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The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of t

by jquery 15y ago

The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena. For the "unfortunate" women who tragically receive too many messages, just implement something like LinkedIn's brilliant "InMail" system. Make it cost money to send a premium message. Now these women can focus on premium messages if they don't have time for the spammers. Even better, let the women choose how much it costs to send them a message. There, real-life dating boiled down to its essence.

chii 15y ago
whilst true, it is sad to me that men with money end up getting more dates...
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Then it should be equally sad that attractive women get more dates, right? Wealth is a mate quality metric for males, just as much as attractiveness is for females.
  - jaems33 15y ago
    Exactly. Attractiveness (height, weight, look) is just as superficial as wealth.
    - niels 15y ago
      None of them are superficial. Get over it.
visarg 15y ago
This problem can be fixed. The ratio of messages sent by men:women could be limited.
groby_b 15y ago
If that's your "real-life" dating experience, maybe you should date different people. Yes, some women look at wallet size. Most (of the ones I know) don't. Yes, even the ones who don't date within roughly their own socioeconomic strata - but that's a) the same for men, and b) not the same as what you're implying.
spenceyboi 15y ago
The male/female ratio is close to 50/50. Men on online dating sites just don't seem to realize online dating is simulating real world dating. In real world dating, the guys tend to go for the girls not vice versa. On online dating, it is still the same.
- jaems33 15y ago
  Honest question: why? Why in a world where we are trying to promote equality do we 'require' men to make the first move?
  - xxbondsxx 15y ago
    Testosterone, alpha-male qualities, evolution. Take your pick. Societal equality can't override our biological notions of attraction
    - jaems33 15y ago
      Alpha male and evolution as reasons would make a lot of sense to me prior to the modern era, where options for women were limited, survival of new families was more difficult, and women were generally not encouraged to be so forward. Nowadays... eh.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    I don't think it is required, but it is an interesting question why it turned out that way. Could be that women are simply lazy and avoid the risk of rejection. They will be approached anyway, so they don't have to move themselves. Also, women usually do make the first step, just not the obvious one of walking up and talking. I just had to think that it might be a bad strategy for women, because I am a bit like that with recruiters. I am usually too lazy to approach companies I desire to work for and end up working for the next best project a recruiter pushes to me once my bank account falls below a certain threshold. Naturally that way I end up with lots of sub par projects.
- itmag 15y ago
  IRL, most men are too timid to approach women the same way it's done on dating sites. Can you imagine a bunch of average guys going around in the streets and talking to random women in broad daylight with no hesitation? When you take away Approach Anxiety, of course you're going to have a massive storm of sausage looking for action. Because, while it sounds cliché, men really are pigs (or more accurately, chimps). :-)
potatolicious 15y ago
> "The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena." I think it's more complex than this. It's a convergence of many problems really. The first, and greatest problem with online dating is: 1 - Words are a really fucking shitty communications medium. Few people are good writers, and even fewer people are good writers when limited to the span of a few paragraphs. Body language and personality are far more self-expressive, but we have no good ways to pushing this information across the internet. Because of this, there is a tremendous reduction in range of communication. All the profiles start to read the same, because we've essentially topped out how expressively a regular person can get with 3 paragraphs to describe themselves. In other words, when you've crunched down people's self-expression to really short paragraphs and a bunch of multiple choice answers, personality disappears. And its place, the only sane metric one profile from another is physical attractiveness. Which leads to the next big problem... 2 - There are no salient indicators of competition online, quite unlike the real world. How many of us here go after statuesque model-types, exclusively? Bueller? But we do it online, because without the ability to appreciate someone's personality, looks are the only measuring stick you've got left. In the real world this is balanced out the fact that competition is extremely visible, especially in an environment like a club or a bar. You see a girl being hit on by an endless stream of guys. Do you line up and join the fray? Or maybe you find something else? Online these signals do not exist, which means all men will simply line up to hit on the hottest subset of the population without knowing just how long this sausagefest-line is, and the complement of this is that anyone who isn't in, say, the upper quartile of physical attractiveness, will get crickets (or the spamalot shotgunner-types). tl;dr, the problem is twofold: poor communication medium means that personality and unique traits are impossible to express well over the dating network, leading to physical attractiveness becoming the only major factor in almost all decisions, and everyone (guys and girls) become way pickier than they would be IRL. Lack of visible competition drives traffic to only most attractive portion of population, where in real life visible competition will drive a considerable amount of "traffic" back towards average lookers.
- jaredsohn 15y ago
  >Online these signals do not exist On OkCupid, they show a dot on each profile to indicate how responsive the person is. My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot, since it is impractical for her to respond to all of those messages. They also have star ratings, which should indicate how generally desirable the person is on the site.
itmag 15y ago
The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena I think it goes much deeper than that. Think evolutionary psychology and mating dynamics.
Tichy 15y ago
Actually I think it is a direct result of the asymmetric biological "worth" of men and women. Women have much higher reproductive value, men are next to worthless and exchangeable (biologically). The good old "a man can father hundreds of kids, but a woman can only have kids every 9 months". Therefore women are "the price" and men have to compete to get them (and by compete I mean "scramble and write hundreds of messages"). Women don't really have to compete to get pregnant.
- itmag 15y ago
  Women compete too, but for the top men aka the alphas. The richest, most handsome, most famous, most combat-fit, most connected, etc. Or often in today's world: the most caddish. And what is alpha is always relative to something else, which means that rising female incomes, for instance, will raise the bar for competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-getting-acknowledged-by-the-mainstream/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-g... http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-about-hypergamy.html http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-abou... Supposedly, only something like 40% of men got to reproduce in the Neolithic...
  - Tichy 15y ago
    True - and I suppose if Brad Pitt signed up on an online dating site he would get a lot of messages (or whoever todays women are into, not sure). A richer hubby presumably increases survival chances for the offspring (independent of the actual biological father of said offspring). But the fact remains that a woman can easily get laid any time, if she wants to. There was this famous experiment where students approached other students on university campus and asked them if they would like to have sex. Don't recall the numbers, but there was a real high discrepancy between the sexes, basically most men who were approached by women said yes, whereas hardly any women said yes. So basically as a chick, just walk up to some men and ask. Of course modern society complicates it a bit because men now have the risk of paternity charges (a societal construct).
    - 15y ago
georgieporgie 15y ago
The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. Where do you get that information? I believe that directly contradicts the old (pre-Match.com takeover) OKCupid blog, which, to my knowledge, is the only vaguely unbiased source of dating site statistics.
perlgeek 15y ago
Maybe one could prioritize the messages in the inbox, and assign a lower priority if the sender has contacted more people in a reference time frame (eg last 7 days). That way people that mass-mail others get ignored pretty much automatically. Of course that system also has its downsides, it encourages creating multiple accounts.

