13 ms·

I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and all of them are like this. First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/fe

by LeonM 7y ago

I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and all of them are like this. First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs. The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles. Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone. The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed. I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

pepy 7y ago
Fractional Reserve Speed Dating http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-reserve-speed-dating.html http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-res...
arkh 7y ago
> I'd say it's about 80% male. It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.
- Lewton 7y ago
  On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%
- kilroy123 7y ago
  This is correct. It’s become a winner takes all situation.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    It probably was that way since the dawn of humanity. In 100 BC it was probably worse, if anything
- mcv 7y ago
  Create a fake profile to prove these are not all fake profiles? In any case, any site where the profile focuses primarily on your photo is probably going to see this going both ways: men going for the hottest women and women going for the hottest men. If you focus more on people's interests, I'd expect you're going to see a very different pattern.
  - skocznymroczny 7y ago
    The only major remaining website that tries to match people based on interests is OKCupid. And even it is changing every few months. Unfortunately, the success of Tinder and move to mobile phones first ruined most of the dating websites, which try to emulate its success. Because people mostly use phone nowadays for dating websites, long profiles are mostly gone, sending long letters is gone, many conversations are single sentence now. Also, instead of matching based on shared interests/values, most of the matching is based on "swipe left/right on photo".
    - darkwater 7y ago
      I don't get why Match.com, OkCupid should converge to a Tinder-like working model if they share ownership. I guess that there are different niches of people for those different websites/apps, no?
mixmax 7y ago
* I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either * Tinder disrupted the online dating scene by introducing the feature that you can only write someone after you've liked their profile, AND they've liked yours. That makes a huge difference, and solves the spam problem.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  That may have solved the problem initially, but not forever. I got back on Tinder about 6 months ago and bought a premium account after they kept waving the number of potential matches I had, only to discover that the vast majority of them (roughly 18 in 20) were 2,000+ miles away from me and looked like spam.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  It also made it that most guys never get noticed, because women have thousands of likes to go through.
- Blackstone4 7y ago
  From what I understand, it didn't entirely solve the problem since the behavior of men has evolved. Some of my friends are swiping right on everything to get matches and seeing what sticks.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Men are setting up emulator rigs to swipe right in parallel.
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      The app should create a fake account listed as a woman, but with a picture of a man and the text: Fake Account Ban anyone who swipes right on it. Or limit the amount of right swipes allowed per day.
      - mises 7y ago
tiglionabbit 7y ago
OKCupid doesn't have fake profiles, right?
- gruturo 7y ago
  I met my previous girlfriend on OkC, with whom I was for 3 years, and the current one, 1 year and counting, hopefully a lot of counting. There are definitely fewer people than e.g. Tinder, but they tend to be a lot more real vs spammers / scammers / engineered profiles designed to keep you in. Most Tinder matches were bots, most OkC matches were actual people. Of course this is with a sample size of 1, in Germany. Your mileage may vary.
  - amdavidson 7y ago
    "...with whom I was..." Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.
    - bloodorange 7y ago
      There is a delightful sketch that might help you see things differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv5ckMe_2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv5ckMe_2M
    - gruturo 7y ago
      English is not my first language, but yes, to my knowledge that is grammatically correct. Maybe it is a bit ambiguous, although from the context it should be reasonably clear that I was with my (now-ex) girlfriend for that period of time, and not with OkC itself :)
      - freeAgent 7y ago
        Most English speakers would say, "a woman who I was with for 3 years." In this case "with" is understood to mean in a romantic relationship. I don't think what you said is technically correct. "With whom I was" calls for something (a verb or phrase) to be tacked onto the end, but it would still be awkward. For example, "with whom I was dating for three years."
ptah 7y ago
i'm not a woman, but i've seen women getting spammed with dick pics leading many to stay away completely from these sites
mcv 7y ago
