Regarding pictures, I think you underestimate the effort required.
You need to get a phone or camera capable of taking good-looking picture, you need someone that is semi-competent at shooting, you need nice looking clothes and a good-enough looking background. These are all things that need to be planned/accounted for. It also takes time.
I don’t especially enjoy doing these things, and it took quite a bit of willpower to grab a few nice clothes (I already owned!) and my brother (whom I trust) to go and shoot a few pictures (in my garden).
There is also a diminishing marginal utility of better pictures. If your pictures are ugly blurry messes of you in weird poses, then you stand to gain a lot. If they are already decent, the gain is less.
As others have pointed out, there is a pressure to be “genuine”. I think this is not entirely stupid. If someone likes you for your good looking pictures but you never wear these kind of clothes / go to these kind of places, you’re may be setting yourself up for failure.
On the other hand, in my own experience, getting matches on apps like Tinder has proved to be the bottleneck — people like me well enough when they meet me, but it’s hard to shine whatever they like about me through the pictures. So sweetening the honeypot might not be that bad of a strategy.
Nevertheless, the sentiment that matches obtained through more “genuine” pictures might be better suited might not be wrong. I guess you have to use feedback: are you happy with the matches you get? Why? If you deem they’re “low quality”, maybe you should sell yourself more. If you have too many shallow matches, maybe you should filter more (but consider that this filtering might eliminate the matches you do find desirable). Said otherwise (a) an increase in quantity is not necessarily an increase in quality and (b) a decrease in quantity is not necessarily an increase in quality. But they might be.
Regarding pictures, I think you underestimate the effort required.
You need to get a phone or camera capable of taking good-looking picture, you need someone that is semi-competent at shooting, you need nice looking clothes and a good-enough looking background. These are all things that need to be planned/accounted for. It also takes time.
This is wrong. This summer I got some pictures taken from a professional photographer with professional equipment.
I put them on Tinder and then got less matches. A while later I put my new photo’s on PhotoFeeler and it turns out they indeed score less then my old picture that was taken by having someone simply holding my mobile phone with a setting where it made 1 picture per second and then mining the resulting photo pool for the best photo’s with PhotoFeeler.
This response is quite interesting as the exchange is basically:
OP: Why aren’t people doing strategy A for area O to persue goal X.
You: Because doing strategy B for area O is very effortful.
I don’t think we necessarily disagree. Photo feeler does not strike me as requiring a large effort. But taking new pictures did. (In my case the new pictures did work better, so that was a required step.)
I think what you’re saying here is that taking pictures wasn’t a big effort for you (since just a friend could do it?). But for me too it was just my brother who lives with me and using my mobile phone.
And objectively, I expect for some people this is cake-walk, but for me it felt very tedious (but at least I ended up doing it! though it required quite a bit of willpower, explaining why other people who are like me would end up never implementing this strategy).
What you said sounded like you assume putting effort into a photo shoot is important for quality and the belief that things are necessary makes it more effortful.
Simply taking pictures at a high rate where many will be rubbish and picking the best ones to test on PhotoFeeler takes less effort.
I disagree. Intuitively, I’d imagine the amount of effort required to find an adequate one from the pool would correlate with the subject’s base looks level. (FYI: I loosely define adequate here as a picture that would substantially increase your odds vs the average whatever that is. “Best” doesn’t mean anything here to me. I could luck out with an aesthetically pleasing work of art, but if women swipe left, then tough break). I could take thousands of pictures along multiple angles and vantage points but if I’m either ugly or just not photogenic, then tough break..
Indeed, I would pose the opposite question: Why would someone like XoDarap just assume people are oblivious to the power of a good picture when a more charitable interpretation would take into account factors like looks, the pareto principle, photography skills, ethnicity, and general sense of anxiety involved in the whole process of having your picture taken
Imagine being average in looks and new to a city like NYC and having to walk around all day taking selfies in choice locations or going through the wierdness of enlisting a friend just to get ONE good picture. Furthermore, imagine having as your competition the top ~10% of men (lookswise) who as you know receive 90% of the swipe, and that this 10% is likely comprised largely of men who are ethnically white AND have well taken pictures.…
To cite one example: Myself. I paid about almost $800 in multiple photography sessions (in studio and outside). I’ve used that photo-feeler app. I even tried to learn photgraphy on my own. And with all that effort, my results were marginal at best (instead of 500 swipes to get a result… maybe ~450?). The crazy thing about this is that I’m not even ugly.
