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Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the

Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the men are sending messages to basically every girl that they see. They play the numbers game, and it's all about how big of a net you can cast. I don't foresee any dating site being more successful than the current heavyweights until they can get rid of "fishing" so women aren't unmotivated to go on the site and men aren't wasting their time sending the same message to 1,000 different people.

deleted 11y ago
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beat 11y ago
And at that point, they're competing not against automation, but the very human process of "Wouldn't those two make a cute couple?" I like setting up my friends. Lots of people do. I've had some success at it, too (a couple of marriages, even). And I suspect, although I have no evidence, that friend-driven setups and blind dates are more likely to succeed than dating sites are. fwiw, Grindr got around that particular problem by focusing on gay men. But that's a large niche, really. Beyond the problem of men drowning women in messages, there's a question of the quality of those messages. The crap I see my female friends get online from dating sites is appalling. So many men have no idea how to approach women and make themselves appear attractive - and many of them have no idea just how much competition there is. Meanwhile, women have to plow through dozens of dick pics, hoping to maybe find one guy worth talking to. Their odds aren't any better, but for different reasons. Sigh.
- klipt 11y ago
  Well I wish I had a friend who tried to set me up. Instead I spent about 6 frustrating years getting nowhere with online dating, then eventually lucked out with the right girl, and only now do I get the 'cute couple' comments.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Hi. I am a male. I have seen how abysmally low the typical message quality a woman receives is. I learned from it. Sad to say, what I learned is that given the sheer quantity of low-quality messages, investing in message quality is a poor decision. The quality may be significantly higher and there may be an elevated chance of a response... but the odds of the message being read at all are quite slim. The chance of an unread message getting a response is, obviously, zero.
onion2k 11y ago
I'm sure you could solve that by "spam filtering" people's inboxes, just with a slightly tweaked heuristic model. People would get fewer messages but they'd be of a much higher quality. To be honest I'm surprised sites don't already do this.
- Kalium 11y ago
  OKCupid tries something similar with its filters. Men lie their asses off to get around it.
  - woah 11y ago
    Do you mean the multiple choice questions? Or do they actually have message filtering?
    - Kalium 11y ago
      Last I knew - and it's been a while - you could set filters on criteria such as age to avoid getting messages from users you wanted to exclude. But yes, the multiple choice questions are subject to the same problem.
      - jaredsohn 11y ago
        Here are the choices for message filtering (they updated it over the past year or so): gender, age range, whether they are located nearby, whether they are single, match % Also, if the user pays for A-list they can filter on: how long the messages are, hide if it contains certain words, filter by attractiveness.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    I'm talking more about filtering on the message content than filtering based on account settings. For example, if a message is 90% the same as the previous 3 messages the user sent just silently redirect it to /dev/null. Users would quickly learn that a cut'n'paste approach gets rapidly diminishing returns. That alone would slow down a lot of the men who just spam messages to every woman on the site, improving the experience for them while leaving the genuine men on the site unaffected. But I'm sure OKCupid could do much cleverer things.
Kalium 11y ago
There's a wrinkle that makes it worse. Specifically, sites that deliberately invert the power dynamic run into the problem that when women must initiate all communications, you don't get a lot of communications. Tinder avoids this by requiring blind consent from both parties. What do both have in common? Women feel they have the power. In the case of Tinder, women have the power, don't get spammed, and men devolve to the common case of spammy behavior. It's the best of both worlds. Or worst, since users tend to be exactly as shallow as their technology allows.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

beat 11y ago

And at that point, they're competing not against automation, but the very human process of "Wouldn't those two make a cute couple?" I like setting up my friends. Lots of people do. I've had some success at it, too (a couple of marriages, even). And I suspect, although I have no evidence, that friend-driven setups and blind dates are more likely to succeed than dating sites are. fwiw, Grindr got around that particular problem by focusing on gay men. But that's a large niche, really. Beyond the problem of men drowning women in messages, there's a question of the quality of those messages. The crap I see my female friends get online from dating sites is appalling. So many men have no idea how to approach women and make themselves appear attractive - and many of them have no idea just how much competition there is. Meanwhile, women have to plow through dozens of dick pics, hoping to maybe find one guy worth talking to. Their odds aren't any better, but for different reasons. Sigh.

klipt 11y ago
Well I wish I had a friend who tried to set me up. Instead I spent about 6 frustrating years getting nowhere with online dating, then eventually lucked out with the right girl, and only now do I get the 'cute couple' comments.
Kalium 11y ago
Hi. I am a male. I have seen how abysmally low the typical message quality a woman receives is. I learned from it. Sad to say, what I learned is that given the sheer quantity of low-quality messages, investing in message quality is a poor decision. The quality may be significantly higher and there may be an elevated chance of a response... but the odds of the message being read at all are quite slim. The chance of an unread message getting a response is, obviously, zero.

onion2k 11y ago

I'm sure you could solve that by "spam filtering" people's inboxes, just with a slightly tweaked heuristic model. People would get fewer messages but they'd be of a much higher quality. To be honest I'm surprised sites don't already do this.

Kalium 11y ago
OKCupid tries something similar with its filters. Men lie their asses off to get around it.
- woah 11y ago
  Do you mean the multiple choice questions? Or do they actually have message filtering?
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Last I knew - and it's been a while - you could set filters on criteria such as age to avoid getting messages from users you wanted to exclude. But yes, the multiple choice questions are subject to the same problem.
    - jaredsohn 11y ago
      Here are the choices for message filtering (they updated it over the past year or so): gender, age range, whether they are located nearby, whether they are single, match % Also, if the user pays for A-list they can filter on: how long the messages are, hide if it contains certain words, filter by attractiveness.
- onion2k 11y ago
  I'm talking more about filtering on the message content than filtering based on account settings. For example, if a message is 90% the same as the previous 3 messages the user sent just silently redirect it to /dev/null. Users would quickly learn that a cut'n'paste approach gets rapidly diminishing returns. That alone would slow down a lot of the men who just spam messages to every woman on the site, improving the experience for them while leaving the genuine men on the site unaffected. But I'm sure OKCupid could do much cleverer things.

Kalium 11y ago

There's a wrinkle that makes it worse. Specifically, sites that deliberately invert the power dynamic run into the problem that when women must initiate all communications, you don't get a lot of communications. Tinder avoids this by requiring blind consent from both parties. What do both have in common? Women feel they have the power. In the case of Tinder, women have the power, don't get spammed, and men devolve to the common case of spammy behavior. It's the best of both worlds. Or worst, since users tend to be exactly as shallow as their technology allows.