if I want to use them. :spaghett:
I enjoy the options. It doesn't take effort to remember them if I've used them a few times before. :edgeworth-shrug:
Also, if I used less emojis and used those fewer varieties more often, I'd likely get shit for using those particular emojis too often instead. :no-choice:
I haven't used that word contextually like that for almost half a year now. Not worth the backlash. :debord-tired:
Considering how he's passionately and even vindictively defended for his repeated emphasis on "historically accurate" :awooga: :libertarian-alert: (this one especially in the novels) :hypersus: in a historically accurate tale of ice zombies and dragons where the takeaway message is "yeah things are bad but trying to make them better is naive, just enjoy the historically accurate :awooga: :libertarian-alert: :hypersus: in a totally not hog hungry way like millions of consumers surely do," yeah sure I'd use that one.
We need an entirely separate site that's just a marked up index of all the emotes that you can search through.
It's not even an anime reference, it's a reference to a parody video of an anime.
You can use the emote picker or type a : and use the drop down that pops up
Online dating can suck. Online dating is not representative of dating today.
Online dating is not representative of dating today.
why not? sounds like it's more popular than meeting people offline now :(
Sucks even harder for minorities who are targeted by sexual racism. There is some real dumpster fire discourse among diaspora East Asians about this, for example.
My coworkers tell me that they find Asian guys hot. That is, if you’re 6’2, have paper white skin, and look like a kpop idol
As degrading as that is, it's actually an improvement from the previous mainstream stance of "Ewww, no."
At least your coworkers are capable of acknowledging that Asian men can be tall and attractive instead of universally short scrawny nerds.
See, I’d see the silver lining if it was just other groups of people but in my experience Asian girls also tend to think they way too so it’s just :kaneki:
A chunk of any population, Asian or not, male or female or other, have that kind of mentality though. Everyone wants their 6'2 bodybuilder surgeon boyfriend or their D cup supermodel gamer girl or whatever. The people who get over that shit go on to live happy lives, the ones who don't are the ones who live bitter and lonely lives.
I'm my defense I am 6'2" and the idea of a 6'+ lady doctor person sweeping me off my feet and taking me away from all this is what I think about when I'm crying myself to sleep every night.
Idk everyone thinks being really tall is really cool, and it is in a lot of ways, but you'll also go most of your life without being able to stand with your heels on the ground and look your lover in their eyes. It might not seem like much, it might not be something anyone else worries about, but it makes me a little sad sometimes. There's a lot of tall privilege, a huge amount, but you're also fundamentally different from everyone around you. Being a foot taller than everyone else means your ears are above them and you can't follow conversations in noisy venues. You have to bend over or lift someone up to kiss them. People make all kinds of assumptions about you because a tall man must be confident, informed, dominant, and dangerous, Right? Right?
I keep ending up in charge of stuff just by virtue of being a man and the tallest person in the room. It feels cool for a while until you really start to think about what it means about how people view each other, how they conceptualize gender and human bodies. The whole "short kings" thing is, like... just holy shit? Being shorter doesn't make a man any less capable or attractive or present, or at least it shouldn't. But for many people it does and once you're aware of that you have to look at people around you differently because if they'll dismiss someone because they're shorter than average, and esteem people who are taller than average, what other nonsensical and prejudicial views do they hold?
Uft. Sorry for the rant, I just haven't thought about this in a while. But it's been a current throughout my life.
As a tall Asian dude I know exactly what you're talking about. Still, people have irrational preferences without really thinking about it.
I think it's really common for men to say they want a gf with large breasts, for example, and few dudes really consider the practical implications.
Totally. These days the first thing I think when I see someone with really big breasts is "oof, back pain".
I used to do a ton of sword fighting and everyone with boobs was constantly exchanging advice about the latest sports bras and which ones were actually supportive nad which ones were trash.
Yeah I’m 6’3” and while I don’t think I’d want to give up any of my height sometimes I see pictures of me with a group and I’m just like “Jesus Christ I’m a head and shoulders taller than everyone else”
Being a foot taller than everyone else means your ears are above them and you can’t follow conversations in noisy venues.
Wait, short people can follow conversations in crowded places??? :scared: Now that I think about it that tracks but I never thought about that one.
I keep ending up in charge of stuff just by virtue of being a man and the tallest person in the room.
