In the dead of night, after drinking a glass of warm milk and doing soft exercises for twenty minutes, I lay on the bed but couldn't fall asleep immediately. The reason is that I was suddenly attacked by a "sound cannon" commonly known as ASMR when I was performing the essential ritual of playing with my mobile phone before going to bed.
One beautiful woman after another kept whispering in my ear in my message stream: "Come on, you can say anything here that you usually dare not say. There are no cold words, you can voice, you can video, I am here waiting for you."
Their words, tone, and demeanor all convey some NSFW hints. It seems that I only need to click two buttons to escape from the subtle embarrassment of "lonely night, lonely me". This large-scale direct entry gave me a far more absurd sensory impact than the late-night EMO of "Net Yiyun", and also used its unabashed anxiety-selling skills to relieve my stress before the next day.
Advertisements on dating apps are nothing new. In my past information flow, they were called the “Three Heroes of Psoriasis on the Internet” along with hair transplant advertisements and diet pill advertisements. Their stable status in my information flow allows me to tell from the distribution of advertising content I see every day whether "The King of Salted Fish" has increased its advertising efforts during this period, and whether there are online loan software and cosmetics that have mistaken my user profile.
It didn't even pretend to be a "virtual girlfriend"
And I also believe that I am not the "chosen one". Every Internet vagabond is probably immersed in the same environment. "Psoriasis" is the poisonous pool under the Fortress of France, and it is the carbon dioxide in the air of the contemporary Internet. It fills every breath of netizens, and everyone must have already "rejoiced in it".
But maybe the algorithm finally found me as a fish that slipped through the net and put me on the harvest list, or maybe it was because I invested some time in these ads out of fun, confusion, and a little bit of curiosity, so the concentration of dating software ads in my information flow has skyrocketed in recent times.
Thus, a magical world that I had never imagined captured me and successfully caused me to lose sleep.
I used to think that it was extremely outrageous for a lower-middle-level teacher to receive an advertising message saying "There are cosplayers nearby, download the app and you can make a meal appointment" while riding in a place in Qinghai with an average of less than two people per square kilometer.
However, the dimensions that this kind of advertising can reach are actually beyond what most people can imagine. Nowadays, simply putting a beautiful woman on the screen and randomly outputting a few advertising slogans is completely outdated in this chaotic environment. Truly awesome “art” should “come from life and be higher than life.” "Everything is excessive, everything is crazy" used to be used to describe Hong Kong movies in the golden era, but now I think it should be used as a comment on dating software advertisements.
In these advertisements, you can see young and beautiful girls, with happy expressions on their faces, holding the arms of old farmers who are three or four years older than her, and they are completely in love with her.
You can also see a middle-aged man wearing work clothes, with a big beard and a bald head, saying to a woman who is younger, more beautiful and with a good figure: "I am poor, ugly, and have no ability. Do you regret following me?" Then the other party affectionately confessed: "I regret not meeting you earlier."
"Beauty is super proactive" and "appears in three days" are keywords that appear frequently in these advertisements. The mysterious scenes of "old cow eating grass seeds" and "toad biting a white swan in a dream" are the surrealist magical works carefully created by this type of advertisement.
Of course, this is still not their limit. Since they are all starting to dream, they might as well be a little more bold.
The unreasonable "two-love relationship" is far from satisfying their appetite. In the more "new" advertisements, they have completely abandoned the fig leaf of "barely seeming to be a balanced relationship between the sexes", and finding a partner has become a superpower that can be accomplished at the click of a button.
You don’t even need to chat anymore. The female users on the software are all click-and-play robots. As long as you give them a like, you turn on their switch, and they will automatically provide you with meticulous follow-up services. The plot unfolds as if it were a real episode, and it is actually shown in front of you in the advertising video of the outside world.
It’s everyone’s favorite hypnosis book
Here, the standard of "scumbag" has been set to new lows again and again. Not to mention how many times you step on one foot, as long as you pay attention to several girls at the same time, you may trigger a serious Shura field.
