The Hollywood angle was a weak lead-in for the post, IMO, but I like the idea. Getting your friends to talk you up has some interesting potential.
That said, it will of course be gamed and manipulated and still have many of the problems of current online dating models, but that's just the nature of marketing; when there are a lot of products out there, the way to sell yours is to make it stand out, and a site that imposes a handicap just gives the cheaters an advantage.
Yeah the idea is... no worse than any other dating site I guess but the pitch here is absolutely "stop looking for love. Join our site and love will happen to you" it's just it's supposed "happen to you" because ¡friends! instead of lazy scriptwriters.
My 25+ year marriage is actually the product of "predestined love" and I think most people could end up with a love like that. The reality is that you have to keep your eyes open if you want to notice the person that's right for you ... and you have to meet enough people to find them.
EDIT:
As I thought a bit more about it, I also realized that you have to have some criteria for what you're looking for in a partner too. How will you know if you've found them? If all you can come up with is "a body like a swimsuit model", you deserve what you get. Looks might be one criteria, but maybe you'd be better off picking some other attributes to go with it? And perhaps weighting things like interests, life-goals, etc a bit higher.
I'd also recommend understanding your Myers-Briggs type and the types that are compatible (this is not your sign). Then learn the attributes that make up your compatible types and try to spot them in public.
The issue I have with the soul mate theory is that people can and do change when they want to, when that happens your "soul mate" would also change, basically nullifying the entire concept.
Edit: I should say though I completely agree (about everything except the predestined part), people need to keep an eye out and know what they want, and not just physical qualities.
It's not "predestined love" alone - it's also willingness to actually work on that relationship. I've got 23 years so far, and it's been awesome. But it required talking about things, occasionally compromising, being willing to listen, and paying attention to what's going on. And sometimes sticking it out, even when you thought "This really isn't fun right now".
And congrats on 25+ years - you're obviously doing it right :)
I'm in my 50s. Online dating is the ONLY way I'll meet eligible men. And trust me, the pool of eligible men is much smaller than when you're young. That said, the innovation I'd most like to see is crowdsourcing of the online dater's social signals. Not only would that prove they're real humans, but what better way to capture who they really are personally.
Wait, what? My friends might be setting up a profile for me without even knowing it? I sure hope that's qualified by "if I'm signed up", because otherwise I might need to engage in some rage.
They can already matchmake you without you knowing it offline; what's the difference if it's online?
Presumably they wouldn't be allowed to use your real name or super-identifying photos or anything, so this "dating persona" they set up from you is divorced from the rest of your identity, and nobody will find it by looking for you.
How would you disallow them to use your name or identifying pictures ?
Funny thing is IINM this is probably illegal in several countries around the world, both setting up an online profile for someone else, without his/her knowledge being aggravating, and not providing exact personal information.
If my friends did this to me, it would probably put a definitive end to that friendship.
> How would you disallow them to use your name or identifying pictures ?
By making it against the TOS of the site, and banning profiles that do it.
> probably illegal ... not providing exact personal information.
Presumably it's a profile about you, but it's not a profile impersonating you. They don't sign up using your name/birthdate/et al; they have their own account, which they use to fill in the details of your profile.
To be clearer: the concept isn't really that you're filling out someone else's profile. Instead, it's more like (exactly like) a "review" site--friends giving "product reviews" of friends, talking about how you should "buy" this friend or that. They just appear without attribution, conglomerated into a "consensus profile" of "what others think about this person." I imagine it's very clear that the person themselves didn't make the profile, any more than hockeyfan3392 on Amazon made the Macbook his review is attached to.
The difference is that if it's not online, then it's purely interpersonal; a social, private, ephemeral (as in not recorded) sort of activity. But if it's online it's like publishing something in public; it's broadcast to a large number of strangers and it's recorded for a long time. Big difference, I would say.
I have heard quite a few cases of people setting up profiles on dating sites to "prank" or "actively slander" a person. Trying to get stuff like this resolved is difficult.
I think the lie told is not one of predestined love, but of perfect love. That you'll find the person of your dreams, they will sweep you off your feet, and you'll never have a negative feeling about them. It will all end storybook.