I think the most effective way to stand out is for women to contact men. With men spamming all women with meaningless messages, there's little point for women to respond to men contacting them. But if a man received a message from a woman, it's more likely they're real and not a fake profile, and that they're actually interested. But dating sites that create fake profiles and use all these dark patterns to try to con you into joining should simply be avoided like the plague. Nothing good can come out of those, and there's no point in rewarding bad actors with your money. Articles exposing these bad dating sites serve a very important purpose here.
- zapnuk 7y ago
  That's the idea behind bumble. AFAIK men and women rate each other similarly to Tinder (yes/no). However, when a match occurs, women have to send the first message. This doesn't solve the gender inbalance though. This problem is much more difficult to solve, and requires further homogenization (?) of the male and female gender role. This should be one of the more important challenges of our time. Lonelyness and sexual frustration have only negative impacts and are two accelerators for radicalization - which is a pressing concern in developed countries.
  - akuji1993 7y ago
    The reality for someone like me, a very average looking guy, is then that I get zero messages. Doesn't really solve anything either.
    - mcv 7y ago
      Average looking shouldn't be a problem to most people. Just don't look for people who want to date models. Use a dating site that focuses on content and interest rather than looks. But even if you're somewhere where the initial decision has to be made based on a photo, you can make that photo interesting. I met my wife on a dating site 13 years ago (a small, cheap one focused specifically on Christians), and although I probably had a profile with a whole supposedly-witty story about myself, the thing I remember is the photo; I used a photo from a recent vacation to Africa, with me selfie-style in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. Her first message to me included some reference to Ouagadougou, and that got the ball rolling. (Her photo was her on a sailing boat; also effective.) Don't use a photo where you look average, use a photo where you do something interesting. That says more about you than a chiseled jaw line.
ausbah 7y ago
I've liked Bumble's solution, make it so only woman can start a conversation if matched with someone.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  And typically they don't or just write "hi" and wait for the men to answer.
  - magduf 7y ago
    The other thing some will do is just not say anything, and wait for you to use your one daily "extend", to show her you're really interested in her and not just right-swiping everyone.
    - jrnichols 7y ago
      or they won't write to anyone, and they're merely collecting matches for self validation. Bumble is also (or was) loaded with fake profiles too. I had a friend see my own profile on there, with a city that I wasn't in (but had been) and there's no indication that I wasn't an active user - I had deleted the Bumble app 6 months before. I did finally go and delete the whole account after their anti-gun stance.
dabbledash 7y ago
I think the users on eHarmony are mostly women.
- ackbar03 7y ago
  What about the ones on those pop-ups that keep telling me about horny women in my area?
- magduf 7y ago
  I tried eHarmony for a little while. I finally gave it up because 1) it wasn't free and 2) most of the women were religious, so I got almost no dates on there. I've gotten most of my dates in the last year from CMB; that one doesn't attract as many religious people for some reason.
Ensorceled 7y ago
It might also be an age thing, younger women have no problem meeting people IRL. When I used a couple of these sites, including Match, when I was in my late 40's and I had no problem setting up multiple coffee dates. Nothing came of it and I met my wife at the running club.
gruturo 7y ago
For-profit dating sites also share a common problem: they need to extract revenue out of you, but the more successful they are at being dating sites, the sooner they lose you as a customer. All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.
- leppr 7y ago
  That's one dynamic. But there's also the opposite incentive of word of mouth from positive experiences. When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator. So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.
  - ken 7y ago
    It's a strange situation where they're literally telling you the great thing they found on that website is no longer available! It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
    - leppr 7y ago
      That's an amusing comparison, but I would compare it more to job or house rental listing sites. Of course the "item" you end up settling on is always going to be an intimately personal decision, but the benchmark would be the number of decent candidates you had the opportunity to consider, and the effort you had to expand during the search.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ken 7y ago
ecmascript 7y ago
> Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. That may have an effect, but it is also that women tend to go for the "top" guys while men in general have an more even spread on what they like. This is a more likely scenario. If you are male and not an alpha male that is very good looking and / or successful, it is unlikely that you will have a good experience on dating apps. This has been found again and again: OkCupid (which later deleted the post because the truth is controversial, and they are progressive): http://archive.is/pLAWq http://archive.is/pLAWq Tinder Study: https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png (There are many more, just search for it)
