I’m a completely different counter point. This is typed on my phone.

I am a mess with dating and sought help in the seduction community around 2008 as a teen. There I learned about the value of meditation and Buddhist ethics as my first cornerstone for dating. My second cornerstone for dating came when I understood what my true style of playfulness is since childhood. I have a lot of imagination that I consider to be Disney-like. And I would use that as my “social glue” because I basically showed anyone I talked to the inner workings of my mind while doing that. The third cornerstone was to study positive psychology (Tal Ben Shahar, Harvard). I read many scientific articles. Shout out to Seligman and Learned Optimism as well and to the HEXACO personality inventory and to locus of control/coping styles and to attachment theory. The fourth cornerstone was to travel, in order to loosen up and expand my view/horizon. Using these 4 cornerstones - while having a hacker mindset - the seduction community helped me to find my own style of how I wanted to date. It took 2.5 years of only rejections. I also took an ethic course early on (from Yale or Harvard - I forgot). The reason is because many ideas that were mentioned were toxic. Things like: insulting people for social status, being an “alpha male” or using scripted stories. I immediately steered clear from those. When you are hyper critical (and clueless - like I was) then the seduction community offers good advice. If you copy/paste whatever they do, then it is likely that one might develop a toxic personality.

When I used Tinder a year ago, I started out like anyone else. I put a reasonable bio, reasonable pictures (with hobbies and things I valued). I got one match that month. I realized that in the online dating arena that I was clueless again. So I decided to use my hacker mindset and looked at advice from the seduction community. My hacker mindset allowed me to autoswipe 200k profiles with the simplest JS ever (10 minutes of coding) and the seduction community gave the advice to edit your pictures. I thought about the ethics of picture editing and decided that I could do a few test dates to see if anyone would notice. No one noticed and most dates actually went really well. I decided it was therefore ethical since they would see me in real life anyway. It made me realize that people on Tinder use the peripheral route of the elaboration-likelihood model in consumer psychology. That is to say: profiles are more treated like an impulse purchase and much less like the decision-making process of buying a house. In fact, it is only during the first date that you get an actual fair consideration. This solidified my ethical justification in getting as many matches as possible and get them on a real life date as soon as possible. Another justification is: their environment is toxic so I need to do some unconventional things in order to thrive. I never got banned. I don’t autoswipe fast, no need. One per 10 seconds is enough, just let it churn.

Using this strategy I got 150 matches of women I fancied per month. That is a whole lot better than the reasonable/authentic approach which gained me 1 match per month. I went on 26 dates (1 per week) and around the 26th date I found someone special and with her I am in a relationship.

I’m hardcore when it comes to dating. I know I have to be. If am not, then no one sees me. But when I flip the switch and am intentional about it, then some women see me. When I am in a relationship, I am fully myself - it is just the first 10 to 15 minutes of the interaction that needs to be tweaked a little. All women that became my GF know my entire story quite soon after we enter in a relationship (sometimes before even). They are all fine with it and some actually agree that if I wouldn’t put the effort in then no one would see me standing.

It is what it is. But with careful conscious effort Tinder works. It is more effective for me than any other way of meeting women (night club, sport club, via friends, bold approaches during the day).

So yea +1 for online dating from my side. It saved me a bunch of time after learning the ropes.