Whoever wrote this article must’ve just got on Reddit.
Seriously, this is hardly a new trend for Reddit. There've been tons of hookup subreddits for years now.
Sounds like a disappointment speedrun to me.
I still use 4chan for all my hook up needs. Side note, anyone got the plug on some antibiotics?
> 4chan
It is surprisingly good for trans people.
I never would have thought this, but I’m happy they have a place to go that’s good.
Have you visited /b or /soc in the past 5 years? "Traps" get more attention than biological women. It's the last bus stop for the misogynists.
No. I have not.
I know more than one edgy trans person who browsed 4chan back in the day so I'm only... slightly surprised
Any device or software that allows people to communicate is going to be used for hook-ups. It's etched into the machine code at the heart of the internet.
it's weird tho, how do you find people in your area on a site used all across the world
a/s/l?
21/M/Belgium what about you
29/M/Germany
Could I have the coordinates of your anti tank setups?
my front door is pretty effective against tankies
Just make sure your house doesn't have an Ardennes to go through on the other side!
r/(city)r4r
You click on the banner that advertises local singles in your area ready to hook up now.
Hey maybe let's not vilify the nsfw subs that are doing nothing wrong. The anti adult content trend recently is really disturbing and is pushing the culture war in the states trying to outright ban porn.
I think it's more the blending of people advertising their adult content with those presumably looking for genuine connections that people have a problem with. A lot of niche interest subs have rules around self-promotion and people looking to advertise products for what I think are similar reasons.
Yeah all that shit is getting pretty wild. A bunch of stuffy prudes are freaking out about changing social/cultural norms.
I also think this latest war on porn is a low key cover to undermine online security/privacy/encryption.
It's about control really. The powers that be are afraid people are thinking about how things could be better and they don't want that.
If you want to control people go after their biological needs.
Food
Sleep
Sex
Man spez getting really desperate
the goods are odd but the odds are good.
This is basically an ad saying "if you want to get laid visit reddit." Honestly reddit probably suggested it. They're going to coin the phrase "reddit and chill."
"and thirty minutes later a man posted being interested", "the market is enormous"
Like wow, a guy looking for a hookup, how hard is that to find lol.
Yeah feels like a paid for opinion-publicity. Of course you have to use their shitty app to see NSFW now too so a win win right!!
Those hookups are full of scams and cops.
Ask me how I know.
How do you know that?
They're a cop that scams people.
Years ago, I had some success with these subreddits. In recent years, not so much. IF you could meet the various requirements to post, you would be flooded with some combination of OnlyFans accounts, literal scam attempts, and/or occasional actual prostitutes. But mostly the first two. More than one girl I reached out to had a long list of rules for guys who wanted to message her. Just a whole bunch of bullshit. And the "local" subreddits are 99.99999% spam accounts.
You all were hooking up?
I thought those were people pushing OF content. Or if it was happening, it was only in really big cities.
Big cities are so overrated for the dating scene. You don't have to go all the way to Falador to meet someone sexy. I met my gf in the Lumbridge general store.
Lmao look at this loser, just buy your gf at the GE like a civilized person
I met mine in wildy. She took my stuff and disappeared. Was worth it.
GE? Never heard of it. Buying GF in Varrock western bank.
Don't look for hookups in West Ardougne unless you have lots of penicillin.
seeing the pictures of redditors that got married and met through reddit.. yeah you don't want to have been hooking up there
New notification: $adjective$noun$numbers is following you!
Profile Picture Thumbnail: Cannot be displayed because NSFW
Oh yeah I remember those things. All my friends who use reddit have like 20 of those onlyfans bots following them. Like how did that ever become a thing!?
She's in my area too!
It’s been a hookup app for a long time now.
If I'd known that I might have stayed
It’s mostly sad cheating old dudes in my experience:/
Given Reddit's historic demographic that doesn't surprise me so all.
thanks, I hate it
Ooh, I don't know. Makes me want to get back in there. Apparently I was following the wrong subreddits all this time
And I bet most of it is fake/bots or shilling for an Onlyfans account.
"it always has been"
If Reddit gets seized and shutdown due to solication under FOSTA-SESTA I will laugh
I won't. That's a terrible law and its use should never be celebrated, even against someone we don't like.
