I’m an old so I remember dating apps before smartphones. People with physical keyboards wrote long messages, like emails and letters. You could really get to know someone’s personality. This worked well for me because my sense of humor is absurdist and you need to know my values to know that I’m joking when I say something off-beat.
That just doesn’t work over short text message-style comms. So I can’t be funny. I can’t make a joke about voting for a terrible policy if I have to explain that it’s a joke because that’s not funny. But if I’ve revealed to you a bunch of things that matter to me and then claim to want the opposite, you know I’m being sarcastic and it’s fine. Oh well. I’m lucky enough to be in a great relationship despite the dating apps sucking much worse now.
Then there are the articles about how dating apps have deliberately made themselves worse to keep people paying for subscriptions… I’ve seen at least one and I’ve heard people talk about this on a podcast, I think. I may be misremembering. I consume a lot of media about how much capitalism and humanity create worse and worse systems.
Good luck to anyone who’s searching. I got your back.
The problem is not that people are typing on phones… It’s that all of the apps are now driven by profit-maximizing algorithms instead of algorithms that try to find your best match. OkCupid used to be the best dating site hands down because of the match percentage from the questions, but now it’s just Different Tinder. You can still have great heartfelt conversations on mobile dating apps, it’s just harder now.
OkC is how I found my girlfriend because it let me know a lot of important info (demi/ace, no kids, looking for long term, match %) before I even tried matching with them. I got to be picky.
From what I hear, they got rid of every useful feature and turned it to shit.
While you’re right and my post addressed the same failure / bullshit, writing a long message as an opener would be seen as strange today. It’s not the typical format and would trigger a red-flag for a lot of people. I’m talking six paragraphs, which was how I used to open comms before smartphone apps.
That just makes it a more effective filter for what you’re looking for. Many people on the apps aren’t interested in a long text conversation and would rather get to know each other in person. If you prefer conversing online for a while, then count it as a win if someone ignores or unmatches you for sending them a long message.
OkC seems to think I’m an absolute Adonis by Indian Ocean trade corridor standards, got hit up by folks from Uganda to Iran to India to Cambodia to Indonesia.
Thing kept insisting on showing my profile in those regions apparently despite me pretty consistently searching exclusively in the Northeast of the US.
Idk, my step dad met my mom in the 90s by taking out a personal ad in the paper. It said, in full (minus A/S/L and contact info):
“Can’t dance, won’t cook, never had a job. Frog seeks princess.”
He was a resteraunt manager back then, idk if he can dance tho… probably not. So it can be done in a text-length message. It’s rare to find a good match that way though (and they weren’t!), because it’s very little to go on.