Of course the next 20 chapters are ones of compromise, empathy, regret, and apologies, with happiness and perfection in between.
ha! no shit. after almost two decades of marriage i laugh my ass off at this online dating stuff. what a farce. it's a perfect metaphor for the shallow cesspool our culture has become...
i'm happy for your friends, but as a practical matter they are very likely outliers in the statistical sense.
to put it in the perspective of this forum, all of my VC buddies put online dating plays in the category of domain specific search. that's a fairly sterile way to look at the process of finding a life partner, don't you think?
but beyond that, there is no credible statistical data, i.e. stats not produced by the companies themselves and peer reviewed, that would indicate these services produce anything like a non-niche impact on the occurrence of marriage in the US.
there are however numerous more deliberate commentaries on the topic of technology and its impact on the social fabric of culture. one of my personal favs is "Alone Together" by Sherry Turkle.
The more interesting question in all of this is why exactly online dating functions are even viable. IMHO the fact that people, particularly in the business we are in (i'm assuming you are in the software biz as well) spend so much time chained to a desk that they cannot go out and actually interact physically with other human beings is the point of my original response.
Maybe it's my social circle (busy pushing-30 professionals) but I think there is almost zero stigma among my friends over online dating. In fact, less so among women than among men. Men for some reason feel they have to play the bar scene even if they don't like it or aren't good at it, but women feel no such need. Indeed, for a lot of my women friends, online dating offers the very real advantage that it's socially acceptable for women to actively choose in an online context, while in meat space the social convention involves their waiting for the loudest, drunkest guy to come up and hit on them.
Stigma may exist for the young kids, but on-line dating stigma doesn't exist for older people.
I have several older divorced and single friends (mostly women) and they date on-line for one main reason: it's just too damn hard to have an active social life while you're raising kids.
I got married before the whole internet dating took off, but the 90s did have "date-lines." It was basically an voicemail system.
However, any dating-for-dating's sake does underplay the best way to meet compatible partners: meeting them while you're doing something you really enjoy. I met my spouse in a Jazz singing class.
I've always thought meeting people based on social skills (in person) or good photography (on-line) is fine, but I think it's inefficient because you're selecting the database on the least relevant criteria.
Meeting on-line doesn't have to be just about photography, it can also be based on shared interest. My wife and I were on the same law forum and exchanged messages (not romantic, more like "you're so wrong about x, y, z") a few times before we met in real life in a related context (she was at my law school interviewing for admission). Several other marriages and engagements came out of the same batch of people on the same site, from city group meet-ups. Alcohol + a group of people comfortable with each other because they at least vaguely know each other online + a group of people with shared interests is a great way to spark relationships.
I don't think online dating is perfect as it's currently structured, but it has a lot of potential. I'd picture something like a dating site where you couldn't search for people ad-hoc, but which interest-specific discussion forums could link into. You'd create a profile, but only be found by people who reached out through some interest-specific site. This serves two purposes: it prevents women from getting spammed as easily, and it provides some context (posting history) for them to evaluate.
It's highly geographical. Cities with a dating "scene" are far friendlier towards online dating than otherwise.
From your past posts it looks like you're NYC-based. NYC is by far (IMO) the best place to set up an online dating shop, since this city is by a very long shot the most accepting of online dating in the US.
Disclaimer: I work for a NYC-area online dating shop.
In many other cities, and in many subcultures and scenes, online dating is still very much stigmatized. I can't help but think that author would've gotten a very different perspective if he didn't choose to interview people at a bar in the SF Marina of all places (read: notorious area for meathead jocks and their female counterparts).
Not only that, but NYC has more single women than men. Which explains the eagerness of women there to do the choosing, and their openness to new dating methods in general.
Silicon Valley is the opposite. Too many single men, not enough women, inevitably means a sucky online dating experience for guys (unless you're in the very top attractiveness percentiles). I don't think any dating site can fix that, unless it matches Silicon Valley men to New York women or something.
I think this may be solving a legitimate problem, but I think you are incorrect that the source of the problem is hollywood.
Online dating follows historically from personals classifieds. Personals ads contained very little information (in part because they had to be so short). This meant you were going on a date with someone you knew nothing about. It was worse than just a blind date... because you didn't even have any common friends to validate the person wasn't a psycho. People (esp. women) who valued their safety tended not to use personals ads, and there was a definite stigma that people who did use it likely had problems.