These are confusing times, but I am glad I moved
To be fair, reddit for me was always about getting to know like-minded people. And I met my wife through the 40+redditor seeks redditor group so if that's what it is I'm fine with it. Not in the least as I left that toxic waste dump with the exodus and have not missed 95% of it. (Yes, I miss /r/AskHistorians but I am strong, if I allow myself one subredit it will suck me back in so clean break is for the best).
Those subreddits are trash. If you're from US, everything can be either easy or difficult. But if you're from another country, don't bother. US-centrism is a real pain.
No kidding. I started to receive messages from reddit mods (not the user, but actually coming as "from /r/subname mods", with phishing/scam links.
My wife and I met on r4r, but the post was looking for friendship, and that eventually led to us dating two years later.
I tried dating subreddits before. Results were not good.
The problem is that online dating is a miserable experience from a heterosexual perspective. I cannot really speak for the LGBTQ experience but I do have a lesbian friend who has pretty much been undateable.
On every dating/hook-up subreddit every single "M4F" post gets mass-downvoted and practically hidden from view, while every "F4M" post is swarmed with desperate and thirsty guys whose comments can be summed up in just five words: "PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME." You see the same shit on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn, Okcupid, POF and every other dating app.
Women can easily swipe right on any guy and 99,999 times out of 100,000 match with them, meet up with them and bang them in less than two hours if they wanted to. Men on the other hand get zero matches unless you look like a fucking Chippendale, are over 6ft, have a big dick, have a nice bank account and a decent job.
The internet has turned us hypergamous, and we wonder why the incel community is growing at an alarming rate...
y'know, i really thought lemmy would be better than this but i guess it is just fucking reddit all over again.
this stupid "men have to be chad thundercock or die alone!!!1111 it's so easy for women waahhhhh" shit is just a divisive incel talking point with no basis in reality. you literally just pulled numbers out of your ass too. the incel community is growing at an alarming rate because of all the talking heads on social media who purport this trash and people like you who mindlessly repeat it.
I really hate the fact that 'incel' has become this catch-all insult for a low value man, and frankly find it offensive that you are comparing me to the kind of people that glorify and worship school shooters. These people shouldn't be the reason to outright dismiss male woes with online dating, especially when a lot of online dating sites have zero interest in helping you find love and just want to make your experience as miserable as possible so that they can sucker you into paying triple the price of a WoW subscription to see what fake users 'liked' your profile.
I do not associate myself with the manosphere because these communities are toxic-a-f. At the same time I find it greatly concerning that they are growing in prominence (just look at Andrew Tate's social media following) and think there's loads of factors at play. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
Also, no basis in reality? There is an evolutionary basis to explain this. Humanity had evolved over millions of years to find certain traits attractive in a mate. For men, being physically strong, healthy, having status in a tribe and being able to provide for a family would have been strong factors in ensuring the survival of the next generation back when we were still foraging and hunting. We had only shed our status as a hunter-gatherer species hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. Is it outlandish to conclude that our human biology has not caught up to the millennia of societal and technological change that we've made as a species?
If you use the same talking points and terminology ("low-value man" lol) as they do, then I have every reason to draw comparison. The problem lies with the fact that y'all insist on framing this as exclusively a men's issue, and that women are somehow to blame for having unrealistically high standards that you make up and project onto them.
Indeed, there is no basis in reality that women have it easier. You can speculate that it's a product of evolution but that at best only points to surface-level differences, while the overall negative experience that has come about from the commodification of dating affects both sexes.
Edit: Also, let's say that it is men who are disproportionately affected, I find it interesting that the first reason you go to are all the things that men are commonly insecure about (height, penis size, etc.) despite those things not being the focus of the sources you provided later.
This is the main reason why I compared your post to incel talking points. Their whole tactic is playing off of the insecurities of men, making them feel bad about themselves, and framing it as the opinions of women despite no input from actual women being present. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what you were doing with your initial post, whether you're aware of it or not.
Side point (& I'm not the person you were responding to), but I have to ask: Do you not see online dating in the same vein as most other online corporate sites that commodify their users and devalue them for profits?
