Your Looks and Your Inbox (dating sites)

[Independent voter]

So this article was posted on OKCupid by staff and then quietly deleted a short time later from what I understand, probably due to complaints. OKCupid's reason for deleting the article has sparked a lot of debate on twitter.

The article has a bunch of charts and graphs if you're interested.

Basically your photo will give you a lot more responses than anything you put in your profile.

However women seem a whole lot less picky then men do when it comes to looks, for the vast majority of men looks are a huge factor.




https://archive.is/ZJymw#selection-305.0-683.306

Your Looks and Your Inbox
How men and women perceive attractiveness
This week we will confront an unfortunate truth of online dating: no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.
We’re going to look at how your photos affect both the messages you get and how successful your own outgoing messages are. We all know that beautiful people are more successful daters, but let’s quantify by exactly how much.
To illustrate the exact spectrum of looks we’re talking about here, and to put some human faces on our discussion, I want to introduce a few photos of real OkCupid users. Here are two women and two men near the top of our range.

And here are two sets rated in the middle.

As for photos at the bottom of the curve, it didn’t feel right to write someone and say “can I use you to illustrate the concept of ugliness on my blog?” so you’ll just have to extrapolate.
The above featured users have graciously agreed to let me post their pictures, so please don’t make them regret it. Funnily enough, I had to write about a dozen beautiful female users before anyone would even get back to me. Life imitates blog!
Anyhow, I know attractiveness is far from a universal concept, but maybe keep these folks in mind as we go through the data.
We’ll start with a simple line chart. The information I’ll present in this post is not normalized because, as we’ll see, it’s interesting how men and women evaluate looks differently.

Our chart shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.
Given the popular wisdom that Hollywood, the Internet, and Photoshop have created unrealistic expectations of how a woman should look, I found the fairness and, well, realism, of this gray arc kind of heartening.
Now let’s superimpose the distribution of actual messages guys have sent:

2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women.
When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.
The medical term for this is male pattern madness.
The female equivalent of the above chart shows a different bias:

As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Just to illustrate that women are operating on a very different scale, here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:

Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.
Finally, I just want to combine the two charts to emphasize how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people get. I have scaled this graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys get 11× the messages the lowest-rated do. The medium-rated get about 4×.

This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.
Now let’s take a look at how senders’ and recipients’ attractivenesses affect reply rates, not just the number of messages sent.
As you’d expect, more attractive people get more replies. And since they themselves get so many more messages than everyone else, they write back much less frequently. Here’s the graph for female senders, plotted in evenly-spaced “attractiveness groups.”

And here’s the one for male senders.

taste the rainbow, of self-esteem issues
One interesting thing seems to be going on here: when the best-looking men write the worst-looking women, their message success rate takes a big hit. The knee-jerk response would be to somehow chalk it up to hunky spammers, but we very carefully control for that in these articles, and in any event why would better-looking girls be drastically more susceptible to it? It seems to be some kind of self-confidence thing.
As we did before, I’m going to consolidate the line charts to show just how your attractiveness changes how often your messages get responses.

This post has been the preamble to the larger discussion of “what makes a good profile?” We’ve spent a lot of time on OkTrends looking at messages, and since your profile is the other important place you express yourself, we thought it deserved the same treatment.
I wanted to address physical attractiveness right at the start, because obviously it’s a huge factor in how successful your profile is. In the upcoming posts in this series, we’re going to control for attractiveness, so that we can deliver real and useful advice for all the non-models out there.
We’ll look at, among other things: what makes a good picture (is it taken outside? inside? is it full-body? a head-shot? with your pet snake? what?), what kinds of self-presentation will get you the most messages (jokey? flirty? all business?), and how much profile information is too much. Should be good.

[potis]

TLDR: Women are more shallow than males are.

Newsflash!

Like you need an article from a dating site to tell you that.

Males will put their dick into anything that it will allow them too, another newsflash!

Because stereotypes are made out of thin air, right?

[zenkai]

https://archive.is/ZJymw#selection-305.0-683.306

Your Looks and Your Inbox
How men and women perceive attractiveness
This week we will confront an unfortunate truth of online dating: no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.
.

Dating sites are a fucking joke, because most people are jackasses. I found out quickly that not very many people read profiles, I even tried shortening mine down and make it TLDR but still I get people who clearly only messaged me based on my picture, asking me dumbass questions that is in my profile. So glad I am off the market and not dealing with with that shit.

The best relationships I usually had were not from dating websites.