JulianMorrison 7y ago
The essential problem with dating websites is this: - Women and men join. - Women are immediately dogpiled by creeps, catfished, dick-picked, called names and given death threats for saying no. - Women turn right the fuck around and leave. - 80% ratio if you're lucky (and 100% plus bots, employees, and ghost accounts if you aren't).
notyourday 7y ago
> First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs. In my empirical observation it is not correct. Dating is local. The proportion of men and women on the sites in a locality will roughly match the proportion of men to women in the dating pool. Among the people that I know in NYC every woman who is single has dating apps. About the same percentage of men have dating apps. NYC is split fairly even between available men and women which if not to say that there are more women looking to date in NYC than men. > The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles. Empirically, I again have to disagree. I had a very similar conversation with a couple of people at a party so we did an experiment the weekend after party -- all of us went to the Whole Foods on Bedford Ave, popped in virgin SIM cards into our phones and created Tinder profiles: One M4F, one F4M, one M4M and one F4F. We set the distance to one mile and spent two hours hanging around the store both inside and outside. Between 6 of us, during that hour we saw in person 19 people that all of us agreed were on Tinder, of those 11 confirmed that those were them ( all of us used the same "Hi. Excuse me. Me and my friends are having a bet about Tinder. Is this you?" -- men were more successful getting confirmation both when they were approaching men and women but not by much) > Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone. It is because men's messages are as bad when they are "spamming" as when they are "putting thought into it". Online dating is online sales: putting up a website does not lead to sales. You need to make it: 1) attractive 2) relevant 3) understand your pitch 4) qualify your prospect 5) lead your prospect to sale If you don't have much to offer other than a badly built website ( bad photos ), with irrelevant product ( bad text pitch ), do not understand your pitch ( why should she date you and not Brad? ), do not qualify your prospect ( she lives 33 miles away in NJ. Are you seriously thinking she would be coming to Brooklyn to date you?! ) or lead the prospect to signing on the dotted line ( did you forget that you compete not only with Brad but also with a re-run of Law and Order or Netflix and she does not know you from Adam as of yet so why is she coming out again? ) you won't succeed. I recommend watching "Groundhog day". That's the movie version of the "i can't get a date" problem before the internet era. > I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned. Online dating converged to "dating". The same people who are able to successfully convert seeing a stranger in a coffee shop to getting strangers number/instagram/facebook and going out with that person the same day/next day/next week are the people who can do it online. The medium is different but the process is exactly the same.
bglusman 7y ago
I don't know about the ratios (or how a user looking through could really tell what the true ratio is) but as far as none of them having a decent matching algorithm... I'm a big fan of OkCupid here... (I know they were aquired by match but they still operate independently AFAIK) I interviewed for them 12-13 years ago but never worked there, but they were Harvard math guys who founded SparkNotes and "opensouced" an early version of their basic matching algorithm in 2004 or 2005 on their blog, I'll see if I can find and post here or perhaps someone else will share bit the gist was only using the intersection of questions you both answered, and both of you don't just answer the question but also give how much you care about the answer to this question and "acceptable" answers from your match (if you care at all, if not answers don't matter) and they use those to customize weight of each question in matching... I don't know if it has any special romantic matching qualities but it's WAY better than anything else I've tried for a metric of people worth meeting and who you'll sometimes have INCREDIBLE amount in common with, when match percentage is over 90 or 95%... I've dated two 96+% matches for over a year FWIW. EDIT: couldn't find original blog post but this article seems to have some of the same math/details in less entertaining form https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-online-dating/ https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-o...
- dspillett 7y ago
  > couldn't find original blog post When match.com bought them a number of posts about the inner workings, along with any posts that were critical of paid dating sites, were quickly taken down, and they took some effort to chase down exact copies hosted elsewhere and demand they be taken down too.
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the Match buyout made the entire experience significantly worse. All of a sudden there was a lot of swiping ala-tinder and suddenly you can't actually see messages that've been sent unless you both match with each other... OKC used to actually be a nice place to meet people (I'm still in contact with a number of friends I met on there) but it's turned into a cesspit. Off topic, but if anyone can suggest a non-awful replacement I'd be all ears. Ideally one where I can talk to people rather than having to make a yes/no decision based entirely on 3 photos.