Though online dating is popular now, I think it was previously viewed as the high-tech version of printed personals ads. So the stigma carried over. It's certainly decreased over time, but I think that history is part of the stigma.
Again, I think you have a potentially viable solution to a problem people care about... even if I disagree on the source of them problem.
Hollywood helped to normalize the idea of online dating with Sleepless in Seattle - if it was good enough for tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, then sure, why not? OP comes off as slightly unhinged and blaming the world for his failure to find love.
Also, I can't figure out why the alleged Hollywood lie would only impact online dating. Wouldn't all forms of dating affected? Certainly the "fate" aspect of true love isn't exactly new--Rom coms didn't usher in wave of zero dating.
What's the incentive for my friends to do all this work for me for free? Why would I bother setting up a profile for a friend? It seems like a lot of work for no benefit.
The OkCupid profiles make more sense: you make them so that you look good and you get dates. Work -> reward.
Because they're your friend and you want them to meet someone that's right for them...? I have a friend whose roommate made an OkCupid profile for her because she wanted her to meet more people.
Actually there are plenty of people who would do something like that for their friends. I don't know much about the dating scene but I have a number of friends who do dedicate time and money to arrange dates for their friends. I'd say the benefit you get is the satisfaction you gain from helping out a friend.
As someone who is recently married, my incentive is for them to get hitched and hopefully knocked-up so my wife and I aren't awkwardly the only married/baby-ed people in our friends' circle!
I'm honestly really surprised to hear that anybody thinks there is still stigma attached to online dating. I don't know what it's like for straight people, but online dating definitely has zero stigma for gay folks. I mean, compared to Grindr -- where all criteria for meeting somebody have been reduced to "I don't want to have to walk more than a couple of blocks" -- online dating like OKCupid is staid and respectable.
well, the stigma is that it outright tells me you don't have friends.
i never had to go out alone to find a significant other. Sure a few days i had to stay home because none of my friends wanted to go out. but that's life.
... you will probably not meet, and be happy with, someone you meet in a dive bar, or online dating. it's just common sense, or you may call it stigma.
"you will probably not meet, and be happy with, someone you meet in a dive bar, or online dating. it's just common sense"
Huh? Since OkCupid, and many others, work and are very popular, how can it be common sense that you won't meet someone you'll be happy with? Can you explain that?
That's a very "Hollywood" way to think. If you're looking for a compatible someone, why not increase your chances by searching among a group of people who are also looking for a compatible someone, instead of hoping you randomly happen upon people while out with your friends.
Just as with employers looking for employees, some of the people who are looking just haven't found the right fit yet. The rest are people nobody wants. The former churn (or dwindle if the market isn't being replenished), while the latter remain constant.
The game-theoretic optimum in a market for lemons--whatever you might think of it--is to avoid "dating" to begin with, and instead just find someone desirable and seduce them away from whoever they're currently with. In employment, this is called "headhunting." :)
I don't think that's a particularly apt analogy, for the simple reason that people break up for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with one or the other person being a "lemon." Relationships are based on idiosyncratic compatibility, unlike cars where "lemon" is a well-defined, universal concept. E.g. it's rare that one person's lemon will be another person's dream car, but that's often the case for relationships.
A more apt economic analogy is that dating is a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low. Online dating reduces transaction costs, in the same way EBay does.
People break up with their cars for many idiosyncratic reasons as well. That just means there are good deals churning into the market; not that it's not a market for lemons. The requirement of a market for lemons is simply that it's very hard to discern the quality of a product, and that the people offering low-quality products are incentivized to hide the defects, so defective products "pile up" in the market, rather than being "flushed out" by some sort of spam-filtering process.
Also,
> a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low
This describes the housing market perfectly. It's also a market for lemons, or rather, it would be--homeowners are incentivized to hide defects in their homes--but we have house inspectors to remove this property from the system. There are no date inspectors.
> ... you will probably not meet, and be happy with, someone you meet in a dive bar, or online dating. it's just common sense, or you may call it stigma.
One of my best friends got married with a girl he met online dating. Another one met his wife on an online forum we both frequented. I met my last girlfriend (3 years) and my fiancée (getting married this summer) in bars/clubs.
I picked my girlfriend[1] of four years up at a bar. After a few dates, she broke it off with a guy she'd been dating casually who she met through Match.com.