[Ryme]

I mean, this feels fairly expected right? I wish they'd make some graphs for the dog filter.

[ro9ue]

So a TL;DR for this would be:

Guys are generally pretty reasonable on judging people's looks, but always shoot out of their league.
Girls are harsh judging other peoples looks, saying 80% of men are below average, but tend to undershoot for a potential partner.

Did I get that right?

[Mistame]

It was probably pulled because someone got "offended" at the notion that looks matter.

TLDR: Women are more shallow than males are.

I always cackle when people use "shallow" unironically. In the context of dating, "shallow" is just a term used to compensate for rejection. People have preferences. Not dating someone because of something that puts you off does not make you "shallow", it makes you rational.

So a TL;DR for this would be:

Guys are generally pretty reasonable on judging people's looks, but always shoot out of their league.
Girls are harsh judging other peoples looks, saying 80% of men are below average, but tend to undershoot for a potential partner.

Did I get that right?

Pretty much. Though it does seem to focus on faces, which aren't the only factor when it comes to attractiveness. I've seen countless women with pretty faces but only one curve: round. That said, I think the differences line up with the differences between men and women in general. It takes more for a guy to be "hot", because women tend to be more critical when confined solely to physical attributes, since they usually consider other factors as well. But when considering those factors, a less-attractive man may actually become more attractive. Men, however, are generally physically-driven and if a woman fits into their preference, it doesn't take much for them to be "hot", even if they're only "average". They tend to shoot for "out of their league" because frankly, the hotter the better. Obviously, there are exceptions/variances and I'm not saying either is bad. /shrug

[Queen of Hamsters]

It was probably pulled because someone got "offended" at the notion that looks matter.



I always cackle when people use "shallow" unironically. In the context of dating, "shallow" is just a term used to compensate for rejection. People have preferences. Not dating someone because of something that puts you off does not make you "shallow", it makes you rational.



Pretty much. Though it does seem to focus on faces, which aren't the only factor when it comes to attractiveness. I've seen countless women with pretty faces but only one curve: round. That said, I think the differences line up with the differences between men and women in general. It takes more for a guy to be "hot", because women tend to be more critical when confined solely to physical attributes, since they usually consider other factors as well. But when considering those factors, a less-attractive man may actually become more attractive. Men, however, are generally physically-driven and if a woman fits into their preference, it doesn't take much for them to be "hot", even if they're only "average". They tend to shoot for "out of their league" because frankly, the hotter the better. Obviously, there are exceptions/variances and I'm not saying either is bad. /shrug

... Was not expecting such an intelligent, insightful post in this thread. ---<@ to you good person!

[unbound]

In other news, water is wet.

Online dating sites are like going to a grocery store. By and large, people are going to pick out the best looking fruits in the pile, and very few will even have the knowledge on how to find the sweetest / best fruits anyways.

[Keltas]

Man if they needed someones ugly profile they should've asked me, I would've 100% let them use it.

That might've actually gotten me a message for once.

[Akka]

One thing I wonder : if it's the blogger himself who picked up the photo according to what he considers "attractive", maybe contrast between how he thought he got an average sample of men against how women thought they were mostly unattractive simply stems from a fundamental difference in how women rate attractiveness on a male compared to how a man would do ?
(so basically, as a man he selected a range of men according to his own criteria, but from the PoV of women, his selection was below-average)

[Radaney]

TLDR: Women are more shallow than males are.

Newsflash!

Like you need an article from a dating site to tell you that.

Males will put their dick into anything that it will allow them too, another newsflash!

Because stereotypes are made out of thin air, right?

It's not even a bad thing either, it makes evolutionary sense.

Also people are allowed to have whatever standards they want.

But yeh everyone knows this anyway.

[LiiLoSNK]

People like hot people? Weird. I personally like the fattest, ugliest, smelliest, and laziest looking people.

[Coolthulhu]

I've been running an experiment of sorts: I created two accounts on a dating website, one has clothed pictures and a brief but honest description, the other one has only shirtless torso pictures (no face) and no description whatsoever. As normal me I get about 1/2 people to message me a week, as headless horseman me that number rises to about 30 per week. I've been telling myself I should be happy about my body, but I really just end up not replying to messages sent to the headless horseman. Besides, some people didn't reply when I wrote them with the normal account, but quickly replied to the headless horseman. I'm pretty bummed about it.

[Arlee]

While there could potentially be an interesting discussion in this, there's already a few posts focusing on the gender aspects of this and it's pretty difficult to keep this topic off of gender things which is a forbidden topic.