It is almost certainly the shit pictures. If you are in “too good to be true” territory, you will be getting matches, but women will be asking you things like “are you real?” and “are you a model?”

As I said, grab a bro or a tripod. A friend is better - but said friend should almost certainly also be a single male friend with a strong focus on improving their dating profile. No one else will be as dedicated. Professional photogs can also be helpful, but for anything beyond “school photo” shots, you will really be racking up the bills. Shooting good photos takes a lot of time and effort, so your friend and photographer will need to show up again and again and again in order for you to build a good profile. Ime, it takes about 2-3h on average to get one photo, including finding a location, setting up equipment, figuring out a good pose, working with lighting, etc. Then you should shoot somewhere between 500 and 1000 shots - iterating, messing around with lighting and posing, etc. And then, typically, only 1 in 3-5 photos you spend the time shooting is actually good enough to include in your profile. So if you and your bro go out 5 days per week and shoot for 5 hours each day (2.5h for each of you), you should expect to generate one good photo for the apps each week.

Or you could use a tripod and remote shutter. The downside here is that you have no one to push you out the door to actually do the work, no one to give another opinion on how the shots look or what to try, you have to line up all your shots yourself and iterate time and again with delayed feedback, and there is no one around to take the edge off the fact that you are posing in front of a camera alone in public which is incredibly awkward. But the upside is that your tripod won’t complain about waking up at 4:30 am so you can shoot for 2 hours during the golden hour.

Other possibilties: you are shooting yourself in the foot with your bio; you live in a metro of less than 1mil (or SF); your misanthropy and social isolation are etched into your face and posture, and this comes through in the pics you currently have. Don’t worry, you can hide this last one with the law of large numbers in your pics. But also… it’s something to work on long term

Edit:

Re: fat loss. If you can cut down to abs and get a shirtless shot, its a bug win. But not necessary to get matches.

Re: clothes. Make sure your clothes aren’t just “nice”, but are cool or stylish, hopefully expressing something about who you are.

Eh.

1. Even dirty, slutty women don’t like constantly being give death and rape threats.
2. There are not enough slutty women to meet demand. Even if a woman is banging 3 guys per day, either her roster will fill up instantly or (if she never bangs the same guy twice) the guys she has alreadh banged will be back in the market an hour after they blow their loads.
3. Slutty women might want to fuck a lot, but they still have their preferences and will exercise them. Why fuck the overweight, balding McDonald’s worker when you can fuck a finance bro with a six pack and a razor-sharp jawline? And if you are that finance bro, why would you be on an app with so few women (as per, (2))? Most women will gravitate towards platforms where they feel safe and respected (wrt normal cultural norms regarding sex), so the hot guys will be spending their time on these platforms since they are largely ambivalent to anything except the existance of a suitably large and attractive female population.

I’ll note that this is essentially the dynamic at play on fetlife. We already have a real life example of how this works out, and no, it is not a utopia of abundant pussy for every horny dude, but rather the opposite - fetlife is well known for having worse outcomes for straight guys than mainstream dating platforms, because women simply don’t respond to (almost any) messages on the platform.

You could go on and have your pick of dozens of guys in an hour.

You can still do that on dating apps.

I gotta say, this does not seem like a replicable strategy.

I think “be open to meeting women where ever you go” is good advice. But I kinda doubt OP is gonna have great success meeting someone specifically by joining an IRC

@[email protected]

Awesome list. Big fan of no negativity or being demanding or needy. Also a big fan of using dgaf humor in your bio. Also a big, big fan of asking girls out quick.

A few things I disagree on:

• Motorcycles are hot. If you ride, get a cool pic of yourself riding. Like, a pic of you cornering on the track or blasting up a dirt hill (depending on bike type). But yes, don’t just take a pic of your bike like owning a bike is your whole personality.
• Imo, pics with other people in them are great. I don’t like far-away group shots, since it is hard to pick you out unless you are obnoxiously front and center. But a pic of you with one or two friends is a good pic for showing your social circle and how you look socially. After all, having friends is a green flag.
• If you are specifically seeking casual sex or non-monogamy, having other women in your profile can also be a good thing. Sure, a woman seeking a monogamous relationship may be turned off - but on the other hand, having female friends is a green flag for not being a creep. And if a girl wants to fuck, she wants to fuck a guy who fucks, since he’s more likely to fuck her good.