[1] Ivy-educated, Ph.D.-holding, tenured professor girlfriend.
No, why would I? He and I both knew that she was going on dates with more than one person. There's no scandal. In fact, I'd be a bit worried about immediate overcommitment otherwise.
Ivy educated and a two timer. How will you feel when she dates the next guy and after a few dates dumps you?
I don't see the need to brag about her education? Was that in some way relevant? It sounds like you might be feeling like you need to compensate for her to timing behavior.
Seriously? That's uncalled for. I hope you were just having a really shitty day, or something, and didn't actually mean to insult both me and my girlfriend.
Obviously, what I wrote wasn't clear enough. Read the other responses.
Grindr fixed the problem in the article about requiring lengthy descriptions, and it fixed the keywords/attributes/searching problem, by reducing profiles to an image and a geolocation. When I worked with online dating over a decade ago, we figured out that matchmaking is essentially worthless, and what you need to do is to throw profiles at people until they see something they like and can start messaging each other.
But what Grindr does, is it creates a virtual space of people around you, which makes it a lot more like real life bar dating, where you just have faces, and yet the straight version of it - I forgot what it's called - is not as respected as OKCupid, so there's still some way to go.
Not only does online dating have zero stigma for gay folks, it's one of the few viable routes for finding other gay people who don't appear flamboyant or effeminate. What I really wish existed was a way to find other nearby gay guys without the hookup overtones associated with Grindr.
The problem with online dating boils down to: guys have no idea what they are doing. I've helped my friends and the secret is to write a three sentence message: an intro about why the message, a funny sentence, and finally a light question. It's pretty simple.
I used it on OkCupid and got about a 30-50% response rate. Now I'm 6'8" and in shape which skewed the results but my friends copied what I did and their response rates skyrocketed. Then you only send 2-3 more messages before asking her out for drinks. Worked nearly 100% of the time.
I think that it comes down to, people spend way too much time trying to write the perfect message or profile. Be yourself. Think of it as a filter to get rid of the girls that you aren't compatible with.
Then when you're on the date, relax and just have fun. I've heard so many horror stories from my female friends of guys that are super awkward. The group setting is a great idea as it relaxes people and gives them support. That's why wingmen exist.
no. do not be yourself if being yourself has not netted you success. men need to do the research and then put in the practice in what women actually want.
there are thousands of articles and dozens of discussion sites out there related to self-improvement and success with women. there is a huge spectrum from bad PUA stuff all the way to general fitness and nutrition focus, avoid the ones that turn you off and read the ones that appeal to your common sense.
i repeat - do NOT just "be yourself". tall fit white guy's advice does not apply to you if you are not tall and fit and white. you need to put in the work to improve yourself if you are not the hollywood marketed image of 'perfect guy'
ignore this guy and improve yourself in other more meaningful ways. attractive women do not exclusively go for good looking tall guys, not by FAR. women are not actually that shallow. it's more about personality and fitness.
I remember checking your site out when you posted it and it's nice to see someone trying something actually new, but I feel like this concept doesn't solve the common problems and adds some new ones.
Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?
Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).
I also think women are even less likely to use it considering your own point about them not wanting to involve their own friends. I would think people would also want to play a role in the selection considering it's a pretty subjective/personal thing.
Definitely awesome to see something new though and hopefully you prove me wrong and it works better than I suspect.
Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?
Aren't you more interested in reading what somebody's friend has to say about them rather than what they're saying about themselves? Also, we have Facebook accounts (100+ friends required to join) which are not easy to replicate and we can rate limit. On OkCupid, the worst that happens is they ban you for spamming, and then you come back under a different username. Sure, girls might recognize the same photos, but you're fundamentally a free radical in the system.
Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).
It relies on reciprocity, and it's actually fun when you try it out. If you're commenting on your friends' profiles, they'll naturally want to comment on yours. All of the comments on my profile happened not because I asked my friends to do that, but because I started out by commenting on theirs.
With the stigma, it's largely an issue skewed by age. More women in their 30s using dating sites socially, the sites just aren't designed to be social.
The facebook reputation barrier is a good idea - should set a bar for the low end of quality.
I see your point about the reciprocity, makes sense and I wouldn't worry about the stigma - if your site catches on the stigma will just die faster.
