and also this: "What if the empathy extended to Nico (despite his nonexistence) suggests that we’ve developed a kind of reflexive compassion for the performance of vulnerability, regardless of whether there’s anything actually vulnerable beneath it?"
Love this project and the essay. You could formalize it to some extent: the distribution of actual responses on Hinge is X% less diverse than the distribution of bar pickup lines between 2000-2010, or something along those lines. IMO the distribution of text is probably not actually all that different but all the other factors in the bar added the variance (sight, sounds, etc) - flattening it to one dimension is what produces the irreality.
This is a surreal post. Like seeing under the surface of... lots of stuff. Def not just dating apps!
I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that when I did Hinge I often thought about the sameness of lady profiles too. And I also wondered: How do they know what to copy? Straight women don't see straight women, right? How does it work?
But I guess this helps me to see it better. It's bigger than anything so simple as direct copying.
The irreal is a good way to put it
and you know I find when I'm on Twitter a lot of times I find myself asking questions like: should this be an all lower case tweet?
should i throw in an abbrev?
do I seem current enough?
It's all kind of ridiculous but I feel that internal pressure.
I think it’s an emergent property of environments with huge online selections, like Hinge or Netflix or Spotify. In theory you should be able to find something weird and unique and perfectly suited, but in practice you choose the mostly familiar option.
Nice, I did enjoy reading this! I think you were able to articulate something about convergence, or a kind of “overfitting,” of masculine behavior toward an optimized singularity on dating apps that I haven’t been able to put into words until reading this! Very interesting!
this is so interesting!!! and i’ve also been really sitting with the idea that people just don’t care whether or not something is real anymore as long as they can complain. we grew up hearing “don’t believe everything you see on the internet” and then we somehow just forgot ? about that ? so seeing this little experiment is super cool. very insightful
I dont think people willingly want to, out of bad faith, forget the notion of “don’t believe everything we see on the internet” but I do think it has come to the point where the internet has become incredibly efficient as an ontological bucket and aggregator of information. We're at a point where we are quite literally models overfitting to the algorithms that run apps like Hinge in the first place. So, no matter whether the “spark” is real or not, the illicit feelings something induces are enough for people to engage with that media using all the humanity and modes of empathy within their arsenal. Though ngl, some people also just like to complain, but I find that these systems are more pervasive than we think.
Oh woe is me! The hundreds, literal hundreds of responses I got this week are all so awful. Total mid chick getting outrageously high levels of interest because the market is so comically lopsided and guys are thirstier than ever that are trapped in that dying late stage empire called the US with no way out.
Now do the app where you get NO likes for months or years at a time to simulate the average male experience. You should be able to 'vibecode' (LOL- i.e. no dev skills) that one up in a jiffy as it'll be totally blank...
> we’re still building a perception of reality, just an irreal one
The not-a-typo gives me the sensation of a thorn in the eye, which might be precisely how I should react to the object-level thing being described. Neato
Oh banger I reacted so hard I had to scroll down and react on frame 0, before I finished the piece. How do you pronounce irreal? Eye-reel, ee-reel, or ear-reel all sound totally wrong in my throat, then I turn to ee-re-al like an Albert who lives by Lake Erie. Anyway I've always really liked the metaphor of water/attention to explain the gendered experience of dating - boys dying of thirst, girls drowning. The hostile Twitter crowd think "this guy is sending you water, anyone should be grateful for that precious thing!". But water is free now, if they were willing to make like Narcissus and ask for attention from the fountain of an LLM. Twitter is already irreality, so much of the time, why not go one step deeper? It'll be interesting (sad) to see about the drownings on the news
lolll i love the concept of the app
and also this: "What if the empathy extended to Nico (despite his nonexistence) suggests that we’ve developed a kind of reflexive compassion for the performance of vulnerability, regardless of whether there’s anything actually vulnerable beneath it?"