baud147258 7y ago
> I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either I know one French dating website, AdopteUnMec, where it's free for women and paying for men, the owner are claiming the user split is 50-50 between men and women. But I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.
wingspar 7y ago
I think it also depends on what your looking for. At my small office of 10 people, where's 2 people that found matches on e-harmony, resulting in marriage.
winternett 7y ago
I think the main differentiator is whether you pay for the dating site or not... These sites are all geared towards generating money from accounts. When you're operating on the free side, profiles are fake and you get limited interactions with people (and bots) just enough to keep you engaged. When you pay, it's still not great in terms of matchmaking and functionality, and most of the features now are meant to up-sell you, or to keep you paying monthly. Actually connecting people has really become the last concern of most sites.
balabaster 7y ago
Google should do dating based on people's every day searches... "Hey, we know you're both single, or at least looking for other partners. You're literally the only two people on earth that share this fascination, everyone else thinks it's weird and creepy. You should chat. Based on the personality profiles we've created for you both based on your search history, we think you'd make an amazing couple." That could totally disrupt dating, it would be organic in a way that could actually work for relationship longevity and it would be based on things people are actually interested in rather than what they think they should present as being interested in to signal mates. It has the potential to be far more real than dating sites.
- jayalpha 7y ago
  Well, why would I want a partner with the same interests? To share one or two, great. But I can learn much more from a person that is very different compared to me. This is why I think this clustering based on interests was always bullshit on dating sites. And this is why people use Tinder now.
  - balabaster 7y ago
    I think Google is probably able to determine based on personality profiles created from our searches who we're most likely to mesh well with... whether that's based on interest or personality profile, who knows. It would be an interesting experiment.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
      Google can't even figure out that when I search for something in maps I probably want locations that are close to me and not across the country
bobloblaw45 7y ago
> Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile Exactly! I mean it doesn't make any sense not to. I'd bet most of the men that do this have spent a very long time making long thoughtful messages only to get absolutely nothing back. Every single time. And honestly getting something back like "Next time If you want to talk to a woman then say more than just 'hey'" once in awhile is far better than feel like you're trying to talk to people that don't actually exist.
taigeair 7y ago
I'm actually working on a new type of dating app that addresses this conflict of interest. Most dating apps want you to be addicted (single and swiping) to their screens so that they can keep earning billions of dollars from subscriptions, power-ups, and ads. Even if you aren't paying, they want you addicted to their platform for their paying members. There is a serious conflict of interest. We are different. We understand users want to find someone, so they get on with their lives-- to have amazing life experiences with someone they like. We give our users exactly that and our main revenue stream is tied to that. Just like Uber and Lyft sell rides because customers want rides-- we sell adventure dates because our users want breathtaking dating experiences. We also hate screen addiction. We want to be in the background, so people can focus on living in the moment. And every day, we'll sprinkle their lives with like-minded, kind people and travel opportunities. Would love your feedback on it. Here's more info I wrote about our business model: https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-dating-business.html https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin... Also I am happy to share my user data with the community too.
freeAgent 7y ago
That's pretty sad. I used OkCupid pretty successfully 5+ years ago in Chicago. I did not notice a spam/fraud problem at all (maybe one or two obvious spam messages here or there). It worked almost too well, to be honest. Women initiated contact with me rather than the other way around, and I had enough flow in that direction that I only initiated contact once. I ended up marrying a woman I met on OKCupid. I assume that as online dating has grown in popularity, the spam and fraud problems have increased. It probably also depends on location, age, and a bunch of other factors.
seisvelas 7y ago
The only evidence I've seen to counter this (very common) critique is the disturbing practice of 'chadfishing'. If you make a profile and put a picture of a hot guy, you will be flooded with female interest. Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by LeonM 7y ago

