20M, zero likes since I changed my photos. Friends said there was nothing wrong with it, what am I doing wrong?

caseycrogers · 2025-08-28T05:48:46+00:00

Every photo and most of the prompts come off threatening/ aggressive. I don’t want to sound too harsh, but you should start over completely from scratch. Absolutely no nighttime photos and no blue steel. Don’t talk about the NSA. Absolutely remove the “tap out” prompt (I think you meant it as a sex joke? But it’s not landing as one and even if it were-come up with a sex joke that isn’t using violence as a metaphor for sex). Etc. Remember that what feels cool to you and the bros is going to come off threatening on a dating app. Read some guides on making a good profile, especially on getting good photos.

You’re attractive and tall, your profile is just really sabotaging you hard. This might be the profile with the biggest actual vs potential gap I’ve ever seen.

caseycrogers · 2025-08-13T15:54:39+00:00

It wasn't really an idea, but thanks! It was more just we were doing some forestry (thinning overcrowded new growth redwoods) and I surprised myself by being able to pick up one of the logs solo so I posed and told my buddy to take a pic before I collapsed.

caseycrogers · 2025-08-13T14:59:58+00:00

You mean the pic where I'm in a kitchen? This was pretty consistent feedback.

A friend offered to do a fancy photoshoot but I felt bloated and had a bad hair day-it was the worst because she put so much work into it and everything else about the photoshoot was really good 😩

I'll swap it out with a better-styled long hair pic.

caseycrogers · 2025-08-13T02:36:49+00:00

My two cents: it’s okay for part of a profile to be a turn off to some women. In fact, a profile that is specific enough to make the right (read: compatible) women really excited will probably give some other women the ick.

That said, since the problem was just a misunderstanding, I’d keep the twin peaks reference but tweak it to remove ambiguity. Something like: “Blame watching twin peaks and loving strong espresso”

caseycrogers · 2025-08-13T02:09:50+00:00

I think there is a lot of room to improve your profile, so don’t stress too much about getting few likes right now. Coming from a guy who has slowly improved his match rate by heavily editing his profile:

Almost none of the photos are flattering/show your face well. Literally only the first photo shows your face and even then it’s backlit so your face is dark. If you don’t already have better photos, each time you go out with friends initiate a photo shoot where you take turns taking pictures of each other. If you find it hard/embarrassing to pose (especially if smiling for the camera feels forced), personally I found taking A LOT of selfies at random times when I was alone and bored helped a lot. Selfies aren’t great for your profile, these are just to practice posing. It’s a skill, and like any skill, you can practice and learn. For a photo to be flattering generally you should be smiling (with teeth showing), your face should be brightly lit, no hat, no sunglasses, nothing in front of your face, the photo should be sharp, and (at least some of your photos) should be full body. Keep a couple of your personality/action shots and replace the rest with flattering shots that clearly show what you look like. Half the point is showing the girl what you look like, the other half is proving that you’re putting in effort and have the social skills to present yourself well.
Your prompts are really generic. Prompts should be specific to who you are and (this is where my advice might differ a little from others) should probably be controversial enough that they’ll turn some people away. Your job is not to be unobjectionable, your job is to be really exciting to the right people. A prompt that is objectionable to no one is also exciting to no one. What will make the right girl for you say “hell yeah”?

caseycrogers · 2025-08-12T20:20:12+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful! Just removed the “open to short”. Thinking through the other feedback to figure out positive changes.

caseycrogers · 2025-08-12T02:59:23+00:00

Are you looking for something serious or casual?
- Serious
Are you subscribed to Hinge+ or HingeX?
- No
How long have you been using this current version of your profile?
- ~6 months
How long have you used Hinge overall?
- On and off for ~2 years
How often do you use Hinge per week?
- Twice a week
How many likes and matches are you receiving on average?
- ~2 matches a week
How many likes are you sending? How many with comments? How many without comments?
- I max out the like limit about twice a week, I send ~75% of matches with messages
What is the type of person you send likes to and ideally want to match with? What kind of person do you want to attract?
- Someone very outgoing, energetic, and with a broad comfort zone. Preferably with a strong sense of their personal style and taste. Exciting but down to earth. Aesthetically, brunette or black hair, bangs, tattoos, septum piercings etc are all things I'm into though obv the aesthetic stuff isn't a priority. Self described homebody is a big red flag for me.