One day I want someone to brand me a highkey pathetic foid is that too much to ask
Thank you for the article Hinge is a mysterious and evil place and I think you unpicked the experience of it very well
Love this project and the essay. You could formalize it to some extent: the distribution of actual responses on Hinge is X% less diverse than the distribution of bar pickup lines between 2000-2010, or something along those lines. IMO the distribution of text is probably not actually all that different but all the other factors in the bar added the variance (sight, sounds, etc) - flattening it to one dimension is what produces the irreality.
This is a surreal post. Like seeing under the surface of... lots of stuff. Def not just dating apps!
I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that when I did Hinge I often thought about the sameness of lady profiles too. And I also wondered: How do they know what to copy? Straight women don't see straight women, right? How does it work?
But I guess this helps me to see it better. It's bigger than anything so simple as direct copying.
The irreal is a good way to put it
and you know I find when I'm on Twitter a lot of times I find myself asking questions like: should this be an all lower case tweet?
should i throw in an abbrev?
do I seem current enough?
It's all kind of ridiculous but I feel that internal pressure.
I think it’s an emergent property of environments with huge online selections, like Hinge or Netflix or Spotify. In theory you should be able to find something weird and unique and perfectly suited, but in practice you choose the mostly familiar option.
Nice, I did enjoy reading this! I think you were able to articulate something about convergence, or a kind of “overfitting,” of masculine behavior toward an optimized singularity on dating apps that I haven’t been able to put into words until reading this! Very interesting!
this is so cool! i loved reading this
this is so interesting!!! and i’ve also been really sitting with the idea that people just don’t care whether or not something is real anymore as long as they can complain. we grew up hearing “don’t believe everything you see on the internet” and then we somehow just forgot ? about that ? so seeing this little experiment is super cool. very insightful
I dont think people willingly want to, out of bad faith, forget the notion of “don’t believe everything we see on the internet” but I do think it has come to the point where the internet has become incredibly efficient as an ontological bucket and aggregator of information. We're at a point where we are quite literally models overfitting to the algorithms that run apps like Hinge in the first place. So, no matter whether the “spark” is real or not, the illicit feelings something induces are enough for people to engage with that media using all the humanity and modes of empathy within their arsenal. Though ngl, some people also just like to complain, but I find that these systems are more pervasive than we think.
Oh woe is me! The hundreds, literal hundreds of responses I got this week are all so awful. Total mid chick getting outrageously high levels of interest because the market is so comically lopsided and guys are thirstier than ever that are trapped in that dying late stage empire called the US with no way out.
Now do the app where you get NO likes for months or years at a time to simulate the average male experience. You should be able to 'vibecode' (LOL- i.e. no dev skills) that one up in a jiffy as it'll be totally blank...
I'm banned from Hinge also we did code it but it was too boring
this is so cool! very anthropological
The app is 404ing btw
Ok. Like it. Socio-technologically mediated responses are my favorite /@-@;$,82920. ❤️
> we’re still building a perception of reality, just an irreal one
The not-a-typo gives me the sensation of a thorn in the eye, which might be precisely how I should react to the object-level thing being described. Neato
Oh banger I reacted so hard I had to scroll down and react on frame 0, before I finished the piece. How do you pronounce irreal? Eye-reel, ee-reel, or ear-reel all sound totally wrong in my throat, then I turn to ee-re-al like an Albert who lives by Lake Erie. Anyway I've always really liked the metaphor of water/attention to explain the gendered experience of dating - boys dying of thirst, girls drowning. The hostile Twitter crowd think "this guy is sending you water, anyone should be grateful for that precious thing!". But water is free now, if they were willing to make like Narcissus and ask for attention from the fountain of an LLM. Twitter is already irreality, so much of the time, why not go one step deeper? It'll be interesting (sad) to see about the drownings on the news
Wow, didn't expect such a clever use of AI. It makes you relly think about those archetypes, like when I'm deep in a book. So accurate and brilliant!
Perhaps important to note that the entire idea and driving force came from a guy based on his experience on Hinge
Interestingly enough the homogenous nature of dating apps complained about here is the method selected for because it maximizes matches.