But I feel like the big thing I disagree with in your comment is the thing that I find I disagree with in most men’s dating advice I find in left-leaning spaces. It’s all “don’t”, “don’t”, “don’t”, and “no”, “no”, “no”. And all of the things you are warning against are good warnings - but the overall impression is one of disempowerment - here is a bunch of things not to do. Okay, well what should you do? And the answer (as you noted) is to get good pictures.

And I feel like the real thing I want to add to your conment is emphasis.

GET GOOD PICTURES.

Pics are 97% of how you succeed on dating apps. Bio is 3%. Your bio, at best, is probably neutral (though as you noted, it is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot). Picspicspicspicspics!!!

In order to get good pics, first of all, be good looking. You don’t have to be a Calvin Klein model, but be the best looking version of you that you can be. Hit the gym, eat vegetables, get enough sleep, get a good haircut, buy some stylish clothes, take care of your skin, and express who you are and who you want to become in the way you present yourself.

At this point in my rant, I feel like I need to take a moment to address the “just be yourself” crowd, who may come in and say that changing the way you dress or your diet in order to attract women is somehow fake or inauthentic. And my response is that “being yourself” is shit advice if you currently aren’t getting any matches. Don’t be yourself - become the person you want to become. Because the person you want to become is not only literally what you want, but they are also almost certainly a dashing fucking bastard. And beyond that - “be yourself?” Okay, fine, I will be myself - and myself wants to match with some hotties! Why is that an illegitimate desire? Why is everything else “who I really am”, while my desire for emotional and physical companionship is somehow inauthentic? Seriously, this attitude is just thinly veiled sexual puritanism. Fuck that nonsense!

Another side note: yes, you should lose weight and hit the gym or something. Around this time, someone claiming to be female will typically chime in with some comment about how “guys with big muscles are gross” - which is just such an obvious attempt at gaslighting. Like, go ask Arnold if he ever had any trouble with the ladies. Yes, some women dislike big muscles. Yes, if you keep getting huge (like, taking steroids huge), then you will eventually hit a point where fewer women like you than when you were smaller. Yes, long before you get to that point, you will find diminishing returns to hitting the gym more versus working on literally any other aspect of your life. And yes, women have diverse preferences on body type - some like bodybuilders, some like swimmers, some like ultrarunners, and some like big burly guys with potbellies. But it is a very rare woman who looks at an overweight, pear-shaped gamer body and says “ugh, hawt”. If you exercise regularly and eat vegetables at nearly every meal already, then good job, we are all very proud of you. But if you don’t, you need to get started on that shit yesterday. Humans are animals, and animals want to mate with other animals that are physically healthy, so be healthy

/rant

Anyway, go spend 2 months buying clothes and getting a haircut and improving your sleep hygiene and starting a (reasonable and sustainable) diet and exercise routine. Then go out and start getting some pictures.

Yes, you will almost certainly have to go out with the explicit intention of getting pictures for dating apps. Most attractive women have been practicing looking good in photos since they were 11. They’ve been practicing how to put on makeup so it hides their flaws in shots. They’ve been figuring out how to angle their heads and adjust their jaws to hide their double chin. They’ve been working on getting the framing just right so you can see enough cleavage to be enticing, but not so much that it’s slutty. Every time they go out to a bar, or on a hike, or to a party, or to a pottery class, they ask their friend to get a photo of themselves looking cute, doing the thing. Meanwhile, as a guy, you have not been doing that, so your best photo is a slightly blurry shot of you in a bar where your smile didn’t look awkward for the first time in your life. Why do so many guys have fish pics on dating apps? My theory is that it is because these are the only pictures they have of themselves. So don’t be a fish pic guy! Grab a bro (or a tripod) and go out and shoot some photos of yourself. Ideally, use a good dslr camera so you can control the f-stop and get a good bokeh - but high-end smartphone cameras and post-hoc photo editing can get mostly the same effect these days.

