Advice Rance's Guide to HelloTalk

[Rance]

Is this worth it for the algo/farming followers? I it set as CN/JP/Vietnamese. I know fuck all Spanish

It's 1000% worth it. At least in the beginning when you need to get your followers up, and get over the 100-ish likes per Moment threshold to make your profile look impressive.

Right now I'm set to:
English (native) ---> Chinese (elementary) + Japanese (intermediate) + Spanish (beginner)

Which helps a lot with the algo, but doesn't look so good, it looks confusing. Therefore around when I move to China I'll change it to:
English (native) + Japanese (intermediate) ---> Chinese (elementary)

 

[Rance]

I’m noticing 1 problem using Hellotalk, at least for Chinese girls… the vast majority of profiles are whack
Only a very small fraction of them has:

• A profile picture that isn’t blatantly some celebrity or whatever; Chinese people use regular-looking non-famous people as their PFP if it’s aesthetic lol
• has photos in their Moments so you can verify their profile picture is even them, let alone not filtermaxxed to oblivion. And even then they might have pictures of some random in their Moments
• is actually 6/10+ and isn’t using uncanny alien filters (not that they actually make them any more attractive the majority of the time)
• and of course, is actually in your city. Some kind of “Japan ≈ Tokyo” thing probably makes it a lot more streamlined when using it for Japanese, I imagine

Looks like IRL game is the only consistent solution… only real 中文的人 china-boos will survive

... all that being said though, obviously that tells you how easy it is to set yourself apart because it's probably a lot more of the same for guys. AKA a lot of the stuff that was discussed in OP

I'm immediately realizing the drawback of how BIG China is. Only one of the girls I've messaged with so far is in Hangzhou. And only a handful are elsewhere in the Shanghai-Nanjing-Ningbo triangle. Japan was easy because a solid number of girls were in Tokyo, maybe as much as a third of them.

This brings a subtle social effect. When I was in Tokyo, I'd use the "people near me" feature to find other girls in Tokyo and message them. But because Tokyo is such a massive city and many users were there, there was the plausible deniability of messaging them for other reasons, but they just happened to live nearby. When I message girls in Hangzhou, I feel like they know right away that I'm messaging them because they live in Hangzhou, as it's too unlikely to be sheer coincidence. Probably works against me.

 

[Orientalist]

This brings a subtle social effect. When I was in Tokyo, I'd use the "people near me" feature to find other girls in Tokyo and message them. But because Tokyo is such a massive city and many users were there, there was the plausible deniability of messaging them for other reasons, but they just happened to live nearby. When I message girls in Hangzhou, I feel like they know right away that I'm messaging them because they live in Hangzhou, as it's too unlikely to be sheer coincidence. Probably works against me.

Definitely a good point, but there's still 11 million other people in the city.
I don't even know if the algorithm actually does this - but - even if you don't use the 'nearby' feature I imagine you have plausible deniability that the 'Connect' tab still probably shows you people nearby anyways.

 

[geneblackman]

I still can't figure out the algorithm. Sometimes I get a lot of first messages and profile views then other times it's dry. Same on Tandem.

My moments are still trash too. I might have to try subtle ragebaiting