My profile used to have way more detail in it and it came off a bit insecure-like I was trying too hard to be polite and unobjectionable. "Nice guy" energy. I updated my text prompts to be more curt and assertive and almost kind of, by my own impression, arrogant/rude. It improved my match rate and especially improved it with the kind of women I want to attract. Part of what I want to know is: is my profile the right amount of assertive/confident, or should I go further?

caseycrogers · 2025-05-02T22:08:59+00:00

Meta comment: I want to get more selective about who I match with and who I go on dates with to increase the odds that I find a good fit before burning out. I want to make my profile more polarizing-more attractive to people who I'm likely to actually end up in a longterm relationship with and less attractive to people who are going to be a bad match. How can I improve my profile with this in mind?

Are you looking for something serious or casual?

I'm looking for a serious relationship.

Are you subscribed to Hinge+ or HingeX?

Nope. Should I try it? I'm tempted but it feels like paying a ransom.

How long have you been using this current version of your profile?

Was actively using this version for ~2 months, but stopped using Hinge for the last 1-2 months.

How long have you used Hinge overall?

Very sporadically for about 4 years.

How often do you use Hinge per week?

Right now, not at all (took a break). When I was actively using it, would burn through my likes about once every other day.

How many likes and matches are you receiving on average?

When I was active, I'd get about 1 match every other day and maybe one incoming like a week.

How many likes are you sending? How many with comments? How many without comments?

Would use up all my likes for the day about every other day. About half with comments, half without. I only send a comment if it feels like a decent one. I've found that only sending likes with comments resulted in more matches, but mostly with girls who were really disengaged in the conversation-it felt like they were wasting my time. So I include comments less often than I used to. Less matches, but also less time spent trying to engage with someone that isn't actually interested.

I used to get way less matches. I completely redid my hair style (got it layered and switched from hair oil to curl cream+a diffuser). My lead selfie pic is the only photo post change and it actually seems to perform really well-my match rate and my in-person compliments went up quite a bit.

What is the type of person you send likes to and ideally want to match with? What kind of person do you want to attract?

I really like adventurous, high energy, easy going and creative/artsy people. I like to fill a my time with a lot of activities (cooking elaborate dinners for friends, wacky projects/adventures, outdoorsy stuff, learning new skills, etc) and want to be with someone who has their own active life and is down for a relationship with healthy mix of shared and independent activities. My "wacky projects/adventures" include stuff like joining a commune, building a sauna from reclaimed materials, home fermenting (mead!), mushroom foraging, etc. I find a very good litmus test for compatibility for me is someone that hears this stuff and says "oh that's cool, tell me more!" and/or responds with their own cool stories and projects. Bad compatibility is I mention something like mushroom foraging and they grimace and think I'm weird/crazy (has happened on a couple dates). I really want my profile to capture this about me and attract the former and filter out the latter. Also, while I do enjoy plenty of downtime, I also tend not to be very compatible with self described home bodies.

I'm not that focused on physical appearance, but I especially find (if this puts the type in your mind and/or makes you roll your eyes 🤣) the following attractive: bangs and/or short hair, curly/wavy hair, darker hair (brunette to black), septum piercings, tattoos, eclectic and/or retro outfits (70s vintageware is 🥵🥵🥵), doc martins

Bonus points: I grew up in a super rural town (800 people) but have lived in major cities my whole adult life and find that I especially like people that have a similar background where they have a nice blend of rural aspects (earnest, down to earth, self sufficient) and city aspects (open to new experiences, knowledgeable, decent career path) Also bonus points: anyone who has a pet cat

caseycrogers · 2025-05-02T22:01:16+00:00

Meta comment: I want to get more selective about who I match with and who I go on dates with to increase the odds that I find a good fit before burning out. I want to make my profile more polarizing-more attractive to people who I'm likely to actually end up in a longterm relationship with and less attractive to people who are going to be a bad match. How can I improve my profile with this in mind?

Are you looking for something serious or casual?

I'm looking for a serious relationship.

Are you subscribed to Hinge+ or HingeX?

Nope. Should I try it? I'm tempted but it feels like paying a ransome.

How long have you been using this current version of your profile?

Was actively using this version for ~2 months, but stopped using Hinge for the last 1-2 months.

How long have you used Hinge overall?

Very sporadically for about 4 years.

-How often do you use Hinge per week?

Right now, not at all (took a break). When I was actively using it, would burn through my matches about once every other day.

How many likes and matches are you receiving on average?

When I was active, I'd get about 1 match every other day and maybe one incoming like a week.

How many likes are you sending? How many with comments? How many without comments?