I personally think online dating is a "meat market" or "horse show" for everyone of every gender & orientation. There's little to no real effort on behalf of these sites to actually increase the number of connections (e.g. via coming up with features that actually encourage making connections), instead their entire ecosystem is designed to encourage the same type of "doom scrolling" that sites like FB encourage so that you stay on their sites/apps for longer viewing ads for longer, or shell out more & more money for their "premium" offerings.
It's hard to deny that online dating does not provide avenues for diversity in presenting people's strengths. Some people are more appealing in person than they are in text for example. Some people aren't photogenic (even if they are actually physically attractive), some people are livelier or funnier in person than they will ever appear in an online dating ad, some people just don't know how to create "eye catching" dating ads....etc.
It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those people at all, it just means those sites don't provide avenues for their strengths, which is a problem because people are extremely diverse, but instead these sites create the "meat market" dynamic because it's the only thing they apparently know how to do & it increases their profits to do so.
This piece from the Atlantic back in 2016 touched on what I mean:
Moira Weigel is a historian & author of the recent book Labor of Love, in which she chronicles how dating has always been difficult, & always been in flux. But there is something “historically new” about our current era, she says. “Dating has always been work,” she says. “But what’s ironic is that more of the work now is not actually around the interaction that you have with a person, it’s around the selection process, & the process of self-presentation. That does feel different than before.”
&
“The thing with design is, at risk of belaboring the obvious, how all of these apps make money is by keeping people on the app,” Weigel says. “Yes, there’s better & worse design, but there is ultimately this conflict of interest between the user of the app & the designer of the app.”
&
But getting as many people in front of your eyeballs as fast as possible doesn’t end up saving time at all. “I have women saying that they spend 10 to 15 hours a week online dating, because that’s how much work goes into producing one date,” Wood says.
So if there’s a fundamental problem with dating apps, one baked into their very nature, it is this: They facilitate our culture’s worst impulses for efficiency in the arena where we most need to resist those impulses. Research has shown that people who you aren’t necessarily attracted to at first sight, can become attractive to you over time, as you get to know them better. Evaluating someone’s fitness as a partner within the span of a single date—or a single swipe—eliminates this possibility.
I don't really give a shit how Incels perceive dating (seriously, no one is "owed" sex), but it's hard to deny that online dating sites, like several other online "experiences", have not negatively impacted their "space" for profits, similar to how sites like Reddit & Facebook were supposedly supposed to "help people communicate & make & keep connections" & only became more & more enshittified to improve corporate bottom lines, resulting in the opposite outcome (E.G. Shit like FB heavily encourages divisiveness instead cause that's what gets the ad views, news sites resort to click bait instead of actually reporting news cause again, profits..etc.).
Of course paywalled dating sites might be better on this, but considering the financial status of a lot of people (especially the younger demographics that are having a harder & harder time even finding the time & money to pursue relationships as one of your sources pointed out, which is also a HUGE part of the problem IMO), it makes sense why many would assume the freemium sites are representative of online dating as a whole (since they do have a larger market share as well)
& of course there are some efforts to address the issues I've listed (like Swan)
I don't know for sure since I'm not a sociologist nor have I personally dug deep enough into this topic, but I imagine that while not the sole reason, these for profit dating sites definitely have a sizable impact on the rise of incel "culture".
But I digress.
He is talking specifically about online dating, where judging by superficial looks is the whole goal and populations that are in it for the hookups are heavily male skewed and always will be. If you think that's your only option then yes- it really is "so easy for women" and "men have it so hard". That entire ecosystem is an absolute cesspit and always has been.
If you date the "normal" way- aka, making friends and connections face to face, things haven't really changed significantly and your chances are good if you just stay clean and personable. You just have to put actual effort into being a social human being, which is where the internet drags far too many of these kids off track.
Exactly. You need to check all the boxes online before women will take the risk. To be clear, online dating is shit for them too. A lot of those matches, are people you wouldn't want to match with once you get to know them.
Off-line? Entirely different. Join a club, get to know people, they see you're probably not going to kidnap them or that you have a nice personality and even the ugliest guy stands a chance of dating very nice women.
