I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.

What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
    5·
    1 year ago

    I am with you on a lot of this, but I will never and I mean ever understand the impulse that so many people have to say that online dating has made life worse. Dating is much better now because of online dating. Instead of constantly needing to be vigilant for an opportunity to find a mate and then pursuing them only to often be shut down or find out about a huge deal breaker on the second date, we can filter out a lot of those cases simply by reading a profile. Yes I’m aware people lie and hide things. But if they’re on a dating site they probably are looking for a relationship of some kind and if they wrote 3 or more sentences you probably can get a feel for what they generally value in life.

    I also think it’s quite a stretch to try and say online dating = capitalism because “marketed as products” and “throw people away like trash”. It sounds like you were broken up with by one too many online dates?

    Are you somehow intelligent enough to write all of this so thoughtfully, yet somehow unaware that relationships have ALWAYS been highly “transactional”? One of many aspects I could focus on to illustrate this is just the concept of marriage period. In many cultures, since thousands of years ago, you literally paid a family for a bride. It still continues today if I’m not mistaken, you just call it “paying a dowry” instead of buying a wife because it sounds better.

    If we are talking about r/datingadvice I think there it’s a legit complaint to say that people seem to be more in the “throw that person away” camp but I don’t think there’s actually a shred of evidence that anything is new about this. We just now have a conduit for public opinions about dating to end up in our faces while we doomscroll.

    I also blame capitalism for a lot, but I think it gets tricky to link capitalism to everything bad. I’d say it’s more like all these things are symptoms of a condition and all somewhat related. Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.

    • chic_luke@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      First things first, throwing people away and online dating are in two different camps entirely. For the throwing people away it’s something that I have seen a lot: the Reddit dating advice is also more and more common and spread on social media, and it’s becoming to be eaten up by people. Ask random friends in your social circle in general, and you’ll find that - at least the younger ones - are susceptible to this trend.

      As for online dating: we can meet in the middle and say that I think it would be a net pro on something that is structured differently than Tinder, which represents the embodiment of what I think is bad about it. There is, of course, value in being able to have access to a wider pool than “your friend group and social circle”. This is how I would structure my own dating app:

      • Free and open source with no invasive data telemetry, full GDPR compliance, you can request all your data to be wiped clean with a button.
      • No freemium model to encourage buying a pro option for it to actually work. Using a simple, unbiased algorithm that does a sort by distance, then a sort by sexual/romantic orientation compatibility (without requiring you to state it on your profile, for privacy reasons)
      • Use a model that discourages “serial dating”. Every match you have with the app has a countdown, and the chat automatically terminates after some amount of messages and days. Every match has a “Set as Exclusive” button. Both parties press it when they’re not quite in a relationship, but are seeing each other exclusively. When both people press it, both people know they have agreed on this, and from then on the app goes in total lockdown until you deselect it and go back to non-exclusive dating.
      • As for the last thing, I will freely borrow an idea that already exists from the Hinge app (which I consider to be the absolutely least worst option around; I have read a book written by one of the people who worked on it and I have agreed with every word): The app is made to be deleted. When two people enter an official relationship, both select a “Make official” button in their match’s settings view. When that’s done, the app congratulates you, deletes both accounts and then invites you to delete it.

      Yes, I am aware this would not work for open relationships or stuff like couples looking for a third unicorn for kinky stuff, but that’s by design, as existing apps already work well for that. Tinder, for example, is more widely used for casual sex that it is about building romantic relationships, and it is perfectly adequate for that.

      Yes, you are pointing to combines marriages - but I am not suggesting we go back to the 50’s, I am talking about the past few years. Capitalism has already been an upgrade over feudalism, I agree. My point is that, lately, we have been overdoing it and everything that started off as a positive innovation, like social media and dating apps, is starting to lose its soul and become more Draconian or anti - capitalism.

      Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.

      I have a question for you: why is it that billionaires and big capitalists have been amassing more profits and pushing this more intensive version of capitalism? I know this argumentation all too well, I have once had a long discussion with a friend who argued capitalism or not wouldn’t change anything because greed exists. My counter point is that, while greed exists and has always existed, it’s never been quite that bad in recent times and, for second, greed and capitalism feed and reinforce each other. It’s an endless loop that keeps reinforcing itself.

      Also, do consider the fact that while I was highly upvoted here on Lemmy, the same wouldn’t be true at a random table with some friend group out there in the world. These opinions of mine that are popular here are fringe in the real world, so if you get the impression my comment is disconnected from reality and what people think when you touch grass, yes, that is precisely the point why I wrote it. This is my own little grumpy old man yelling at a clown view of a lot of modern things that I talk about in spaces like these online, but mostly shut up about when I’m out there having a drink.