Your goals with these photos is:

1. Look good. Literally, if you do nothing but get a bunch of shots of you doing fuck all in different poses, locations, and outfits while looking handsome, you will be head and shoulders above most guys. Body language, facial expression, lighting, and composition all matter. Make your photos look good!! (Important side note - make sure you have at least one clear photo of your face, and one clear photo of your body).
2. Be interesting. The school photo style shot can be “good enough”, but it is ultimately boring and looks fake. The easiest way to make a photo interesting is to be doing something where it looks like a candid shot. This could be as simple as just walking down the street or drinking a cup of coffee. But your pictures are more interesting if you are doing something that is (get this!) interesting! So shots of you doing cool shit are what we want - pics of you doing a sport or hobby, pics of you doing a cool job, pics of you holding a cute dog, pics of you travelling to a cool place.
3. Tell a story. Since bio does basically fuckall, we want to tell the story of who you are through your photos. What makes you awesome? What will dating you look like? What are your attractive features? Get some shots of yourself looking focused and serious, and some shots where you look fun and playful. Show off your normal, chill side, your exuberant side, your sexy side, your stoic side. Use your photos to paint a picture of who you are, what you want, and what you can bring to the table.

Once you have done all that, if you still aren’t getting matches, or aren’t satisfied with the quantity or quality of the matches you’re getting, there are a few things to do.

1. Remember: location, location, location. The smaller the population around you, the faster your well of potential matches runs dry. If you live in a smaller town or city, there comes a point where you are better off just leaving the house and meeting girls the old fashioned way. If you are really serious - move.
2. Iterate. Improve fitness and style, and then take even more pics, replacing one pic at a time in your profile with a more attractive one.
3. Iterate more. Improve your lifestyle. Try new hobbies. Expand your horizons. Then get pics of you doing these new, even cooler things.
4. Make yourself real. The problem is that catfishing is a problem on dating apps, so many women are nervous to match with a guy who looks like he might be faking it - and with your awesome profile, you might look “too good to be true”. So build up your IG by posting regularly, and link your IG to your profile. Then a girl who is interested in you can see that you are actually a cool guy who does cool things regularly and has a thriving social life with lots of friends in his pics and liking his posts. This is pretty easy if you just do one cool thing per month and then post some pics from that thing. After a year, you’ll have a sufficiently full IG to link to the apps, and it’ll only get better from there.

Of course, at this point it is easier to actually be a cool guy who does cool things with friends all the time, at which point the women have won - they have successfully seduced you into having a life worth living instead of being a neckbeard who never leaves the house. Damn feminazis, ruining our awesome male lives /s

Also, the market is a bit saturated with MAGA bros. Certainly there are women looking for them, but the gender ratio has a skew

That’s how Hinge works also. The reason Grindr works is that men are more likely to be down to fuck in the Wendy’s bathroom with a stranger.

What if you have a fuck van and a fuck shed?

…asking for a friend

Ah. I didn’t realize that you are still in high school.

Okay, yeah, cliquishness sucks - but just look at it as training for the rest of life. If you can break into cliques in high school and/or make friends despite their exclusionary nature, you’ll be set for life. There are few places in real life where people are as dickish to each other as they are in high school.

Yea stuff like… Tik Tok… Instagram… fighting in hallways, bragging about skipping class…

Are you listing things that the other kid did? Because this is not even close to the sum total of all the things you could be doing with your time outside watching tv.

High school kid sounds cool. Just think of all the stuff you could be into if you didn’t watch tv all the time.

What, like, romantically? Or just to make a friend?

Romantically, Hinge is the most common. Though you should try all three of the main apps - Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder, to see which platform is most popular around you, as this seems to change from place to place. And maybe FarmersOnly or something if that’s really the vibe of the area?

Platonically, imo the best option is to search for groups for specific hobbies. Eg, hiking clubs, language exchanges, tabletop rpg meetups. Meetup.com used to be pretty good for this - it’s gone downhill in recent years, but is still worth a shot. Local facebook groups dedicated to certain interests have a similar trend - not as good as they used to be, but worth a gander.

But really, probably your best bet is to just leave the house and see who and what is out there. Head to the local bar and meet people. Spend some extra time talking to the clerks at the hardware store, and strike up convos with other customers. Go to town hall meetings. Often, small businesses will have bulletin boards full of flyers for other events happening in your area, where you can meet other people.

The upside of rural areas is that most people tend to be friendly - or at least open to meeting new people. A slower pace of life and not constantly being overwhelmed with options for new people to meet means most people are interested in more spontaneous social interactions. Otoh, it can be a lot harder to find your people. Rural communities tend to be fairly conservative and monolithic. If you are looking for friends to play DnD with, you might have a hard time finding those people when all the other people around you are just interested in trucks, beef, family, and jesus.