Tinder men to women ratio – Gender Statistics:
78,1% of users are men, and 21,9% of users are women
46% of the time men swipe right, meanwhile women swipe right 14% of the time
This explains a lot the fact that men are less ‘successful’ on Tinder when compared to women.
Whoever wrote this article must’ve just got on Reddit.
Seriously, this is hardly a new trend for Reddit. There've been tons of hookup subreddits for years now.
Sounds like a disappointment speedrun to me.
I still use 4chan for all my hook up needs. Side note, anyone got the plug on some antibiotics?
> 4chan
It is surprisingly good for trans people.
I never would have thought this, but I’m happy they have a place to go that’s good.
Have you visited /b or /soc in the past 5 years? "Traps" get more attention than biological women. It's the last bus stop for the misogynists.
No. I have not.
I know more than one edgy trans person who browsed 4chan back in the day so I'm only... slightly surprised
Any device or software that allows people to communicate is going to be used for hook-ups. It's etched into the machine code at the heart of the internet.
it's weird tho, how do you find people in your area on a site used all across the world
a/s/l?
21/M/Belgium what about you
29/M/Germany
Could I have the coordinates of your anti tank setups?
my front door is pretty effective against tankies
Just make sure your house doesn't have an Ardennes to go through on the other side!
r/(city)r4r
You click on the banner that advertises local singles in your area ready to hook up now.
Hey maybe let's not vilify the nsfw subs that are doing nothing wrong. The anti adult content trend recently is really disturbing and is pushing the culture war in the states trying to outright ban porn.
I think it's more the blending of people advertising their adult content with those presumably looking for genuine connections that people have a problem with. A lot of niche interest subs have rules around self-promotion and people looking to advertise products for what I think are similar reasons.
Yeah all that shit is getting pretty wild. A bunch of stuffy prudes are freaking out about changing social/cultural norms.
I also think this latest war on porn is a low key cover to undermine online security/privacy/encryption.
It's about control really. The powers that be are afraid people are thinking about how things could be better and they don't want that.
If you want to control people go after their biological needs.
Man spez getting really desperate
the goods are odd but the odds are good.
This is basically an ad saying "if you want to get laid visit reddit." Honestly reddit probably suggested it. They're going to coin the phrase "reddit and chill."
"and thirty minutes later a man posted being interested", "the market is enormous"
Like wow, a guy looking for a hookup, how hard is that to find lol.
Yeah feels like a paid for opinion-publicity. Of course you have to use their shitty app to see NSFW now too so a win win right!!
Those hookups are full of scams and cops.
Ask me how I know.
How do you know that?
They're a cop that scams people.
Years ago, I had some success with these subreddits. In recent years, not so much. IF you could meet the various requirements to post, you would be flooded with some combination of OnlyFans accounts, literal scam attempts, and/or occasional actual prostitutes. But mostly the first two. More than one girl I reached out to had a long list of rules for guys who wanted to message her. Just a whole bunch of bullshit. And the "local" subreddits are 99.99999% spam accounts.
You all were hooking up?
I thought those were people pushing OF content. Or if it was happening, it was only in really big cities.
Big cities are so overrated for the dating scene. You don't have to go all the way to Falador to meet someone sexy. I met my gf in the Lumbridge general store.
Lmao look at this loser, just buy your gf at the GE like a civilized person
I met mine in wildy. She took my stuff and disappeared. Was worth it.
GE? Never heard of it. Buying GF in Varrock western bank.
Don't look for hookups in West Ardougne unless you have lots of penicillin.
seeing the pictures of redditors that got married and met through reddit.. yeah you don't want to have been hooking up there
New notification: $adjective$noun$numbers is following you!
Profile Picture Thumbnail: Cannot be displayed because NSFW
Oh yeah I remember those things. All my friends who use reddit have like 20 of those onlyfans bots following them. Like how did that ever become a thing!?
She's in my area too!
It’s been a hookup app for a long time now.
If I'd known that I might have stayed
It’s mostly sad cheating old dudes in my experience:/
Given Reddit's historic demographic that doesn't surprise me so all.
thanks, I hate it
Ooh, I don't know. Makes me want to get back in there. Apparently I was following the wrong subreddits all this time
And I bet most of it is fake/bots or shilling for an Onlyfans account.
