There's no way to tell the difference between one person selecting three choices and three people selecting one each. A running tally of the number of users who have upvoted at least one answer would be helpful.
its fair that you do lose some data when you aren't able to see who has multivoted, but it does provide you more information than if you were funneled into one choice alone which didn't represent you
personally I find all these dating sites to be completely useless for guys...too much competition.
when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
Women tend to approach men less than the reverse, I presume that if you approached more then you'd end up with higher values in the qualities you care about.
It's also only important to note you are not just "competing" with the other guys she saw this week, but the whole online/offline pool of available males attractive females invariably have. It's about leveraging the speed of the internet to find another human being that is ACTUALLY a good match, so one would expect to beat out other people to get to a 1 in 100 match.
> SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier...
wow at this whole set of sentences... I rarely care but this kind of misogynistic, antiquated nonsense is mildly offensive even to me. I personally try not to treat other human beings like disposable hump dolls and look for some kind of a real connection, but maybe I'm just some kind of crazy hippie. To avoid the apparent but incorrect inference, I am not into monogamy now either.
I wasn't the one looking for the "disposable hump doll." I've never even initiated a contact. The women who contacted me were just looking for sex. This happened far more often in SF. In NYC some are looking for that, but more seem to be actually looking for a husband, or a long term boyfriend. I put the crazy and antibiotics lines in there because I really did get the clap, and really did have to change my phone number.
the point was that describing women in the manner of the last 3 sentences signals such a world view. Also, there's nothing wrong with casual sex, it's pretty awesome...
so like, you had these bad experiences after just letting the stereotypically passive sex chase you, maybe use a bit more selection and go after the really interesting ones and you'll have better experience
I mean if you put yourself in list for casual sex then yeah, you need to be super careful about the people that contact you because typically attractive sexually liberated females get enough attention they don't have to pursue males
> Women tend to approach men less than the reverse
Yeah, that's true. I've talked to girls on the site that didn't even know it had a search. How do they think they get all those messages? It's bizarre.
I agree that it's better when women send first messages. This dating site startup is trying to take advantage of that by not allowing men to send initial messages: http://www.herway.com
I think that only works if your looks are above average. I once used a photo of an actor on my profile just to see the effect. That raised quite some responses without me doing anything. Then I replaced my photo with a real one (my best one back then) and the number of responses instantly dropped tenfold.
I don't think I'm ugly but not particularly attractive, either. However, your post is interesting because I apparently do look very similar to a certain B-list celebrity. That is what most women open with. "Has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like X..."
Yeah. Paradoxically, I've found if someone makes a point to say they are clean and not to worry about it that's the most important time to wrap it up, maybe twice. I'm sure there's at least one rap lyric about this.
Think of it as business: improve your marketing. There are many women who ignore anyone who messages them because they want to be in control of the situation. Therefore they troll the male listings and respond to the ones they like.
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
Of course one will have more success if women come to them, but I think it only works if you have the natural looks to pull it off. Some people, even when they're not ugly, don't have the looks required to entice women to message them no matter how they dress, pose, or how much they go to the gym.
I think the take home message is that most guys' profiles set the bar pretty low. It doesn't take much to rise above the noise floor: by simply attempting to be personable and have a decent photo you're well ahead of the game.
Sounds obvious, but I used to check out men's ads just to see what I was up against, and I was definitely not impressed!
I think the premise (looking for marriage) puts a lot of guys off. Even though marriage is exactly what I'm looking for, I steer clear of eHarmony because I'm afraid of what kind of women it might attract. I have a friend who got married to a woman he met on eHarmony, and he seems happy. Still, I have this horrible fear of meeting a woman who has marriage tunnel vision and through sheer determination makes it work somehow even though it shouldn't.
I know it's a stereotype of the marriage-obsessed woman, but my only concrete model for this fear is a woman I know whose husband feigned a lot of interests and personal characteristics that he dropped within a month of getting married, not to mention that he suddenly started nagging her to change a bunch of things about herself that he never seemed to mind before. So it's a fear I would expect women to have, too. It surprises me that anyone is on eHarmony at all!
I do understand that pressure to "make it work". But it totally wasn't there for either my wife or I. I was matched with over 300 women during the 3 months that I was enrolled, and my (now) wife was in grad school finishing her dissertation. She wasn't in any hurry to settle down, and I was eager to cross off women that weren't perfectly (truly) suitable so I could move to the next one on the list!
Women have to play a numbers game, too. If they go for the same guys the other girls go for, they won't get time with the guy, or they'll get time with a guy who is dating a bunch of other women. Women figure this out pretty quickly. Your model of how women behave would result in a lot of frustration for them unless they're happy being some generic stud's Tuesday night girl.
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
Having talked to quite a few girls with OKC accounts, and having seen their inboxes, this is surprisingly true. I didn't believe it until I saw it, but this is pretty much all of the major archetypes.
Yeah, you're right, it is about me. But what do you want me to say? That it works for everyone?
A lot of my good friends are photographers so most of my portraits are taken from them. Thus, I think my photos are well executed compared to self portraits taken via mirrors/cellphones.