No fr wtf is up with that. It happens all the time. I’ll be one of the least experienced people in the room and people will still look to me like I should know what’s going on.
When I have a woman or any afab person or a shorter person as my supervisor or manager I always stand behind them and very pointedly differ to them when customers inevitably direct questions to me. Otherwise people will just assume I know what's going on and it's like "dude i am wage labor, they literally have a masters in forestry I just move stuff around"
I always found the "Asian men are unnatractive/sexuless/whatever" thing utterly bizarre. How does normative racism like that even get started?
At the risk of sounding like a "representation matters" lib, there's basically zero depiction of Asian men in westoid media as positive role models or attractive partners. Even today it's incredibly rare to see any movies or TV with Asian male protagonists, and the Asian guy "getting the girl" is practically non-existent.
Add onto that a consistent trend of emasculated Asian men as weak, short, and feminine. This is not unlike how a lot of media and people still think of black women as aggressive and over masculine, at least to my understanding and hearing it from a few black women.
Lastly, there's still this idea that sexual racism is acceptable. Like if someone says "I don't want to date <race>" it's still broadly seen as a legitimate personal choice. Compare with someone saying "I don't want to work with <race>" or "I don't want to be friends with <race>".
Representation does matter; it’s just very much not everything. If we had FALGSC but only white people are allowed on TV that would still be bad
hardly qualifies as discourse, bunch of strivers uncritically regurgitating manosphere narratives and their parents' reactionary politics
The manosphere dudes are at least half the problem, but their existence certainly doesn't explain all those ridiculous articles from women trying to explain their fetish for mediocre white dudes as some sort of deep cultural awakening.
As for reactionary politics from parents, that's also a huge problem but ironically it's the manosphere dudes who tend to push back against that by advocating interracial dating.
the manosphere dudes are largely a product of the white fetishism that goes on in the asian female community, asian chicks post hart-celler really threw asian guys under the bus. someone on here a while back said this was a common sociological phenomenon for 1st/2nd generation immigrant women but i'm pretty sure the degree to which whiteness is fetishized in asian female communities remains an outlier, sociological phenomena notwithstanding.
the type of reactionary politics i was referring to mostly consists of standard american conservatism: rampant anti-blackness, bootstraps mentality, communists ruined our country, america was good to us, we wuz khanz/colonize the colonizer narratives, etc. as an aside, i'm really skeptical of the whole 'asian manosphere does interracial dating' thing, i just can't see the massive insecurities they carry around being good for even a normal relationship, much less an interracial one.
Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan really helped mainstream the idea of interracial dating and marriage. The book was a smash hit and so was the movie. It played constantly on Lifetime for years.
You don’t think being emasculated and dehumanized for centuries has any affect on the perception of Asian men?
being emasculated and dehumanized only affects asian manosphere insofar as they remain incapable of assimilating into whiteness (and its corresponding sexual benefits/social status) as easily as their female counterparts
masculinity is just a number to them, they have no conception of what it is outside of a quantitative (and overwhelmingly western) context
In my experience at least, the manosphere guys are most likely to reject assimilation into whiteness as a misguided relic of their parents' attitudes.
I would characterize the mainstream Asian diaspora view of keeping your head down, working doubly hard to overcome discrimination, and then getting a wife through vague means after that as far more assimilationist.
Like yeah, it could be the outcome of sour grapes in a MGTOW sense but there's also the case where any Asian man who is outspokenly against white supremacist structures in dating is labeled by boba libs as an "MRAsian" so I don't think it helps to be reductive like this.
my take on assimilation into whiteness is more along the lines of consciously shaping aspects of one's life to correlate with the white narrative that promises sex, power and success by default.
the narrative falls apart upon contact with reality and the result is that asian dudes end up in the manosphere next to the incels wondering what went wrong, difference being that asian manosphere thinks that they can tick boxes off a checklist and sigma grindset their way out of sexual emasculation. unfortunately, the checklist that they're using is still part of the white narrative that they by definition cannot belong to.
i can understand why the discourse around the situation might be upsetting and call for a more delicate touch than mine. maybe it's because i'm not really on twitter, but i just can't see the boba libs as people, so their opinions don't really carry any weight with me.