pepy 7y ago

Fractional Reserve Speed Dating http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-reserve-speed-dating.html http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-res...

arkh 7y ago

> I'd say it's about 80% male. It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.

Lewton 7y ago
On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%
kilroy123 7y ago
This is correct. It’s become a winner takes all situation.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  It probably was that way since the dawn of humanity. In 100 BC it was probably worse, if anything
mcv 7y ago
Create a fake profile to prove these are not all fake profiles? In any case, any site where the profile focuses primarily on your photo is probably going to see this going both ways: men going for the hottest women and women going for the hottest men. If you focus more on people's interests, I'd expect you're going to see a very different pattern.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  The only major remaining website that tries to match people based on interests is OKCupid. And even it is changing every few months. Unfortunately, the success of Tinder and move to mobile phones first ruined most of the dating websites, which try to emulate its success. Because people mostly use phone nowadays for dating websites, long profiles are mostly gone, sending long letters is gone, many conversations are single sentence now. Also, instead of matching based on shared interests/values, most of the matching is based on "swipe left/right on photo".
  - darkwater 7y ago
    I don't get why Match.com, OkCupid should converge to a Tinder-like working model if they share ownership. I guess that there are different niches of people for those different websites/apps, no?

mixmax 7y ago

* I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either * Tinder disrupted the online dating scene by introducing the feature that you can only write someone after you've liked their profile, AND they've liked yours. That makes a huge difference, and solves the spam problem.

save_ferris 7y ago
That may have solved the problem initially, but not forever. I got back on Tinder about 6 months ago and bought a premium account after they kept waving the number of potential matches I had, only to discover that the vast majority of them (roughly 18 in 20) were 2,000+ miles away from me and looked like spam.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
It also made it that most guys never get noticed, because women have thousands of likes to go through.
Blackstone4 7y ago
From what I understand, it didn't entirely solve the problem since the behavior of men has evolved. Some of my friends are swiping right on everything to get matches and seeing what sticks.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Men are setting up emulator rigs to swipe right in parallel.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    The app should create a fake account listed as a woman, but with a picture of a man and the text: Fake Account Ban anyone who swipes right on it. Or limit the amount of right swipes allowed per day.
    - mises 7y ago

tiglionabbit 7y ago

OKCupid doesn't have fake profiles, right?

gruturo 7y ago
I met my previous girlfriend on OkC, with whom I was for 3 years, and the current one, 1 year and counting, hopefully a lot of counting. There are definitely fewer people than e.g. Tinder, but they tend to be a lot more real vs spammers / scammers / engineered profiles designed to keep you in. Most Tinder matches were bots, most OkC matches were actual people. Of course this is with a sample size of 1, in Germany. Your mileage may vary.
- amdavidson 7y ago
  "...with whom I was..." Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.
  - bloodorange 7y ago
    There is a delightful sketch that might help you see things differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv5ckMe_2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv5ckMe_2M
  - gruturo 7y ago
    English is not my first language, but yes, to my knowledge that is grammatically correct. Maybe it is a bit ambiguous, although from the context it should be reasonably clear that I was with my (now-ex) girlfriend for that period of time, and not with OkC itself :)
    - freeAgent 7y ago
      Most English speakers would say, "a woman who I was with for 3 years." In this case "with" is understood to mean in a romantic relationship. I don't think what you said is technically correct. "With whom I was" calls for something (a verb or phrase) to be tacked onto the end, but it would still be awkward. For example, "with whom I was dating for three years."

ptah 7y ago

i'm not a woman, but i've seen women getting spammed with dick pics leading many to stay away completely from these sites

mcv 7y ago

I think the most effective way to stand out is for women to contact men. With men spamming all women with meaningless messages, there's little point for women to respond to men contacting them. But if a man received a message from a woman, it's more likely they're real and not a fake profile, and that they're actually interested. But dating sites that create fake profiles and use all these dark patterns to try to con you into joining should simply be avoided like the plague. Nothing good can come out of those, and there's no point in rewarding bad actors with your money. Articles exposing these bad dating sites serve a very important purpose here.

