I have thought a lot about dating. I hope some of it is helpful. What I write is quite opinionated, so I'm pretty sure you won't agree with all of it. I hope the parts you agree with, that it inspires you. I've tried to help many of my friends with dating, it pains me to see people being so stuck and not finding the love of their lives. It pained me too, which is why I put in all of my effort into it for a while.

This is not comprehensive and I didn't really edit my comment, all of this is just a quick stream of consciousness comment.

How I approached Tinder and (online) dating:

1. Tinder is a toxic environment, it's too focused on looks. I need to be toxic back to detoxify it, not in ethical terms but in practical terms. In ethical terms, I believe to be ethically neutral what I did but I think some people might have find what I did a bit negative. Given that I found it a toxic environment, I decided to put on my hacker mindset. My hacker mindset stems from hacking the school system (accelerated studying when it wasn't allowed) and learning how to hack computers (a couple of courses from uni which were really good and I constantly asked "how does this relate to having a "hacker mindset" ?).

2. You can learn about your matching rate by passport traveling to any big western European city that has prostitute accounts on there. Should they be on there? No, but after reporting so many of them I realized they weren't going away. So I stopped reporting them and used them as a side channel because the fact is they swipe right on everyone. Since they swipe right on everyone, and the maximum amount of swipes per minute is 60 (I've tested this) and they match me within about 2 minutes, it means that I'm about 120 cards down on the average stack. This meant that my profile was getting shown. If you have a different experience, you have evidence that your profile is not being shown.

3. Men have to start a conversation. The way to go about that is to say the most original thing you can about something you observe in her pictures. You have to be at least in the top 5 most interesting matches for her to be able to respond (I know this because once I got a lot of matches after months of tweaking, that was my limit). People complain about it: the reality is that for many of us is that dating is not a comfortable experience. So embrace that and mentally prep for it. My skills are meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy. The things that can happen are brutal, be prepared for it. I've been: ghosted, into passionate relationships while later neglected, dine & dashed (for an innocuous amount thankfully) and more things. In my experience, dating was brutal. It's okay because I know that people don't intend for it to be brutal, we're simply all very specific about our inimate lives.

4. You need to be photogenic. You don't need to be hot. Again, you need to be photogenic. If you're not photogenic then edit your pictures until they look like the best shot picture of you ever. Make all your pictures like that. Use photoshop, lightroom, AI, whatever it takes. Go ask people for feedback if this still looks like you. If it does but you clearly see an improvement: use it. This is one of the things that people might think is unethical, but if your friends think it looks like you, IMO, you're good. My dates never called me out on my AI edited pictures, neither has my wife. When I told her before we got a relationship that my pictures were AI edited, she was surprised since they looked like me. Yea, but those pictures gave me way more matches than the pictures that are the "natural" me. Again, the reason is because people select photogenic people and they don't realize it. I went into this topic quite a bit to verify it. See also [1, 2] (using photofeeler in your pipeline is not necessary by the way, I tested that too).

5. Make sure you swipe a lot. Use your hacker mindset to think about how to do this efficiently. I swiped 200K profiles in total with minimal time investment. I had to, I got 300 matches out of it (aka women I actually would potentially like) so I knew it'd be going through the weeds.

6. When looking at profiles, don't be too judgmental, don't humanize them too much either. Humanize people when you go on dates, as you will see the real them. Humanize people more when you chat with them. Profiles aren't human. Profiles are profiles. At best they are shadows of who we actually are and we can't read too much into them. IMO a human is the most human in the dating process when you see them for real. This also means: get unmatched randomly? Whatever. Someone is having a mean chat with you? Whatever. Weird things in someone's profile? Verify on the first date if it is an actual problem. My friends were too judgmental. I found my wife on one of the profiles that if I would've been too judgmental, I'd have skipped her profile as her bio was very very short. I figured she was just super casual about it (which was true).

7. When you go on a date and in a chat, make sure that 10% of your conversation is playful. This only goes for serious people like me (I tend to do 95% playfulness because it's so easy for me to be serious and I actually love playfulness but forget about it all the time, and it creates all kinds of memories and triggers to stay playful forever with the person you bond with, and then it weaves in amazingly nicely with my serious side). If you're not playful, you're dead in the water. People want to be able to have fun and feel comfortable, playfulness achieves this way better than humor. Though, while the concepts are related as playfulness leads to humor, playfulness is a much more expansive topic to meet these emotional needs.

8. Meditate with loving-kindness meditation and Vipassana (mindfulness) to build up a thick skin and be loving at the same time. The thick skin will protect you against the brutal nature of dating and the loving part will give you a warm vibe towards yourself, others and the world in general.

9. When on dates: always be respectful and well intentioned and be capable of stating your own needs when it becomes necessary. Don't know how to respectfully say your own needs? Read about non-violent communication by Marshal Rosenberg. I always ask at the end of the first date if I can kiss them (if I am into them). Asking this at the first date is IMO not a necessary thing, if you want to go slower, feel free. It's a bit weird to ask perhaps, but it is the most respectful way I know how to go about it. Yea sure, you can be "natural" and just "go for it" and risk weird/unwanted situations. I'd rather have some potential social awkwardness by being explicit and clear.

[1] https://blog.photofeeler.com/bad-selfies-what-do-i-look-like...

[2] https://blog.photofeeler.com/why-do-i-look-different-in-pict...