Tuesday, January 22, 2019

The Dating App Ghostwriter

Ms. Golden, 43, has developed these no-fly lists in her four years as a dating app ghostwriter. For $2,000 a month, she swipes, chats and charms, impersonating her clients. Once she has earned a client a date, she tags them in and becomes a more traditional dating coach, reviewing each encounter in detailed post-mortems, helping to guide their next moves. Some clients disclose to their dates that they have used Ms. Golden’s services, and others do not. . . .

Tone is essential to Ms. Golden’s — and her clients’ — success. She learns to imitate their conversational styles through the use of an eight-page intake form that includes specific questions: How do you take your coffee? Have you ever “swam with dolphins or stingrays or enormous turtles”?

By the time a potential client has answered those questions and had an hourlong introductory conversation, Ms. Golden thinks she can mimic them convincingly enough — down to whether they would type “gonna” or “going to” — to start chatting.

Ms. Golden subscribes to a less-is-more mind-set, and much of the work she does is in how little she says. She will not get caught in volleys of conversation, and judges prospective dates who do so.

“They should be wondering more about me, and I’m not going to give it all to them right then and there,” she said. “When I’m messaging someone and they respond right away I’m like, chill out, eager beaver.”

4 comments:

Shadow said...

This sound like too much work. But then there's the guy who married an anime hologram.

Next up: sexbots! Marriage certificates are extra.

G. Verloren said...

@Shadow

To be honest, once it finally happens, I'm firmly convinced that sexbots will be a net positive to society, if for no other reason than they'll absorb some of the abuse and harassment that otherwise gets leveled at actual people.

It won't cure all such ills, of course, as there will still be the pychopaths and the nutjobs, but I think it will weed out a lot of the horny young idiots who get caught in negative feedback loops where their desire for sex drives them to act in ways that repulse potential partners and they just makeselves them more and more desperate.

pootrsox said...

Wonder how sexbots will affect the misogyny (not to mention the anger and potential violence) of the incel community.

G. Verloren said...

@pootrsox

I file them under the psychopaths and nutjobs category, and imagine they will reject the idea of sexbots as being beneath their "dignity".

They already (ostensibly, anyway) reject pornography on the basis that masturbation is emasculating and turns you into a "cuck", and argue they instead need to be macho alpha males and go out and violently dominate real women, so I can't imagine they'd be any less dismissive of sexbots. Their entire philosophy basically boils down to wanting to treat women as sex objects, and not accepting literal sex objects as a substitution.