I'm not sure I'd be more receptive to what a friend has to say about someone, but that's generally because what anyone says doesn't matter when the sent/received message ratio is so bad (which is what I tried to fix with the marking idea).
Cool though - will definitely keep following it to see how it goes.
I meant quality as a reference to spam and spam like accounts. If you can't easily just create a new account or create multiple accounts then that eliminates those kinds of issues.
Yeah, I think there should perhaps also be a 'time' factor. Because I know plenty of people who've deleted facebook altogether, returned, and are in the same boat.
I'd be reluctant to date anyone who has 100+ friends on Facebook, that seems to me to indicate a degree of shallowness. After 7 years I have 59 and I honestly need to pare that way down. (Wow pruning my friends list, amazing how many people have closed their FB account! A good 10% of past "friends" no longer have accounts)
But hey, thanks for excluding introverts! Really nice of you.
My primary issue is that I only have about 3 or 4 people on Facebook who actually know me well and who interact with me on a regular basis that I'd trust to help fill out my profile.
In addition to that, the entire "guys only look at pictures" thing is BS. Yes I look at pictures first, right after that I read the profile. If the woman in question doesn't have indicators that we are a match in ethics and values, then I am not going to bother sending a message.
Indeed the primary problem I suspect your dating site has is the same problem sites like match.com have, they really don't allow for filtering by value systems. This is OKCupid's single strength that nearly makes up for everything else that is wrong with it.
I really don't care if a woman's friends say she is fun to hang out with. I do care what books she reads and what her feelings on various social and political issues are.
You're probably not thinking about all the use cases.
My girlfriend has over 400 friends (and she aggresively culled). But she was secretary for a political party, and also has a lot of "friends" from an online game ("My Fishbowl").
It's odd to find a girl with LESS than 100 facebook friends. Men in my social sphere, OTOH, don't have as many facebook friends unless they're actively trying to date through facebook itself.
Facebook only was stupid to start with, but 100+ facebook friends requirement is something else, it means the service is only open to a specific kind of profile, the one who add people without thinking.
Funny thing is in my online dating profile, I have a requirement similar to yours: that people getting in touch with me have no facebook account.
I have to disagree that colleges are the best place to start, from your blog. We actually started all of this at Stanford, talking directly to fraternity and sorority presidents. They all sounded excited when we said we'd taken them out for drinks to get their thoughts, but when it came time to pull the trigger and sign up, they wouldn't do it.
Why? Because the Greeks have it perfectly. They're basically paying fees for students to put together their social life for them. So actually, I just caught myself here: college students might be a good starting point, but Greeks are the absolute worst starting point. They don't need what we're building. And most college students I think would be reluctant to sign up anyway, they have their classes and student clubs they can join. They have a lot of opportunities.
But the problem becomes very apparent as soon as you move and graduate. You don't know anyone. You can't date people from work because that's shitting where you eat. You avoid talking to girls at the gym for the same reason. You're left with the bar scene, which isn't too bad. It still feels a lot more natural for me to meet someone in a bar than online, even though I've met several girls from OkCupid.
Your point about mutual interest addresses the pain of rejection, and agree with you on that. Let's Date is a great mobile app that addresses this perfectly. I guess Tinder is in the same boat, but neither of those actually worked for me. How many people did you meet from using it? I only met one girl from Let's Date, the rest I assume are fake or ended up deleting the app shortly after downloading it.
Yeah I don't think greeks are a good place to start because they probably don't need it, but I'd imagine other college kids would use it especially because they're busy with classes and other things.
Definitely agree that college kids have more opportunities than new grads though to meet people. I think the matching idea (tinder/let's date) is a good one, but like you I noticed the problem seems to be that girls don't actually use it - which is critical since otherwise nothing happens.
Never got a chance to run the checkit experiment because I ended up graduated early to move out here for a job. I do think meeting people out (at bars and things) is critical and the dating sites now don't take advantage of that - the check into places idea.
Dating sites set the bar low for messaging which contributes to the over messaging problem, there is a high social barrier to go up and talk to someone or ask someone out in person. The social barrier is actually a good thing because it means that if you go and talk/ask you already have a large advantage since most people were already self selected out. I think something that helps break the ice or helps with this meeting process in a specific place would be valuable. Otherwise I think most dating websites are shitty for heterosexual men in their early to mid twenties.
