Data Is Beautiful

This is a bad chart with lots of data issues. It apparently consists of two points, 1995 and 2017. The source is some data aggregator that isn't clear, and of course the differentiation between the categories is non-existent. what is the difference between "church," "friends," or "neighbors?" What is the difference between "school" and "college."

That said obviously there are more "online" couples between 1995 where the only options were AOL or IRC chatrooms and 2017 where actual dating apps existed that were easily accessible via your phone.

My Take: I agree the internet has changed society in the past 22 years. Thanks shitty chart from reddit. I now have a greater awareness of the significance of the internet.

I don't buy that Bar/Restaurant has steadily increased as people have become more isolated.

My guess is it's a self-reporting error, where people meet on dating apps, but are reporting where they first met in person.

I met my wife from a friend who I met online. So I indirectly met my wife online.

I can't bring myself to try online dating, my friend that hit the jackpot and ended up marrying the first girl he went on a date with through whatever app he used tells me it works, as if his experience is absolute, but I hear about too many people getting ghosted by shallow dates to want to try. My self esteem couldn't take it.

Perhaps I'm just paranoid, anxious and completely unfixable but I personally hate the concept of online dating. I feel like it's the same problem I have with most online services, being a product to advertisers and nothing more then a number. Once again it's probably me being paranoid but I'm at a point where I would rather just not go through the trouble of dating at all, especially since this data is from 2017 and has most likely favoured online dating further

the implication of this, is that algorithms now have actual influence on the natural selection of humans. small influence of course, but, unsettling to think about for too long.

My wife and I met on match.com. We bonded over our love of cats. We celebrated our 20th anniversary of our first date in March. We lived 5 miles apart before we met. We never would have met without the Internet.

“Online” needs to be broken down into “dating app” and “met playing World of Warcraft”

Absolutely everything in your life can and will be turned into a commodity of capitalism for someone else to profit from, including the simple act of meeting other people. Community? That will be destroyed if it will help a millionaire make more money. Society will be atomised into little individual boxes for each person where they can then be turned into numbers and easily fed into algorithms that allow someone to profit.

Something that has been natural through community building and real social relationships people care about for thousands of years will be destroyed, there is in fact a profit motive to do so.

It's no wonder that loneliness is also at an all time high.

That is super depressing

Visualization of our society becoming hyper atomized in real time. Can't meet via friends if you have no friends.

Were 11% of people in 2017 really out there dating their coworkers? Isn't that hella awkward? What are you going to do if you have a messy breakup and you still have to see each other every day?

This is a really weird graph and kinda the opposite of "data is beautiful" lol

I'd be curious to see a more year-by-year breakdown. I feel like a lot of those would fluctuate.

On the one hand, on the surface, my wife and I seem to anecdotally validate the data since we met online. On the other hand, it was 1994, and it was just a discussion BBS, not a dating site. We talked online for a few months before we met, and even then it was just a site meet-and-greet at a pizza place. We didn't start dating until months after that.

I met my future wife in irc in 1994. In 1996 she moved from where she was to my state, and then in 2000 we got married, and have been ever since. The Internet was way different back then. I tell that to anyone using one of the current/past crop of dating apps.