zapnuk 7y ago
That's the idea behind bumble. AFAIK men and women rate each other similarly to Tinder (yes/no). However, when a match occurs, women have to send the first message. This doesn't solve the gender inbalance though. This problem is much more difficult to solve, and requires further homogenization (?) of the male and female gender role. This should be one of the more important challenges of our time. Lonelyness and sexual frustration have only negative impacts and are two accelerators for radicalization - which is a pressing concern in developed countries.
- akuji1993 7y ago
  The reality for someone like me, a very average looking guy, is then that I get zero messages. Doesn't really solve anything either.
  - mcv 7y ago
    Average looking shouldn't be a problem to most people. Just don't look for people who want to date models. Use a dating site that focuses on content and interest rather than looks. But even if you're somewhere where the initial decision has to be made based on a photo, you can make that photo interesting. I met my wife on a dating site 13 years ago (a small, cheap one focused specifically on Christians), and although I probably had a profile with a whole supposedly-witty story about myself, the thing I remember is the photo; I used a photo from a recent vacation to Africa, with me selfie-style in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. Her first message to me included some reference to Ouagadougou, and that got the ball rolling. (Her photo was her on a sailing boat; also effective.) Don't use a photo where you look average, use a photo where you do something interesting. That says more about you than a chiseled jaw line.

ausbah 7y ago

I've liked Bumble's solution, make it so only woman can start a conversation if matched with someone.

LunaSea 7y ago
And typically they don't or just write "hi" and wait for the men to answer.
- magduf 7y ago
  The other thing some will do is just not say anything, and wait for you to use your one daily "extend", to show her you're really interested in her and not just right-swiping everyone.
  - jrnichols 7y ago
    or they won't write to anyone, and they're merely collecting matches for self validation. Bumble is also (or was) loaded with fake profiles too. I had a friend see my own profile on there, with a city that I wasn't in (but had been) and there's no indication that I wasn't an active user - I had deleted the Bumble app 6 months before. I did finally go and delete the whole account after their anti-gun stance.

dabbledash 7y ago

I think the users on eHarmony are mostly women.

ackbar03 7y ago
What about the ones on those pop-ups that keep telling me about horny women in my area?
magduf 7y ago
I tried eHarmony for a little while. I finally gave it up because 1) it wasn't free and 2) most of the women were religious, so I got almost no dates on there. I've gotten most of my dates in the last year from CMB; that one doesn't attract as many religious people for some reason.

Ensorceled 7y ago

It might also be an age thing, younger women have no problem meeting people IRL. When I used a couple of these sites, including Match, when I was in my late 40's and I had no problem setting up multiple coffee dates. Nothing came of it and I met my wife at the running club.

gruturo 7y ago

For-profit dating sites also share a common problem: they need to extract revenue out of you, but the more successful they are at being dating sites, the sooner they lose you as a customer. All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.

leppr 7y ago
That's one dynamic. But there's also the opposite incentive of word of mouth from positive experiences. When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator. So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.
- ken 7y ago
  It's a strange situation where they're literally telling you the great thing they found on that website is no longer available! It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
  - leppr 7y ago
    That's an amusing comparison, but I would compare it more to job or house rental listing sites. Of course the "item" you end up settling on is always going to be an intimately personal decision, but the benchmark would be the number of decent candidates you had the opportunity to consider, and the effort you had to expand during the search.
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ken 7y ago

ecmascript 7y ago

> Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. That may have an effect, but it is also that women tend to go for the "top" guys while men in general have an more even spread on what they like. This is a more likely scenario. If you are male and not an alpha male that is very good looking and / or successful, it is unlikely that you will have a good experience on dating apps. This has been found again and again: OkCupid (which later deleted the post because the truth is controversial, and they are progressive): http://archive.is/pLAWq http://archive.is/pLAWq Tinder Study: https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png (There are many more, just search for it)

