Anecdotal agreement: I spent some time using online dating several years ago, but I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. I messaged a lot of women, got

Anecdotal agreement: I spent some time using online dating several years ago, but I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. I messaged a lot of women, got ignored by a lot of women, went on a couple of very unfulfilling dates. The issue was that (for me and my targets) when you log in there's just so many people. So you use very brutal winnowing to filter down to a manageable set, but (obviously) you can only filter based on the info the site gives you: Height, weight, religion, ethnicity, facial appearance. In so doing you throw away tons of potential matches that you'd have got along great with, but the people you're left with aren't really "matches" at all. They had no particular reason to talk to me, and I had no particular reason to talk to them. "Hello fellow human; do you wish to discuss current events?" A couple years later (after a fairly unhappy but very educational relationship with someone I did NOT meet on a dating site) I tried online dating again. This time I had a very specific idea what I was looking for, and used keyword searches to find potential matches. I quickly filtered it down to 3 possible matches in my city, one of whom was far and away the best match. I messaged her, she replied, and 4.5 years later we're still happily dating. I think online dating is great if you have very specific criteria and you're trying to find someone who matches at all, and need the ability to perform a hard filter on a large pool of people you know don't match. Online dating is terrible if you don't really know what you're looking for, and you're just trying to find people to talk to. (And of course, that goes both ways. Online dating is a horrible way to meet someone who doesn't know what they're looking for, because they're likely to use very arbitrary was to filter the pool down to a manageable subset. But it's great if your target does know what they're looking for, because if you match, your message will really stand out.)