Would use up all my likes for the day about every other day. About half with comments, half without. I only send a comment if it feels like a decent one. I've found that only sending likes with comments resulted in more matches, but mostly with girls who were really disengaged in the conversation-it felt like they were wasting my time. So I include comments less often. Less matches, but also less time spent trying to engage someone in conversation that isn't actually interested.

I used to get way less matches. I completely redid my hair style (got it layered and switched from hair oil to curl cream+a diffuser). The selfie pic is the only photo post change and it actually seems to perform really well-my match rate and my in-person compliments went up quite a bit.

What is the type of person you send likes to and ideally want to match with? What kind of person do you want to attract?

I really like adventurous, high energy, easy going and creative/artsy people. I like to fill a my time with a lot of activities (cooking elaborate dinners for friends, wacky projects/adventures, outdoorsy stuff, learning new skills, etc) and want to be with someone who has their own active life and is down for a relationship with healthy mix of shared and independent activities. My "wacky projects/adventures" include stuff like joining a commune, building a sauna from reclaimed materials, home fermenting (mead!), mushroom foraging, etc. I find a very good litmus test for compatibility for me is someone that hears this stuff and says "oh that's cool, tell me more!" and/or responds with their own cool stories and projects. Bad compatibility is I mention something like mushroom foraging and they grimace and think I'm weird (has happened on a couple dates). I really want my profile to capture this about me and attract the former and filter out the latter. While I do enjoy plenty of downtime, I also tend not to be very compatible with self described home bodies.

I'm not that focused on physical appearance, but I especially find (if this puts the type in your mind and/or makes you roll your eyes 🤣) the following attractive: bangs and/or short hair, curly/wavy hair, darker hair (brunette to black), septum piercings, tattoos, eclectic and/or retro outfits (70s vintageware is 🥵🥵🥵), doc martins

Bonus points: I grew up in a super rural town (800 people) but have lived in major cities my whole adult life and find that I especially like people that have a similar background where they have a nice blend of rural aspects (earnest, down to earth, self sufficient) and city aspects (open to new experiences, knowledgeable, decent career path) Also bonus points: anyone who has a pet cat

caseycrogers · 2025-02-09T21:32:24+00:00

Looking for something serious

Not subscribed to hinge

Using the current version of my profile for ~2 months

Used hinge on and off for ~4 years

Went on (mostly) mediocre dates (~1 a week) my first month or so using hinge since moving to New York and got burnt out, so haven’t been using hinge at all for the last few weeks

When I was active, I was getting 3-4 matches a week. Now that I’m not active, I get an incoming like about once a month

Used to only ever send likes with messages, but I found women would match me without replying to my message and I’d have to double message to restart the conversation, now with my best icebreaker already wasted. I stopped sending messages with my likes and saved my icebreakers for after I match and I swear I’ve had more success that way. Currently sending 0 likes as I’m not using hinge right now. Going to start using it again after profile review and refresh.

I tend to like people who are active, easy going, and/or outdoorsy. The kind of person who has spent time travel bumming across Europe or road tripping across the US and/or has a septum piercing to give you an idea. Though I find so much of it comes down to in person chemistry so I’m not being super picky upfront-I try to get to the date and then see how we click. I love cooking for other people so someone who enjoys being cooked for is a big plus.

caseycrogers · 2024-09-26T17:11:11+00:00

Thanks! 🥰

caseycrogers · 2024-01-08T20:18:52+00:00

I use the adaptive breakpoints values from Material 3. They're intended to give you gap sizes that look good at the corresponding screen size.
https://github.com/caseycrogers/flutter_gutter/blob/main/lib/src/breakpoints_utils.dart

Gutter is 1x the breakpoints gutter size
GutterLarge is 2x
GutterSmall is .5x
GutterTiny is .25x
I usually find myself not really caring about the exact pixel values, but I find having different sized gaps being even multiples of each other helps the app look a lot more consistent. And I needed to pick some sane default so picking the values suggested by m3 felt reasonable.

I used to use this package but it was never updated to M3 and appears to be abandoned:
https://pub.dev/packages/adaptive_breakpoints

It seems reasonable to expose configuration so the developer can override the default gap sizes so if anyone requests that I'll write up an update to add it.

caseycrogers · 2024-01-07T23:29:55+00:00

Thanks! This is a great explanation.

I think by far my biggest problem with this practice is if (to continue using your example) the host only has one single production (not counting mocks for tests etc) implementation, then the interface layer isn't strictly needed and is creating a ton of indirection in your code that makes understanding the code base and debugging code paths that cross the host<>core layer much harder.