JulianMorrison 7y ago

The essential problem with dating websites is this: - Women and men join. - Women are immediately dogpiled by creeps, catfished, dick-picked, called names and given death threats for saying no. - Women turn right the fuck around and leave. - 80% ratio if you're lucky (and 100% plus bots, employees, and ghost accounts if you aren't).

notyourday 7y ago

> First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs. In my empirical observation it is not correct. Dating is local. The proportion of men and women on the sites in a locality will roughly match the proportion of men to women in the dating pool. Among the people that I know in NYC every woman who is single has dating apps. About the same percentage of men have dating apps. NYC is split fairly even between available men and women which if not to say that there are more women looking to date in NYC than men. > The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles. Empirically, I again have to disagree. I had a very similar conversation with a couple of people at a party so we did an experiment the weekend after party -- all of us went to the Whole Foods on Bedford Ave, popped in virgin SIM cards into our phones and created Tinder profiles: One M4F, one F4M, one M4M and one F4F. We set the distance to one mile and spent two hours hanging around the store both inside and outside. Between 6 of us, during that hour we saw in person 19 people that all of us agreed were on Tinder, of those 11 confirmed that those were them ( all of us used the same "Hi. Excuse me. Me and my friends are having a bet about Tinder. Is this you?" -- men were more successful getting confirmation both when they were approaching men and women but not by much) > Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone. It is because men's messages are as bad when they are "spamming" as when they are "putting thought into it". Online dating is online sales: putting up a website does not lead to sales. You need to make it: 1) attractive 2) relevant 3) understand your pitch 4) qualify your prospect 5) lead your prospect to sale If you don't have much to offer other than a badly built website ( bad photos ), with irrelevant product ( bad text pitch ), do not understand your pitch ( why should she date you and not Brad? ), do not qualify your prospect ( she lives 33 miles away in NJ. Are you seriously thinking she would be coming to Brooklyn to date you?! ) or lead the prospect to signing on the dotted line ( did you forget that you compete not only with Brad but also with a re-run of Law and Order or Netflix and she does not know you from Adam as of yet so why is she coming out again? ) you won't succeed. I recommend watching "Groundhog day". That's the movie version of the "i can't get a date" problem before the internet era. > I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned. Online dating converged to "dating". The same people who are able to successfully convert seeing a stranger in a coffee shop to getting strangers number/instagram/facebook and going out with that person the same day/next day/next week are the people who can do it online. The medium is different but the process is exactly the same.

bglusman 7y ago

I don't know about the ratios (or how a user looking through could really tell what the true ratio is) but as far as none of them having a decent matching algorithm... I'm a big fan of OkCupid here... (I know they were aquired by match but they still operate independently AFAIK) I interviewed for them 12-13 years ago but never worked there, but they were Harvard math guys who founded SparkNotes and "opensouced" an early version of their basic matching algorithm in 2004 or 2005 on their blog, I'll see if I can find and post here or perhaps someone else will share bit the gist was only using the intersection of questions you both answered, and both of you don't just answer the question but also give how much you care about the answer to this question and "acceptable" answers from your match (if you care at all, if not answers don't matter) and they use those to customize weight of each question in matching... I don't know if it has any special romantic matching qualities but it's WAY better than anything else I've tried for a metric of people worth meeting and who you'll sometimes have INCREDIBLE amount in common with, when match percentage is over 90 or 95%... I've dated two 96+% matches for over a year FWIW. EDIT: couldn't find original blog post but this article seems to have some of the same math/details in less entertaining form https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-online-dating/ https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-o...

dspillett 7y ago
> couldn't find original blog post When match.com bought them a number of posts about the inner workings, along with any posts that were critical of paid dating sites, were quickly taken down, and they took some effort to chase down exact copies hosted elsewhere and demand they be taken down too.
- BuildTheRobots 7y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the Match buyout made the entire experience significantly worse. All of a sudden there was a lot of swiping ala-tinder and suddenly you can't actually see messages that've been sent unless you both match with each other... OKC used to actually be a nice place to meet people (I'm still in contact with a number of friends I met on there) but it's turned into a cesspit. Off topic, but if anyone can suggest a non-awful replacement I'd be all ears. Ideally one where I can talk to people rather than having to make a yes/no decision based entirely on 3 photos.