I do think meeting people out (at bars and things) is critical and the dating sites now don't take advantage of that - the check into places idea.
Yep. We weren't sure at first, so we asked girls: would you rather meet a group of guys at an event or a venue, or would you rather just go to bars? They want to go to bars because there's alcohol and it acts as a social lubricant. Everyone becomes more sociable.
Meeting people with groups of friends is hands down the single best experience out there. Figuring out how to replicate the experience on CWF is going to be a real challenge. It might not even happen, we might leave that to Flock. But what we do still solves a vast majority of the problems with all online dating sites, mainly the identity problem.
There's a natural filter when you go out to bars. It takes some courage--probably some alcohol too--to go up and start talking to girls. But it also requires some degree of social proof to get friends to comment on your profile, so I think it carries a similar effect. You're right that most dating sites suck for men in their 20s, but that's what we're trying to fix.
I think most dating websites are shitty for heterosexual men in their early to mid twenties.
I think it is dating that is shitty for men in that range. They have a limited pool of women in an age range that most of them want to be involved with. Those women in turn have socially acceptable dating opportunities with men of a much wider age range, including many men with better financial means than most men in their early to mid twenties. The result is too many men chasing too few women.
It's common to blame it entirely on financial means.
I think older men also tend to know themselves better. After a few decades you've grown into your own personality; you have good enough friends that there's no mad hustle to be what other people want you to be.
So you're comfortable in your skin. And that shows.
I've had dates at the same sort of cafés I'd have gone to as a younger man, so it's not as though I'm using fancy French restaurants as a status signal. It's just that I know myself better and don't feel as much like I need to prove anything.
I got a message on okcupid once from a woman saying only "you're so attractive, why does your age filter include me?"
One of my current partners is about the same age as her.
The 'man should ideally be at least slightly older' norm is counterproductive and I hope one day it goes away.
(I'm not saying there aren't underlying reasons why that norm often works ... just that I wish people would consider those underlying reasons and give up on age as a hard filter rather than a probability contributor)
What has always weirded me out about post-college life is that the density of things like clubs and activities is much, much lower. I would have thought people would be social about their hobbies post-college, but somehow... not so much, in many places.
One theory on why the author might be having a little trouble with OkCupid comes down to this sentence:
"Unless your parents are Jewish and they threaten to disown you for not having a Jewish boyfriend...yea, you may not want to message me in that case."
I mean, I laughed, it's a funny profile, but ultimately it implies bitterness over your last relationship, which, in my experience, is a turn off for both sexes. Don't get me wrong, everyone's bitter after getting dumped, but your next significant other doesn't want to know about it (at least not at first). In fact, they don't want to know anything about your previous relationship, good or bad, period.
EDIT: This actually adds some merit to his idea...his friends would be objective and wouldn't make the same mistake.
I'll second the confusion over people thinking there's a stigma to online dating. I thought that was a 90's thing.
The problem is not that you can't find someone who is x, the problem is that when you find someone who you want to be with, and you don't give a flying fuck if they are x or non-x, you still get your relationship ruined by other x being dicks to your non-x and to you by extension. That is the problem. And no, those sites do not solve it, if anything they might make it worse. (You should dump your non-x because look how many eligible x there are on xdate.com and xpeoplemeet.com)
OKCupid actually has a question that you could use to filter out non-Jewish people or people who want to date only Jewish people. But unfortunately it sounds like she decided it mattered only when the relationship was underway.
It's at least reflective of his low-filter personality. I'm more surprised that his friend in the linked Grouper article posts a picture and labels one girl as the grenade.
You're completely right, people are lazy, but online dating is also way more work than it has to be.
Women receive so many messages that it becomes overwhelming and too much work and men try sending earnest messages for a little while and then concede that it's basically a numbers game. These two phenomena are self-reinforcing. The more messages women receive, the less likely they are to respond. The more messages a man doesn't get a response to the more likely they are to put less effort into their messages. If you solve this problem, you effectively solve attrition rate in dating sites.
If you look at an old inbox full of sent of received messages for a man versus a women, you'll notice something interesting. The woman's inbox will be full of avatars next to almost all the messages. Men don't delete or suspend accounts. Now if you look at the inbox of the men on the other hand you'll notice that more and more of the messages have the default avatar next to the name as you move back in time in the inbox. This is because many women become totally overwhelmed by the number of messages, the quantity of them that are vulgar, etc.
