Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.

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Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.

Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.

Tea isn’t a dating app, it is… I guess you could call it … dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?

A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).

But it doesn’t actually directly link to

[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]

It is named ‘tea’, as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.

Literally this is their own marketing:

https://www.teaforwomen.com/about

It is literally just a replacement for Facebook ‘Are we dating the same guy’ groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.

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So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.

I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.

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Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.

Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of… is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don’t mention untill they’ve been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they’re committed when they’ve in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?

These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.

Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking…

But its not like this doesn’t happen to men.

I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.

But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn’t look like they’ve fucked with this page.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists…

About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I’d be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, ‘shut up and deal with it’, whatever you want to call it.

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Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:

Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.

I agree that it wouldn’t represent the average man, but we’ve got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who’ve been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.

Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.

But I don’t think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.

Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.

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Also, uh:

You say that,

The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

But what I am seeing is:

To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags

The rest of that quote is that the picture is ‘verified by the Tea team’, but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.

Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver’s liscense… basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is… so uncommon I cannot think of an example.

So…taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who’s already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.

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EDIT 2:

Occured to me on reviewing this:

… Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?

How… does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?

AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.