"it always has been"
If Reddit gets seized and shutdown due to solication under FOSTA-SESTA I will laugh
I won't. That's a terrible law and its use should never be celebrated, even against someone we don't like.
These are confusing times, but I am glad I moved
To be fair, reddit for me was always about getting to know like-minded people. And I met my wife through the 40+redditor seeks redditor group so if that's what it is I'm fine with it. Not in the least as I left that toxic waste dump with the exodus and have not missed 95% of it. (Yes, I miss /r/AskHistorians but I am strong, if I allow myself one subredit it will suck me back in so clean break is for the best).
Those subreddits are trash. If you're from US, everything can be either easy or difficult. But if you're from another country, don't bother. US-centrism is a real pain.
The new tinder
Always has been
No kidding. I started to receive messages from reddit mods (not the user, but actually coming as "from /r/subname mods", with phishing/scam links.
My wife and I met on r4r, but the post was looking for friendship, and that eventually led to us dating two years later.
I tried dating subreddits before. Results were not good.
The problem is that online dating is a miserable experience from a heterosexual perspective. I cannot really speak for the LGBTQ experience but I do have a lesbian friend who has pretty much been undateable.
On every dating/hook-up subreddit every single "M4F" post gets mass-downvoted and practically hidden from view, while every "F4M" post is swarmed with desperate and thirsty guys whose comments can be summed up in just five words: "PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME." You see the same shit on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn, Okcupid, POF and every other dating app.
Women can easily swipe right on any guy and 99,999 times out of 100,000 match with them, meet up with them and bang them in less than two hours if they wanted to. Men on the other hand get zero matches unless you look like a fucking Chippendale, are over 6ft, have a big dick, have a nice bank account and a decent job.
The internet has turned us hypergamous, and we wonder why the incel community is growing at an alarming rate...
y'know, i really thought lemmy would be better than this but i guess it is just fucking reddit all over again.
this stupid "men have to be chad thundercock or die alone!!!1111 it's so easy for women waahhhhh" shit is just a divisive incel talking point with no basis in reality. you literally just pulled numbers out of your ass too. the incel community is growing at an alarming rate because of all the talking heads on social media who purport this trash and people like you who mindlessly repeat it.
I really hate the fact that 'incel' has become this catch-all insult for a low value man, and frankly find it offensive that you are comparing me to the kind of people that glorify and worship school shooters. These people shouldn't be the reason to outright dismiss male woes with online dating, especially when a lot of online dating sites have zero interest in helping you find love and just want to make your experience as miserable as possible so that they can sucker you into paying triple the price of a WoW subscription to see what fake users 'liked' your profile.
I do not associate myself with the manosphere because these communities are toxic-a-f. At the same time I find it greatly concerning that they are growing in prominence (just look at Andrew Tate's social media following) and think there's loads of factors at play. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
Male virginity has more than trebled in the United States from 8% of men aged 18 - 30 reporting no sexual partners in 2008 to 27% in 2018. That is an alarming statistic.
But wait that's one source, I hear you say. Here is an archived post from the Okcupid blog which was taken down after Match got their money-grubbing paws on the site, which showed trends of how badly male users were ranked. Of course Match Group had to remove that from their blog because they have to keep up the illusion that it's worth paying a £37/month subscrption.
Also, no basis in reality? There is an evolutionary basis to explain this. Humanity had evolved over millions of years to find certain traits attractive in a mate. For men, being physically strong, healthy, having status in a tribe and being able to provide for a family would have been strong factors in ensuring the survival of the next generation back when we were still foraging and hunting. We had only shed our status as a hunter-gatherer species hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. Is it outlandish to conclude that our human biology has not caught up to the millennia of societal and technological change that we've made as a species?
If you use the same talking points and terminology ("low-value man" lol) as they do, then I have every reason to draw comparison. The problem lies with the fact that y'all insist on framing this as exclusively a men's issue, and that women are somehow to blame for having unrealistically high standards that you make up and project onto them.