My profile is pretty genuine. I don't aim to be pretentious or egotistical.
When I contact people, I usually start up with something that's related to their profile or something that's in common as to help talk about something interesting. Thus, no disrespectful pick-up lines or gratuitous photos.
Contacted about... 21 people over six months (people of different levels of attractiveness)? Received like... 1 reply.
So, congratulations on the site working very well for you. Really. But, not everyone has such fortunate results despite doing things that are civil and respectful. So when people say, "so if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses" well I can say it doesn't always work.
It isn't according to OkCupid's exposed stats. Average reply rate to messages sent by males is between 1/3 and 1/4 (varying by age). If you hunt through the OkCupid blog archive, you can find the relevant stats. (I think they were released this year.)
I have heard back from at least 5 girls on OKC and gone out with 3 of them at various points in the past year .. again, i might have messaged like 20 odd to get those 5 to responsed but it wasn't a cut-paste job ..
In a fit of experimentation, I created a female profile using a random photo from flickr (sorry, whoever you were).
As a female user you get a LOT of messages - no private parts yet, but most of the male messages are exactly as the parent post describes: pretty dumb, explicit and anonymous/generic.
It's reassuring for me. I know that I stand out from this crowd.
It's quite amazing in the offline world too: just how much unwaranted (and usually creepy) attention women (all women, not just the attractive women) receive on a daily basis (on the street, at the gym, at work). On the other hand, it's also amazing how much rejection men receive every day: I wonder if the latter is one explanation of entrepreneurship being more attractive to men that it is to women.
I am not sure it's a reason to be reassured. You're standing out from "population of men actively looking for a mate online", not from "population of men in general".
It's not all that different from the programming job interview situation. Amongst candidates that are actively on the market, there's a percentage that are _always_ on the market because they are either horrible or have unrealistic expectations.
I can't tell for OkCupid (they are not covering my country well), but i was inspired by it and built a similar app for Russian social network and it worked very well for me.
For a long time I expected to marry someone that I met online, since I was meeting lots of friends that way. I finally found love at the bookstore I worked at.
When it comes to online dating, a majority of females maintain profiles for ego boosting purposes. The same girls that are approachable on the street will not give you attention online as they have a large range of choice and are looking for something specific, usually something that doesn't exist (only in their heads).
For best results, exploit superficiality: put up interesting pictures.
There's no combo of options which matches that. The "member of" options all have specific text such as being "not in relationship" or "in a relationship with someone from the site".
I am a paying member of Match.com but currently dating someone I met playing Lexulous (a Scrabble clone) on Facebook. I was reasonably happy with Match.com and got several dates, most of which were with reasonable matches I was happy to go out with. I met my last long-term girlfriend on Match.com.
When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though.
Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others.
If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
Other: joined OkCupid for the silly quizzes they had way back when they first started, kept it around as a social networking thing before facebook. All the time I've been with someone I didn't meet online (same person), but without the internet we would never have gotten together ;).
As a woman, I get a very large number of messages & woots or winks or w/e they're called these days, all I can say is that the ones I bother to read are the ones that aren't just "hey baby" or weird soppy poetry. Though I'm not looking, so that could skew my opinion ;P
I had a small stint with online dating, even met and had a relationship through one. But it didnt work out long term and I never went back to the site afterwards (was using plentyoffish at the time).
A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
I really liked OKC when I was using it and think it's one of the best dating sites, but I have something of an anti-OKCupid story:
I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious.
Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
I always searched for "atheist only" in my online searches. Then a Muslim girl wrote me and told me I had good bone structure. 3 years later, we're engaged. (She's also very moderate in her beliefs.)
> I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
Unfortunately, unrestricted searches generate way more hits than you can process by hand. I worked around this by applying subsets of search criteria at a time. For instance, instead of searching for an Atheist/Agnostic 25-35 making over $50k with an Average or Athletic body type who likes backpacking, exercises 3-4 times per week, and has a graduate degree, I would search for athletic Atheist/Agnostics making over $50k, then search for women with graduate degrees who like backpacking, then maybe widen the age range to 20-40 but apply the rest of the criteria, and so on. The challenge was to be as inclusive as possible without generating more hits than I wanted to process in one sitting.
It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.
Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
somewhat off-topic: I read somewhere recently that 35% of date site users are married. Can anyone confirm this stat or find a source for a more accurate estimate?
Dating a girl 3 (almost 4) years strong I met on OKCupid. She messaged me back then, after I kind of gave up on the site (Some bad experiences on in-person dates, yikes). I liked her message, replied, conversation led to MSN, then finally we met up for a dinner and movie night.
I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
I met the best woman ever on OkCupid. Three years on and it's better than ever.
Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.
Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
I have to disagree with your tip. When someone IMs me out of the blue without any prior contact I think it's a little too eager. I prefer to start with a message or two and then move into more real-time interaction.
Well, protip for MistyKaye is to email. I could see how it might put you off, but if you introduce yourself with a bit of fun, don't come off as a weirdo, it can work.