So the answer is obvious… and this actually makes XoDarap’s question almost borderline offensive
Now this doesn’t mean that unless one isn’t a Stud, that you might as well give up on dating. Rather it requires one to think creatively with a bit of daring to have any success. I had to give up on swiping and turn to a channel nobody would expect for my luck to improve
Regarding pictures, I think you underestimate the effort required.
You need to get a phone or camera capable of taking good-looking picture, you need someone that is semi-competent at shooting, you need nice looking clothes and a good-enough looking background. These are all things that need to be planned/accounted for. It also takes time.
I don’t especially enjoy doing these things, and it took quite a bit of willpower to grab a few nice clothes (I already owned!) and my brother (whom I trust) to go and shoot a few pictures (in my garden).
There is also a diminishing marginal utility of better pictures. If your pictures are ugly blurry messes of you in weird poses, then you stand to gain a lot. If they are already decent, the gain is less.
As others have pointed out, there is a pressure to be “genuine”. I think this is not entirely stupid. If someone likes you for your good looking pictures but you never wear these kind of clothes / go to these kind of places, you’re may be setting yourself up for failure.
On the other hand, in my own experience, getting matches on apps like Tinder has proved to be the bottleneck — people like me well enough when they meet me, but it’s hard to shine whatever they like about me through the pictures. So sweetening the honeypot might not be that bad of a strategy.
Nevertheless, the sentiment that matches obtained through more “genuine” pictures might be better suited might not be wrong. I guess you have to use feedback: are you happy with the matches you get? Why? If you deem they’re “low quality”, maybe you should sell yourself more. If you have too many shallow matches, maybe you should filter more (but consider that this filtering might eliminate the matches you do find desirable). Said otherwise (a) an increase in quantity is not necessarily an increase in quality and (b) a decrease in quantity is not necessarily an increase in quality. But they might be.
This is wrong. This summer I got some pictures taken from a professional photographer with professional equipment.
I put them on Tinder and then got less matches. A while later I put my new photo’s on PhotoFeeler and it turns out they indeed score less then my old picture that was taken by having someone simply holding my mobile phone with a setting where it made 1 picture per second and then mining the resulting photo pool for the best photo’s with PhotoFeeler.
This response is quite interesting as the exchange is basically:
OP: Why aren’t people doing strategy A for area O to persue goal X.
You: Because doing strategy B for area O is very effortful.
I don’t think we necessarily disagree. Photo feeler does not strike me as requiring a large effort. But taking new pictures did. (In my case the new pictures did work better, so that was a required step.)
I think what you’re saying here is that taking pictures wasn’t a big effort for you (since just a friend could do it?). But for me too it was just my brother who lives with me and using my mobile phone.
And objectively, I expect for some people this is cake-walk, but for me it felt very tedious (but at least I ended up doing it! though it required quite a bit of willpower, explaining why other people who are like me would end up never implementing this strategy).
What you said sounded like you assume putting effort into a photo shoot is important for quality and the belief that things are necessary makes it more effortful.
Simply taking pictures at a high rate where many will be rubbish and picking the best ones to test on PhotoFeeler takes less effort.
I disagree. Intuitively, I’d imagine the amount of effort required to find an adequate one from the pool would correlate with the subject’s base looks level. (FYI: I loosely define adequate here as a picture that would substantially increase your odds vs the average whatever that is. “Best” doesn’t mean anything here to me. I could luck out with an aesthetically pleasing work of art, but if women swipe left, then tough break). I could take thousands of pictures along multiple angles and vantage points but if I’m either ugly or just not photogenic, then tough break..
Indeed, I would pose the opposite question: Why would someone like XoDarap just assume people are oblivious to the power of a good picture when a more charitable interpretation would take into account factors like looks, the pareto principle, photography skills, ethnicity, and general sense of anxiety involved in the whole process of having your picture taken
Imagine being average in looks and new to a city like NYC and having to walk around all day taking selfies in choice locations or going through the wierdness of enlisting a friend just to get ONE good picture. Furthermore, imagine having as your competition the top ~10% of men (lookswise) who as you know receive 90% of the swipe, and that this 10% is likely comprised largely of men who are ethnically white AND have well taken pictures.…
To cite one example: Myself. I paid about almost $800 in multiple photography sessions (in studio and outside). I’ve used that photo-feeler app. I even tried to learn photgraphy on my own. And with all that effort, my results were marginal at best (instead of 500 swipes to get a result… maybe ~450?). The crazy thing about this is that I’m not even ugly.
So the answer is obvious… and this actually makes XoDarap’s question almost borderline offensive
Now this doesn’t mean that unless one isn’t a Stud, that you might as well give up on dating. Rather it requires one to think creatively with a bit of daring to have any success. I had to give up on swiping and turn to a channel nobody would expect for my luck to improve