Since we're cherry-picking surveys, here are some for you: https://www.salon.com/2022/11/06/why-are-so-many-young-people-are-having-less-and-fewer-friendships/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/
Indeed, there is no basis in reality that women have it easier. You can speculate that it's a product of evolution but that at best only points to surface-level differences, while the overall negative experience that has come about from the commodification of dating affects both sexes.
Edit: Also, let's say that it is men who are disproportionately affected, I find it interesting that the first reason you go to are all the things that men are commonly insecure about (height, penis size, etc.) despite those things not being the focus of the sources you provided later.
This is the main reason why I compared your post to incel talking points. Their whole tactic is playing off of the insecurities of men, making them feel bad about themselves, and framing it as the opinions of women despite no input from actual women being present. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what you were doing with your initial post, whether you're aware of it or not.
Side point (& I'm not the person you were responding to), but I have to ask: Do you not see online dating in the same vein as most other online corporate sites that commodify their users and devalue them for profits?
I personally think online dating is a "meat market" or "horse show" for everyone of every gender & orientation. There's little to no real effort on behalf of these sites to actually increase the number of connections (e.g. via coming up with features that actually encourage making connections), instead their entire ecosystem is designed to encourage the same type of "doom scrolling" that sites like FB encourage so that you stay on their sites/apps for longer viewing ads for longer, or shell out more & more money for their "premium" offerings.
It's hard to deny that online dating does not provide avenues for diversity in presenting people's strengths. Some people are more appealing in person than they are in text for example. Some people aren't photogenic (even if they are actually physically attractive), some people are livelier or funnier in person than they will ever appear in an online dating ad, some people just don't know how to create "eye catching" dating ads....etc.
It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those people at all, it just means those sites don't provide avenues for their strengths, which is a problem because people are extremely diverse, but instead these sites create the "meat market" dynamic because it's the only thing they apparently know how to do & it increases their profits to do so.
This piece from the Atlantic back in 2016 touched on what I mean:
&
&
I don't really give a shit how Incels perceive dating (seriously, no one is "owed" sex), but it's hard to deny that online dating sites, like several other online "experiences", have not negatively impacted their "space" for profits, similar to how sites like Reddit & Facebook were supposedly supposed to "help people communicate & make & keep connections" & only became more & more enshittified to improve corporate bottom lines, resulting in the opposite outcome (E.G. Shit like FB heavily encourages divisiveness instead cause that's what gets the ad views, news sites resort to click bait instead of actually reporting news cause again, profits..etc.).
Of course paywalled dating sites might be better on this, but considering the financial status of a lot of people (especially the younger demographics that are having a harder & harder time even finding the time & money to pursue relationships as one of your sources pointed out, which is also a HUGE part of the problem IMO), it makes sense why many would assume the freemium sites are representative of online dating as a whole (since they do have a larger market share as well)
& of course there are some efforts to address the issues I've listed (like Swan)
I don't know for sure since I'm not a sociologist nor have I personally dug deep enough into this topic, but I imagine that while not the sole reason, these for profit dating sites definitely have a sizable impact on the rise of incel "culture".
But I digress.
He is talking specifically about online dating, where judging by superficial looks is the whole goal and populations that are in it for the hookups are heavily male skewed and always will be. If you think that's your only option then yes- it really is "so easy for women" and "men have it so hard". That entire ecosystem is an absolute cesspit and always has been.
If you date the "normal" way- aka, making friends and connections face to face, things haven't really changed significantly and your chances are good if you just stay clean and personable. You just have to put actual effort into being a social human being, which is where the internet drags far too many of these kids off track.
Exactly. You need to check all the boxes online before women will take the risk. To be clear, online dating is shit for them too. A lot of those matches, are people you wouldn't want to match with once you get to know them.
Off-line? Entirely different. Join a club, get to know people, they see you're probably not going to kidnap them or that you have a nice personality and even the ugliest guy stands a chance of dating very nice women.
Source: https://datingzest.com/tinder-statistics/
Online dating is a bad bet for men because the odds are against them.
Reddit, a place where a guy can jack off with 100s of other guys pretending to be girls
In the same way that IRC was in the 90s.
Did anyone actually hook up via IRC?
a/s/l?
I definitely did. Multiple times.
Lost my virginity thanks to IRC.
Some IRC channels had IRL meetups, people would regularly hook up on those.