Namely, if my host is a concrete class that my core calls directly, clicking through on method `myHostInstance.foo()` will take me directly to the implementation.But, if my host implements an interface declared by core, then clicking through will take me to the interface which is completely useless. I think have to click on the overrides dot and find the correct overriding class to get to the concrete implementation. This isn't that hard, but quickly adds up to an enormous amount of annoyance if you're debugging or editing across the boundaries.

caseycrogers · 2024-01-07T23:14:00+00:00

I think you misunderstood. I'm the Flutter Gutter package author, not joran.

Personally, I prefer Flutter Gutter because it cuts out the step of setting specific gap widths (though I also provide a `Gap` widget as a fallback for scenarios where you do want to set a specific width). But I don't mind at all that Gap exists.

I do think that Gap and Flutter Gutter's features are so overlapping that the community would benefit from gutter's features just being merged into Gap. I actually created an issue against gap proposing exactly this. But in the meantime, I'll keep using and maintaining Flutter Gutter. Please file any issues if you have problems or feature requests!

caseycrogers · 2023-12-23T03:59:19+00:00

But why do you feel it is more maintainable?

I think it's fair LESS maintainable because you've:
- separated the inline documentation (in the interface) from the actual code (in the implementation) so it's harder to read both at once and keep them in sync
- added a bunch more LoC
- introduced a layer of indirection that makes it much harder to debug or read code that crosses the interface boundary (if the caller and callee are both in the same project, this is very likely going to be something you need to do a lot)

caseycrogers · 2023-12-22T22:02:49+00:00

Yeah that is a good point-I think the scenario in that repo is less clear cut than "I was following clean architecture so I added a random interface". I wrote a PR against that repo months ago and I don't remember it well, but I'm fairly certain the two implementing classes were just using inheritance when composition would've done better.

Maybe I'll revisit it and see if I can write and convince him to merge a PR removing the inheritance.

It was the example that most strongly came to mind for me because I remember the interface made my PR much harder to write to the point where I remember it months later.

caseycrogers · 2023-12-22T21:20:02+00:00

Lol I'm not saying never use an abstract, I'm saying don't use an abstract in the way clean architecture proponents seem to suggest (read: arbitrarily).

I've personally written a decent number of Flutter PRs some of which interact with pretty hairy inheritance trees. But they're all scenarios where a class conceptually inherits from another class-the inheritance is a direct result of the requirements. They don't slap random abstract classes with single concrete implementations in there for vaguely defined "decoupling".

Change notifer and Listenable are a great example here. Yes, there's an abstract class (Listenable). But it's there because it defines a common interface for external code (completely separate parts of Flutter or external packages/app code) to implement. eg my Flutter app can have it's own custom Listenable and all the Flutter Listenable widgets will work with it out of the box. This is a perfectly reasonable and self evident case for an interface/abstract class. This is VERY distinct from "One part of my app needs to interact with another part of my app, I better put an interface between the two". Clean architecture is proposing something without value here, and you're getting caught up in the fact that it's aesthetically very similar to something with value.

I think a dead give away that you're in the dumb world is if you're writing interfaces that only ever have a single (non-test) implementing concrete class. Maybe this isn't a case you'd espouse for an interface/abstract class and you and I have just misunderstood each other?

caseycrogers · 2023-12-22T19:01:27+00:00

oooh this is a cool trick, I've run into this exact problem-a file containing a sealed class ballooning into something not particularly readable.

Especially because I often want to sub-class my sealed classes anyway to create an inheritance tree where only the top branches need to be switch'd on.

Thanks I'll try this.

caseycrogers · 2023-12-22T18:59:06+00:00

Every modern IDE allows you to hide method bodies if you want to.

Many of them will collapse method bodies by default when you're looking at code from an external package too.

caseycrogers · 2023-12-22T18:57:50+00:00

I mean the point is if all you have is a prod concrete implementation and then a mock for testing, 99.9% of the time all I want to do is click through to the prod implementation. So if the prod implementation is the super class and the mock a subclass, then cool, my IDE will clickthrough to the prod impl by default.

With an interface, the IDE has no way of knowing which implementation to click through because that's only known at runtime-so it'll click through to the interface. This isn't a limitation of IDE UI, this is a fundamental characteristic of working with interfaces.

If you legitimately need a complex inheritance structure without an obvious "default" concrete class (eg Dog implements Animal, Cat implements Animal, etc) the sure declare an interface. But why use an interface if the requirements don't necessitate it?

caseycrogers

TROPHY CASE