Here, likes and attention are a highly enforceable social contract - judging from its performance, its binding force is even more than a formal marriage contract. As long as you like and follow the other person, then even if you are a "short, poor, ugly and extremely poor loser", there will be "high-quality women" who are rich, beautiful and "covet" your "honesty and honesty" and come to your door with their garage savings in the form of "hunting for thousands of miles".
The short play "Onset Diary 2" once ridiculed these software advertisements in an episode, and a certain scene in it can very intuitively present the contradictions in these advertisements. Who would have thought that this episode, which everyone thought was a comedy at the beginning, now seems to be a documentary based on reality.
Stills from Episode 11 of "Onset Diary 2"
"Magic realism" is no longer enough to describe its absurd core. Only the irreversible damage caused by alcohol and tobacco to the screenwriters' brains can explain their creative logic. This group of screenwriters either absorbed a large number of street writers from Qidian Men's Video, or their daily team building location is simply the Qingfeng Village section of the NGA forum.
Character, conversation, personal ability, status and occupation, property level, appearance level, social status, etc., all factors that may affect the attraction of the opposite sex seem to be wiped out in front of this type of software - men will have more exaggerated power than the emperor, and can roam around in the software and "choose concubines" at will. Any religious myth about heaven, such as the Seventy-Two Beauties, seems unimaginative and ungrounded by comparison. The attractive logic of high returns, zero risk, and zero investment behind it, as well as the precise attack on human weaknesses in the scenes it depicts, make people feel that planners of this type of advertising may have better career prospects if they turn to MLM organizations.
And they are indeed more suitable for jobs with a more vicious professional nature.
Loneliness is a problem that everyone must face in the atomic society. Individuals who develop inward are widening the distance between each other and isolating everyone equally. Various factors such as closed social circles and heavy work routines have also built the comfort zone of life into an airtight cocoon that wraps people up. The fast-paced life and the rising cost of making friends have made "friends" increasingly a luxury in modern society, making closer relationships as elusive as castles in the air for many people.
What you don't get always causes turmoil, and what you don't get always makes your anxiety worse. The eight hardships in life can never be circumvented by separation from love and failure to seek.
Anxiety about intimacy is the elephant in the room in modern society, and different people touch different parts of the elephant. Young people who are good at expressing themselves on the Internet express this anxiety in concrete or abstract ways. Behind many quarrels and confrontations, there are always some underlying emotions.
And among those specific groups of people targeted in advertisements who are stuck in the cracks of the times and live in a less exciting gray-scale reality space, they often choose to keep their mouths shut and become the "silent majority" and allow anxiety to spread.
Then comes the absurdity.
Where there is anxiety, there is business.
Online dating software is a very special type of software. They are different from WeChat and QQ. Their functions are often very pure, just chatting. But it is sometimes very complicated, because you don't know why all kinds of people come to chat with someone, but you must know that a large part of them are not just for chatting.
There are many people who need to chat absent-mindedly like this.
Therefore, we can see that well-known software such as “Momo” earned 2.7431 billion yuan in Q3 2023.
As a result, we can easily find thousands of dating apps, large and small, on the Internet, all of which are enough to fill every inch of the storage space of the latest iPhone Pro Max. The colors of their icons are similar, and the user experience is similar. Whether it is the degree of homogeneity or the number of versions, they are all similar to "Legend".
And if there is business, there will be people selling fairy tales.
Lonely beauties have been waiting for you all night on the app. They are proactive, dedicated, and don't care about material things or external appearances. As long as you gently click a follow button, you can choose from voice, video, or dating. Loneliness, emptiness, and desires can all be perfectly resolved. You may even have the happy worry of "What should I do if they are too proactive and I can't bear it?"
Basically, what these dating apps sell is the story of a snail girl, a modern fairy tale about getting something for nothing.
Turning a cat into a cat lady also falls into this category
"It's over!" which has become a hit recently. I'm surrounded by beautiful women! ”, what they sell is a similar fairy tale. From the first-person perspective, you can immerse yourself in the sweet surroundings of six beauties. It is rooted in the underlying idea of creating dreams for players, making every shot of the game filled with pink sweetness. But precisely because of this, logical considerations and moral condemnation seem a bit out of place in the face of players’ strong desire to dream.