By and large, for me this generated much more reliable results than the email method. As good as 1 in 3, versus 1 in 12 for emails.
(Yeah, I kept rough stats. I was an SEM nerd in those days, shudder, and looked at it like a campaign to be optimized.)
I tried it, and it generally just depressed me that all my compatible matches were over 100 miles away. Guess I should get out of South Dakota if I ever want this service to do any good for me. It would probably be good for my sanity and career if I did.
Wow, another hn'er from SD (grew up in Rapid City).
I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up.
91 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadIt doesn't capture the fact that I have met and dated off of okcupid and pof, and not off of pay sites.
when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
Women tend to approach men less than the reverse, I presume that if you approached more then you'd end up with higher values in the qualities you care about.
It's also only important to note you are not just "competing" with the other guys she saw this week, but the whole online/offline pool of available males attractive females invariably have. It's about leveraging the speed of the internet to find another human being that is ACTUALLY a good match, so one would expect to beat out other people to get to a 1 in 100 match.
> SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier...
wow at this whole set of sentences... I rarely care but this kind of misogynistic, antiquated nonsense is mildly offensive even to me. I personally try not to treat other human beings like disposable hump dolls and look for some kind of a real connection, but maybe I'm just some kind of crazy hippie. To avoid the apparent but incorrect inference, I am not into monogamy now either.
so like, you had these bad experiences after just letting the stereotypically passive sex chase you, maybe use a bit more selection and go after the really interesting ones and you'll have better experience
I mean if you put yourself in list for casual sex then yeah, you need to be super careful about the people that contact you because typically attractive sexually liberated females get enough attention they don't have to pursue males
Yeah, that's true. I've talked to girls on the site that didn't even know it had a search. How do they think they get all those messages? It's bizarre.
Also, my understanding is that using two condoms increases risk of breakage.
> put out on the first date [...] Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
you mean "don't bother practising safe sex", then are you nuts or am I missing something? Some STIs are for life and antibiotics aren't gonna cut it.
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
Of course one will have more success if women come to them, but I think it only works if you have the natural looks to pull it off. Some people, even when they're not ugly, don't have the looks required to entice women to message them no matter how they dress, pose, or how much they go to the gym.
Sounds obvious, but I used to check out men's ads just to see what I was up against, and I was definitely not impressed!
I know it's a stereotype of the marriage-obsessed woman, but my only concrete model for this fear is a woman I know whose husband feigned a lot of interests and personal characteristics that he dropped within a month of getting married, not to mention that he suddenly started nagging her to change a bunch of things about herself that he never seemed to mind before. So it's a fear I would expect women to have, too. It surprises me that anyone is on eHarmony at all!
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
Actually, I found it to be completely the opposite. Most of the guys messaging the girls either (sorted by frequency):
1) Send a picture of their privates
2) Send something incoherent e.g., "GURL UR SO HOT"
3) Send a long, creepy essay
4) Have zero compatibility with her, haven't read her profile (past the picture), etc... and are sending something generic.
So if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses.
In a dream world. I've done that on OKC and have gotten zero responses.
A lot of my good friends are photographers so most of my portraits are taken from them. Thus, I think my photos are well executed compared to self portraits taken via mirrors/cellphones.
My profile is pretty genuine. I don't aim to be pretentious or egotistical.
When I contact people, I usually start up with something that's related to their profile or something that's in common as to help talk about something interesting. Thus, no disrespectful pick-up lines or gratuitous photos.
Contacted about... 21 people over six months (people of different levels of attractiveness)? Received like... 1 reply.
So, congratulations on the site working very well for you. Really. But, not everyone has such fortunate results despite doing things that are civil and respectful. So when people say, "so if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses" well I can say it doesn't always work.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exact... may be relevant to your interests as well.
In a fit of experimentation, I created a female profile using a random photo from flickr (sorry, whoever you were).
As a female user you get a LOT of messages - no private parts yet, but most of the male messages are exactly as the parent post describes: pretty dumb, explicit and anonymous/generic.
It's reassuring for me. I know that I stand out from this crowd.
I am not sure it's a reason to be reassured. You're standing out from "population of men actively looking for a mate online", not from "population of men in general".
It's not all that different from the programming job interview situation. Amongst candidates that are actively on the market, there's a percentage that are _always_ on the market because they are either horrible or have unrealistic expectations.
For best results, exploit superficiality: put up interesting pictures.
Only in NYC
When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though.
Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others.
If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
As a woman, I get a very large number of messages & woots or winks or w/e they're called these days, all I can say is that the ones I bother to read are the ones that aren't just "hey baby" or weird soppy poetry. Though I'm not looking, so that could skew my opinion ;P
A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious.
Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.
Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
One tip, however: if you're a straight male and in Silicon Valley / South Bay, consider setting your search radius to also include San Francisco.
I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.
Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
By and large, for me this generated much more reliable results than the email method. As good as 1 in 3, versus 1 in 12 for emails.
(Yeah, I kept rough stats. I was an SEM nerd in those days, shudder, and looked at it like a campaign to be optimized.)
I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up.
Haven't tried in the new area (Colorado Springs).