by jquery 15y ago

chii 15y ago

whilst true, it is sad to me that men with money end up getting more dates...

sliverstorm 15y ago
Then it should be equally sad that attractive women get more dates, right? Wealth is a mate quality metric for males, just as much as attractiveness is for females.
- jaems33 15y ago
  Exactly. Attractiveness (height, weight, look) is just as superficial as wealth.
  - niels 15y ago
    None of them are superficial. Get over it.

visarg 15y ago

This problem can be fixed. The ratio of messages sent by men:women could be limited.

groby_b 15y ago

If that's your "real-life" dating experience, maybe you should date different people. Yes, some women look at wallet size. Most (of the ones I know) don't. Yes, even the ones who don't date within roughly their own socioeconomic strata - but that's a) the same for men, and b) not the same as what you're implying.

spenceyboi 15y ago

The male/female ratio is close to 50/50. Men on online dating sites just don't seem to realize online dating is simulating real world dating. In real world dating, the guys tend to go for the girls not vice versa. On online dating, it is still the same.

jaems33 15y ago
Honest question: why? Why in a world where we are trying to promote equality do we 'require' men to make the first move?
- xxbondsxx 15y ago
  Testosterone, alpha-male qualities, evolution. Take your pick. Societal equality can't override our biological notions of attraction
  - jaems33 15y ago
    Alpha male and evolution as reasons would make a lot of sense to me prior to the modern era, where options for women were limited, survival of new families was more difficult, and women were generally not encouraged to be so forward. Nowadays... eh.
- Tichy 15y ago
  I don't think it is required, but it is an interesting question why it turned out that way. Could be that women are simply lazy and avoid the risk of rejection. They will be approached anyway, so they don't have to move themselves. Also, women usually do make the first step, just not the obvious one of walking up and talking. I just had to think that it might be a bad strategy for women, because I am a bit like that with recruiters. I am usually too lazy to approach companies I desire to work for and end up working for the next best project a recruiter pushes to me once my bank account falls below a certain threshold. Naturally that way I end up with lots of sub par projects.
itmag 15y ago
IRL, most men are too timid to approach women the same way it's done on dating sites. Can you imagine a bunch of average guys going around in the streets and talking to random women in broad daylight with no hesitation? When you take away Approach Anxiety, of course you're going to have a massive storm of sausage looking for action. Because, while it sounds cliché, men really are pigs (or more accurately, chimps). :-)