I think social media makes it worse. Before the advent of online dating and mass adoption of social media, seeing someone that was very attractive, for lack of a better way of saying it, was rare. Nowadays people that straight up look unreal (and are probably using drugs to look like that, be it appetite suppressants or steroids) are just a click away and it's really warped people's perceptions and standards, especially in the online dating game, and especially when a majority of adults in the real world are overweight or obese. None of this was the case in the past.
Leads to a massive dissonance and disconnect between what people want and what they can realistically achieve, for both men and women. Both for themselves and their potential partners.
Doesn't help that seeing people only through their curated, likely touched up, photo galleries puts everyone in competition with models who have teams of professionals to make them up, take photos and photoshop them.
Maybe people in their early 20s or so but I think most people eventually figure out they're not going to be dating a perfectly hot 10/10 with zero physical flaws.
Sure there are the general societal brainworms that tell you only skinny people are attractive and whatever but I think that always existed.
Do they really take hours to photoshop their TikToks though? Sure there are filters, but those don't really make women slimmer or put muscles on men.
There are filters that will slim you down or bulk you up, remove all your moles, change your eyes, hair, or facial structure, and nearly anything else. There are whole twitter accounts devoted to the really obvious tell tales left behind by bad filter or photoshop jobs.
I remember internet dating in the 2000's had a stigma. It was funny when the people who laughed because I was doing it ended up marrying ppl they meet thru online dating.
I get that online dating is far from perfect. But the alternative to many is to date within their close friend circle. Comrades, tell me if I'm wrong, but having sex has always changed friendships and has often ruined friend groups. It's like, you can never fuck and then go back to being just best buds without fucking.
Comrades, tell me if I’m wrong, but having sex has always changed friendships
Not necessarily. Friends can decide they want to fuck and then just keep on being friends, whether in an ongoing fwb situation or just as a sort of "that happened, probably won't be doing it again" sort of way.
But yeah, of course in most cases it does.
if im not rawdogging it in a baptist church known for hate crimes by the end of a date, the scene is stale
Unironically. I don't want to have deep, meaningful first date conversations. I want to have sweaty undeservedly passionate sex in the back of a Kia with someone i met an hour ago whose name definitely starts with an M, i think.
I miss being young and living in a city with a thriving professional weirdo scene.
A lot of folx around me are in poly/enm relationships and all I can think is "Damn it's like gotta lie on my dating resume, too."
How the fuck do people find these things? The most sexually active/adventurous people I know are people who are just monogamously married.
This shit might as well be fucking Neverland to me.
Being in a city with a big queer/alt/goth/weirdo population helps. And poly groups aren't necessarily more sexually active or adventurous than anyone else. Even ENM relationships might involve just having more than one partner, or having a FWB, or picking people up at bars once in a while. Swingers, Kinksters, and some BDSM communities tend to have more sex, or sexual play. There's some overlap between poly and enm and kinksters, but it's not 100%.
Being in a city with a big queer/alt/goth/weirdo population helps.
I live in Protestant Rust Belt Hell. For 90% of the people I know, living is working, & working is living. I have never been able to do anything remotely interesting, or enjoyable with my life.
Protestant Work Ethic and its consequences. :capitalist-laugh: :you-are-a-serf:
I was in an enm relationship a couple years back and it was the most exhausting thing I've ever done. I don't recommend it.
I don't understand how poly relationships don't devolve into jealosies and arguments myself. It's hard enough having a romantic relationship between two people more must complicate it
It’s hard enough having a romantic relationship between two people
well the other realtionships don't have to be romantic. They can be sexual, they can be about platonic affection, they can be about kinks your other partners don't want to engage in. Working relationships like that often have very clearly seperated roles for different partners, and i don't know any that have worked out long-term where both nesting partners slept with the same people. That idea that polycules are a bunch of horny orgy goers constantly fucking everybody in the polycule is one that's pretty far removed from how polyamory usually plays out when it plays out successfully.
Although i have to admit that i don't see any of that working within the norms and expectations and cultural baggage our society has for straight couples. This mostly tends to work for queer people who didn't have normative ideas of their preferred kind of romance shoved down their throat their entire lifes and had to find out their own way to make love and sex and romance work by just trying things out and coming to grips with that they want and feel.