In "Done!" I'm surrounded by beautiful women! "After becoming a phenomenon-level work, not only its own DLC and sequel projects were launched at a lightning speed, but also a number of real-life interactive video games with the same theme emerged in the game market, from "I Have a Date with a Beauty" to "It's Over!" that even copied the name. I can also chase beautiful women! ", and then to the end of big IP "It's finished! I am surrounded by fairy swords! ", it can be predicted that in the next period of time, players will soon see the strange landscape of "It's finished! I'm surrounded by "It's finished! I'm surrounded by beauties!"
As an antidote that allows people to escape from the present, fairy tales are also necessary in the adult world. They are even more important to us when we grow up than when we were young.
In the more progressive era, "hard work will lead to success" is the "Santa Claus" that everyone admires. However, when the fairy tale of "hard work will be rewarded" has been shattered, people may prefer to use the sweetness of "getting something for nothing" to relieve the pain of "not getting what you want".
However, they are also selling fairy tales. Some people sell the little girl's matches, while others sell the queen's apples.
"It's over!" I'm surrounded by beautiful women! "The popularity of "The Game" is a concentrated emotional release for many anxious people, and it is also a coincidence. It has no logic like all previous games that became popular overnight. Its existence is a clear transaction. You can buy a dream opportunity for thirty or forty yuan. If you are not satisfied, you can get a refund. If you exceed the refund period, the loss will not be too heavy.
All players who bought this game know that after the match burns out, this dream will disappear with the wind, and everyone will return to reality again. Just like in the winter morning, everyone has to leave the warm bed to face the cold world, basically harmless.
Advertisements for dating apps that sell the same fairy tale also offer a dream deal. But the difference between it and the game is that the dreamer does not know that this is a transaction, nor does he know how much this big dream is worth.
What dating software provides is not a one-time immersive experience, but a step to others, a door to another real world that exists on the Internet. In the real world, everyone knows that it is difficult for many charming stories to happen. If you want the kind of unequal friendship in the advertisement, unless you are really the protagonist of Earth Online. If you want true intimacy, the work required is the same as what you need to do in real life.
It’s hard for any decent dating app creator not to know this. Therefore, the relatively formal batch of dating apps from a long time ago have abandoned this routine at the advertising level. At least they have learned to hide their naked purposes in advertisements that are more suitable for the public.
Those dating apps that still sell absurd fairy tales do not hesitate to use the most extreme ways to portray the image of their audience, and use exaggerated plots that insult the audience’s intelligence to create the “beauty of love.” This means that they are targeting the unrealistic fantasies in the hearts of their audiences.
When you open the review page of this type of dating software, you will see people who have been deceived and comments that force users to pay.
Their comments fully demonstrate that each and every absurd advertisement is just a bait used to screen users and lure them to bite the hook. You need to pay to speak, you need to pay to ask for contact information, you need to pay to go on dates, one after another, krypton gold traps are buried in the other party's sexy and seductive words and photos. The conversion between dream and reality occurs the moment the user downloads the software.
Male employees with beautiful avatars, female chatters with part-time fees, and even AI robots use a variety of photos, videos, provocative words, and proactive gestures to support the lies weaved by the software until the user pays.
After users pay, those original naked desires will face an even naked reality.
It is impossible for people not to have unrealistic fantasies. The more people ask for something, the stronger the fire of fantasy will be ignited. The dating apps that are taking advantage of this point are of the same nature as "Macau Royal Casino" to a certain extent.
The only difference is that the latter will be caught, but in the former, you can see them openly appearing on all the most glamorous social platforms such as Douyin and Bilibili, using big data regardless of good or bad, to appear openly in front of all those who "can't ask for it", and even appeared in this article of mine in a playful way, mocking the saying "existence is reasonable" that has been misunderstood by many people and is regarded as a golden saying by many people.
Thinking back not long ago to "It's Over!" I'm surrounded by beautiful women! "When this work first became popular, its exaggerated plot, which was completely aimed at fantasy, made it known as a "science fiction masterpiece" by many people. At that time, many players even criticized this work because of this, deriding it as being irrational, divorced from reality, and purely based on obscenity.
In fact, it’s not necessary. Compared with the real world, the absurdities in the game are nothing to mention.