potatolicious 15y ago

> "The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena." I think it's more complex than this. It's a convergence of many problems really. The first, and greatest problem with online dating is: 1 - Words are a really fucking shitty communications medium. Few people are good writers, and even fewer people are good writers when limited to the span of a few paragraphs. Body language and personality are far more self-expressive, but we have no good ways to pushing this information across the internet. Because of this, there is a tremendous reduction in range of communication. All the profiles start to read the same, because we've essentially topped out how expressively a regular person can get with 3 paragraphs to describe themselves. In other words, when you've crunched down people's self-expression to really short paragraphs and a bunch of multiple choice answers, personality disappears. And its place, the only sane metric one profile from another is physical attractiveness. Which leads to the next big problem... 2 - There are no salient indicators of competition online, quite unlike the real world. How many of us here go after statuesque model-types, exclusively? Bueller? But we do it online, because without the ability to appreciate someone's personality, looks are the only measuring stick you've got left. In the real world this is balanced out the fact that competition is extremely visible, especially in an environment like a club or a bar. You see a girl being hit on by an endless stream of guys. Do you line up and join the fray? Or maybe you find something else? Online these signals do not exist, which means all men will simply line up to hit on the hottest subset of the population without knowing just how long this sausagefest-line is, and the complement of this is that anyone who isn't in, say, the upper quartile of physical attractiveness, will get crickets (or the spamalot shotgunner-types). tl;dr, the problem is twofold: poor communication medium means that personality and unique traits are impossible to express well over the dating network, leading to physical attractiveness becoming the only major factor in almost all decisions, and everyone (guys and girls) become way pickier than they would be IRL. Lack of visible competition drives traffic to only most attractive portion of population, where in real life visible competition will drive a considerable amount of "traffic" back towards average lookers.

jaredsohn 15y ago
>Online these signals do not exist On OkCupid, they show a dot on each profile to indicate how responsive the person is. My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot, since it is impractical for her to respond to all of those messages. They also have star ratings, which should indicate how generally desirable the person is on the site.

itmag 15y ago

Tichy 15y ago

Actually I think it is a direct result of the asymmetric biological "worth" of men and women. Women have much higher reproductive value, men are next to worthless and exchangeable (biologically). The good old "a man can father hundreds of kids, but a woman can only have kids every 9 months". Therefore women are "the price" and men have to compete to get them (and by compete I mean "scramble and write hundreds of messages"). Women don't really have to compete to get pregnant.

itmag 15y ago
Women compete too, but for the top men aka the alphas. The richest, most handsome, most famous, most combat-fit, most connected, etc. Or often in today's world: the most caddish. And what is alpha is always relative to something else, which means that rising female incomes, for instance, will raise the bar for competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-getting-acknowledged-by-the-mainstream/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-g... http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-about-hypergamy.html http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-abou... Supposedly, only something like 40% of men got to reproduce in the Neolithic...
- Tichy 15y ago
  True - and I suppose if Brad Pitt signed up on an online dating site he would get a lot of messages (or whoever todays women are into, not sure). A richer hubby presumably increases survival chances for the offspring (independent of the actual biological father of said offspring). But the fact remains that a woman can easily get laid any time, if she wants to. There was this famous experiment where students approached other students on university campus and asked them if they would like to have sex. Don't recall the numbers, but there was a real high discrepancy between the sexes, basically most men who were approached by women said yes, whereas hardly any women said yes. So basically as a chick, just walk up to some men and ask. Of course modern society complicates it a bit because men now have the risk of paternity charges (a societal construct).
  - 15y ago

georgieporgie 15y ago

The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. Where do you get that information? I believe that directly contradicts the old (pre-Match.com takeover) OKCupid blog, which, to my knowledge, is the only vaguely unbiased source of dating site statistics.

perlgeek 15y ago

Maybe one could prioritize the messages in the inbox, and assign a lower priority if the sender has contacted more people in a reference time frame (eg last 7 days). That way people that mass-mail others get ignored pretty much automatically. Of course that system also has its downsides, it encourages creating multiple accounts.