Most of the poly people i know aren't particularly sexually active, they tend to be on the ace spectrum and they're just in a relationship where it's ok that one of them has a play partner to do a BDSM scene once in a while and sometimes cybers with me and maybe we have sex occassionally and the other has a cuddle buddy who she sometimes brings over to have a transbian slumber party. I don't think that's kinkier or more adventurous than what a lot of monogamous couples i know get up to.
idk maybe this whole stuff is actually easier when you're less horny. Like, i don't get jealous at all, at most i get envious. But envy is a different thing than jealousy, it's "i want that, too", not "you're not allowed to do that with anybody but me".
Edit: Also, almost all working poly relationships i know of have been / are between queer people. Straight couples (or straight guy / bi girl couples) seem to really struggle to make it work.
Everything has always sucked, for all of recorded history, because class society has existed for all of recorded history. Next question.
Nothing ever changes ever and everything is exactly as good and bad as it has ever been. :doubt:
Ulysses; "Recorded History" refers to those portions of History for which we have written records & sources. At what time, and in what kinds of societies was writing invented?
This is an important thing consider; because it doesn't include societies, or peoples that didn't write down their histories. In which things probably were different. But we don't descend from those societies, and we don't follow their rules now do we?
:wtf-am-i-reading:
I don't see how that's supposed to convince me that it's somehow impossible to say that online dating has gotten less pleasant and more frustrating for those still doing it in the years since it became normalized and accepted.
I also don't really see the value or the purpose for making the "nothing really actually changes meaningfully ever" claim except as a long winded way of saying "shut up, stop complaining. Only complaining about complaining is allowed."
Well within recorded history things sometimes get worse or better in specific ways for specific people doing specific things over time. That's a far more believable take than "nothing ever changes ever, therefore no complaining is allowed, except complaining about complaining" to me.
There is a finite and fixed quality of bullshit in the cosmos and while there are local variations it is uniform when viewed from a sufficient distance.
from a sufficient distance.
Yeah yeah, but viewing that far out means many details and specific instances and individual experiences are lost. To summarize, it's a giant, almost unfathomably giant, thought terminating cliche that's generally used to try to get people to shut up and never complain about anything (except complaining itself). :morshupls:
I'm just making a joke riffing on entropy, I don't really think that.
Yeah, good, okay. :bernie-pout:
I'm definitely thinking otherwise for some of the smug emissions in this thread. :lea-why:
so what the universe being big doesn't make our lives less meaningful any more than your life is more meaningful from being in a small space
yeah but that trite pop nihilism is not uncommonly held as sincere belief
I wonder what other possibilities there are. Like, it's hard to imagine a nomadic group having a similar "dating" culture to post-war Western countries.
Just have everyone get tested before the mushrooms, ez pz
Pretty much how actual sex clubs and orgies work. Show up with a recent std test showing clear or don't show up.
Depends on the group and a whole lot of factors. Some nomadic groups had/have super strict dating and relationship norms, others would make free love hippies blush. It's hard to make really broad, general statements about human behavior like that.
Really just want to know if those options are as shitty as online dating
I’m sure it was better back when you didnt have to impress someone with 5 lines of text
I was a kid on some chat program in the early 2000's talking to a girl and she said I needed to write a one page essay on why I thought we would be compatible.
I do often wonder if dating was better when unions were strong. Seems like union meetings could be a worthwhile place and time to meet good people.
Once upon a time the labour movement organised every part of working class life. It was not just political parties and strikes, it was parties, orchestras, night classes, football teams and pensioner's clubs. The labour press would write about labour issues and political struggle but also about entertainmen, sport or hobbies. Later on a proven strategy for recruiting the young for political organisations became to gain a reputation for throwing good parties.
Much has been lost as the established labour movement has accepted the liberal premise that there is one box called "politics", another box called "labour unions" and a third box called "everything else" and that you are somehow breaking the rules by going outside of your assigned box.
god damn, this largely describes a life I wish I had, fuck me :sweat:
Also there's this paper called "Making Friends and Making Out: The Social and Romantic Lives of Young Communists in Chile (1958–1973)" that talks about this topic a bit.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/americas/article/abs/making-friends-and-making-out-the-social-and-romantic-lives-of-young-communists-in-chile-19581973/BA17DBB12541ADAF39DC84DD1FDF62EE
I remember CCK Philosophy talks about this aspect of the SPD part a bit in his recently released '1918 failed German revolution' videos. Talked about the schools, etc. the SPD ran and how there was an entire culture involved with being a part of the SPD and unionism.