One strategy there is to be the person hanging up flyers and making meetup groups. Most people are tired and bored and lonely - they want someone to tell them to show up at a place at a time and to be ready to have fun. So if you are having a hard time finding a community of your people, the best way to solve that problem is to make the community you want.

Finally, I know this will seem like ridiculous advice to some… but you can also just move. The people you spend your time with are, along with things like basic health and financial security, the most important thing in your life. If everyone around you is a gun tote’n Jesus nut, and you are a godless communist, LEAVE. If everyone around you is looking for their tradwife/tradhusband, and you want to have polyamorous queer furry orgies, LEAVE. Finding your people is 10 million times easier when each of those people live withing 5 blocks of each other rather than 50 miles.

And this is doubly true if you are a man looking for a romantic connection with a woman. Sure, tons of women fantasize about living on a farm and taking care of a bunch of cute animals and baking their own bread, but the statistics are clear: women flock to cities. The bigger, denser, and more prosperous a city is, the more likely it is to have a favorable gender ratio for men. And the poorer and more sparsely populated an area is, the more likely it is to have an atrocious gender ratio for men. It’s a very well known strategy: move to the city, make your fortune, get yourself a girlie, then move to a remote homestead where you chop your own firewood and watch foxes play outside your back window.

I mean, this is an incredibly vague question since you haven’t really told us… anything. However, a few tips:

1. Focus on what you do want, rather than on what you don’t want. You want to be better? Great! Be better how? You want to have structure - okay, sure, but why? What goals are having more structure serving? Tell us what you want.
2. If you are lacking self control, the answer, almost universally, is other people. If your family is waiting at home for you to have dinner, you are less likely to eat taco bell. If you want to hit the gym, it helps to recruit a friend to work out witb you three days per week. Want to excell at work? Make friends with coworkers and ask for their help solving problems. Having trouble getting up in the morning? You’ll have less trouble if you have a job where everyone is counting on you to show up.
3. Don’t try to stop bad habits. Just let them fade away as your life fills up with better things. When you notice a bad habit that you want to quit, ask “what need is this fulfilling?” and then experiment with other ways to get that need met.

Beyond that, there are different systems for doing life admin, but I’m guessing you arent really at that place rn.

I’m drawn to Joe Exotic Presidency, but not because I think it is a good idea

Seems like a Reno 911 sketch

Can I get a quote from the article that explains what you are talking about? I don’t see anything about an opinion that crime is now lower. Just stats about which party’s views peope favor in regards to crimjnal policy.

I think it depends on what you mean by “supported”. But during the Nazi regime, the vast majority of Germans were, in some way or another, working to support the Nazis. But after the Nazis were defeated, the Germans became one of the most progressive people in the world. And these were the same people.

Obviously there do exist people who starve to death, but did you even read the article you linked?

Deaths attributed to malnutrition more than doubled, from about 650 in 2018 to roughly 1,400 in 2022

This is tragic. But it is also a rounding error. A map graphic lower in the article notes that 6 deaths due to malnutrition per 10,000 was the worst case. Relative to other causes of death, it is quite insignificant.

Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill […] It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.

So essentially, the picture the article paints is that the typical person who dies of malnutrition is older and is already suffering from one or more ailments, and dies not necessarily from a lack of calories but from a failure to consume enough of some nutrient or other.

This doesn’t seem like the beginnings of mass starvation like we saw in Africa 20 years ago. Will these numbers go up with the current administration’s policies? Yes, probably. But does it seem like massive numbers of poor people will be starving to death in the next 3 years? I highly, highly doubt it.

Um, what? Yes. What the fuck are you talking about? You think they are going to starve to death?

The comments here are wild. So much judgement about people we literally know one single thing about.

There should really only be one answer to this question: “I dunno. Why don’t you ask them?”

Just because your parents like some guy that they’ve never met doesnt mean they are evil, sociopathic, racist monsters. The most likely explaination is that they got walked down the right wing media rabbithole by some network of acquaintences, and now they are trapped in a fairy tale depiction of the world designed to appeal to their baser emotions.

People believe in bigfoot and the flat earth. Why? Mostly because they feel lonely and powerless, and want to feel like they are part of a group that is united in their knowledge of The Truth.

and it caught on

I feel like the real question is in this statement