baud147258 7y ago

> I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either I know one French dating website, AdopteUnMec, where it's free for women and paying for men, the owner are claiming the user split is 50-50 between men and women. But I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.

wingspar 7y ago

I think it also depends on what your looking for. At my small office of 10 people, where's 2 people that found matches on e-harmony, resulting in marriage.

winternett 7y ago

I think the main differentiator is whether you pay for the dating site or not... These sites are all geared towards generating money from accounts. When you're operating on the free side, profiles are fake and you get limited interactions with people (and bots) just enough to keep you engaged. When you pay, it's still not great in terms of matchmaking and functionality, and most of the features now are meant to up-sell you, or to keep you paying monthly. Actually connecting people has really become the last concern of most sites.

balabaster 7y ago

Google should do dating based on people's every day searches... "Hey, we know you're both single, or at least looking for other partners. You're literally the only two people on earth that share this fascination, everyone else thinks it's weird and creepy. You should chat. Based on the personality profiles we've created for you both based on your search history, we think you'd make an amazing couple." That could totally disrupt dating, it would be organic in a way that could actually work for relationship longevity and it would be based on things people are actually interested in rather than what they think they should present as being interested in to signal mates. It has the potential to be far more real than dating sites.

jayalpha 7y ago
Well, why would I want a partner with the same interests? To share one or two, great. But I can learn much more from a person that is very different compared to me. This is why I think this clustering based on interests was always bullshit on dating sites. And this is why people use Tinder now.
- balabaster 7y ago
  I think Google is probably able to determine based on personality profiles created from our searches who we're most likely to mesh well with... whether that's based on interest or personality profile, who knows. It would be an interesting experiment.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    Google can't even figure out that when I search for something in maps I probably want locations that are close to me and not across the country

bobloblaw45 7y ago

> Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile Exactly! I mean it doesn't make any sense not to. I'd bet most of the men that do this have spent a very long time making long thoughtful messages only to get absolutely nothing back. Every single time. And honestly getting something back like "Next time If you want to talk to a woman then say more than just 'hey'" once in awhile is far better than feel like you're trying to talk to people that don't actually exist.

taigeair 7y ago

I'm actually working on a new type of dating app that addresses this conflict of interest. Most dating apps want you to be addicted (single and swiping) to their screens so that they can keep earning billions of dollars from subscriptions, power-ups, and ads. Even if you aren't paying, they want you addicted to their platform for their paying members. There is a serious conflict of interest. We are different. We understand users want to find someone, so they get on with their lives-- to have amazing life experiences with someone they like. We give our users exactly that and our main revenue stream is tied to that. Just like Uber and Lyft sell rides because customers want rides-- we sell adventure dates because our users want breathtaking dating experiences. We also hate screen addiction. We want to be in the background, so people can focus on living in the moment. And every day, we'll sprinkle their lives with like-minded, kind people and travel opportunities. Would love your feedback on it. Here's more info I wrote about our business model: https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-dating-business.html https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin... Also I am happy to share my user data with the community too.

freeAgent 7y ago

That's pretty sad. I used OkCupid pretty successfully 5+ years ago in Chicago. I did not notice a spam/fraud problem at all (maybe one or two obvious spam messages here or there). It worked almost too well, to be honest. Women initiated contact with me rather than the other way around, and I had enough flow in that direction that I only initiated contact once. I ended up marrying a woman I met on OKCupid. I assume that as online dating has grown in popularity, the spam and fraud problems have increased. It probably also depends on location, age, and a bunch of other factors.

seisvelas 7y ago

The only evidence I've seen to counter this (very common) critique is the disturbing practice of 'chadfishing'. If you make a profile and put a picture of a hot guy, you will be flooded with female interest. Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.

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