The 1980 Soviet movie "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (a pretty good one, if somewhat socially conservative) has a scene where a state run de-facto dating agency is struggling to keep afloat, because of a lack of either suitable men or women (I forgot which)
The 1980 Soviet movie "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (a pretty good one, if somewhat socially conservative) has a scene where a state run de-facto dating agency is struggling to keep afloat, because of a lack of either suitable men or women (I forgot which)
People who aren't walking red flags (in the non-political sense), creeps, alcoholics, too old, etc.
Not like they were turned away, but nobody wanted to give them a chance.
It's a romantic comedy movie.
No, but there's a version with English subtitles on YouTube. That's how I watched it.
https://youtu.be/NTWA_7-ld_U
It was the very first result of typing it into the YouTube search bar, but eh
Thank you! Sorry for being an asshole and making you search it up. Now the rest of the site has it, too, though!
married life ain't hard, if you got a union card
a union man has a happy life if he's got a union wife🎶🎵
"We have fallen upon evil times. The world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book."
-- Naram Sim of the Akkadian Empire, 5,000 years ago.
This just goes to show that stupid doomsayers have been warning about the end of the world for 5,000 years.
Nothing ever actually gets worse, ever. This one quote about old people being unhappy with young people proves that.
Yes, that is a leftist take. The most important thing in leftism is to mock and belittle people complaining about problems because everything is how it always was and will always be the same way. :galaxy-brain:
Sarcasm aside, it's more likely that online dating, especially online dating sites owned by :porky-happy: , are being profitably made to be worse products over time so people remain engaged and continue paying for them compared to how they were during earlier implementation. That cycle will likely occur with whatever comes after it, with something being initially good but then being made worse over time for profitability reasons until something else replaces it, but that isn't the same as "nothing ever changes every everything is equally good or bad as always. Get schwifty." :very-intelligent:
That cycle will likely occur with whatever comes after it, with something being initially good but then being made worse over time for profitability reasons until something else replaces it
enshittification - (neologism, information technology) The practice of degrading services once a company or vendor has a monopoly on that service.
I hope enshittification becomes normalized in the public's vocabulary because it is very applicable.
Is it that inconceivable that certain aspects of life just have been either slowly, and/or cyclically getting worse for centuries?
it was good for like an hour one time when i was in college and somebody told me she liked me. it was never good before, has not been good since, and i have no illusion that it will ever be good again.
Common Aroace W
...well, except when I hadn't figured it out yet, I was looking for a relationship and almost entering the incel (well, r/foreveralone, which is just a cove for depression instead of misogyny) spiral because I thought that was what I wanted without understanding what a relationship entails. Dating Apps were an interesting experience. At least in my area, it was the dullest people imaginable, horny people, scambots and the weird feeling when you spotted people you already knew IRL.
Ah well.
It was better back in the day when my parents and your parents arranged a marriage based on who had the best plot of farmland on the manor fields and who brewed the best ale. I'm sad I can't marry the serf I'm sweet on, but seeing that all their property and the family itself are owned by the lord it won't do my family any good, and anyway the lord probably wouldn't allow the match if we asked. I will die at the age of 40 from an unexplainable illness which a person in the 21st century might recognize as skin cancer. It will be said to have been a good and full life.
Online dating could be improved somewhat, even to a previous less monetized standard from only a decade ago. :improve-society:
The false dichotomy being pushed in this thread is "people said online dating was bad, therefore online dating can never get worse."
The smug emissions are getting insufferable, up to and including :reddit-logo: tier status quo warrior quote mining.
Agreed. If there was sufficient will against :porky-happy: that little corner of contemporary living could be improved somewhat.
I'm glad I found someone wonderful and got married before online dating got worse.
We could always do what my grandparents generation did. Two neighbouring families would marry off their children to each other since they were the only people for a days wagon ride, that's how I ended up with a double-cousin-aunt on my dad's side and overall a smaller family tree than one should probably have. But I turned out fine so I don't see why Tinder is better than you and your brothers all being nice to the neighbour girl and her sisters