I've talked to a bunch of people about this (because I'm one of those few people that has no problem talking about online dating because like you I think it is the future) and the conclusion I've come to that many people agree with is that online dating needs the equivalent of the spam button in many email inboxes. However instead of saying the words "Mark as spam", there should be two buttons, one that says "Mark as did not read my profile" and one that says "Flag as vulgar or offensive". The first button is to be used every time a women (or a man) receives a message where someone sends a one line message with no content specific to the recipient or any message which is obviously cookie cutter (cut & paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.
Every time these buttons are used it should impact a score on both the sender and the recipient. For the sender, they're "doesn't read profiles" score should go up and for the recipient that used the button, their "cares that senders don't read and consider their profile" score should go up. The same goes for vulgarity/offensive content. The balance of these two numbers should determine if the message makes it through to the recipients email inboxes at all in the future. You could even warn senders when their score starts getting too bad, like "This message will not be delivered to this user because you've been flagged as someone who doesn't consider the content of user's profiles when crafting a message" or "This user only receives messages from people who take time to craft a personal message". If the sender then goes back and significantly modifies their message before sending again (verified via a text diff and possibly the passage of time), then send it through. This time however, if that message gets flagged by the recipient, then it counts very negatively towards their score.
If you use an approach like this you should be able to keep the inboxes of females (and desirable males) with a high signal to noise ratio. This will greatly improve their experience and lead them to respond to more messages and not get so fed up with the bullshit messages that they either quit responding or quit the site entirely.
[0] The only counterpoint to this are messages that achieve the Forer Effect[1]. One of my friends has crafted some particularly generic messages (his own admission) that presses all the right buttons just like horoscopes texts do and he gets a pretty solid response rate despite the fact that those messages are just cut and pasted. He's even frustrated that his well thought out personal messages often perform worse than his generic ones that play to a recipients own positive self image. TBH, I'd like to take Forer's original text, and modify it for OkCupid to see how it performs. Besides crafting the message, I'd need to figure out how to produce an acceptably generic profile that still ...
These points are good, esp. the aided detection of spammers. But what you are proposing is basically some amendments to classic dating sites, nothing about the very premise of this startup helps.
And honestly, I believe the idea of having friends writing your profile is very flawed. Maybe it's my own personality, but I cannot see that happening to me or any of my friends.
Online dating is never going to be perfect because no dating is ever going to be perfect. But roughly speaking, everything is already invented. Dare I say, pay sites do the bulk of the filtering by having people pay (mostly us males), and that just works and finances the site. As simple as it is. And this is why they still exist.
So yeah, you can add a few elements, maybe some enhancements to traditional dating sites but the basic mechanics are just that: everybody self-promoting and looking for other people, following their basic instincts. How much can you direct that to be more effective? probably not that much more.
Completely agree. I only read the post. I didn't check out the guy's dating site because I'm in a relationship and I'm still working on trying to make it more open.
The one habit I think still needs to be taught to people on dating sites is the value of publicness and openness. About two years ago I got my mom to sign up for OkCupid (a few years after her divorce) and the biggest problem I encountered was her reluctance to be open. People are afraid to put any identifying information or any information that deviates from the public image they maintain at work and in social circles. This basically sets themselves up for failure because connecting with the right people for you really is dependent on both parties being open enough to find real connections. Jeff Jarvis I think has given one of the best talks on the value of openness. If you've never seen it, definitely check it out.
While your point is valid, I'm left wondering if too much openness becomes a problem. When I was single, I made an OkCupid profile and decided to, for better or worse, be as open and honest as possible (a principle I adhere to in meat space as well). I had over 1200 questions (this is a lot) answered and never tried to make myself seem like something I wasn't.
I figured I was doing everything right, and I was optimistic (a good handful of my friends had great success on OkC), but I barely got any dates, and the ones that I did ended up being duds. I did this for maybe 8 months.
Contrast that to the couple of months I signed up for a paid match.com account (pro tip: paying for a service and looking for someone else who has paid for a service shows a mutual seriousness about the service; OkC's barrier to entry is practically zero so many people don't end up taking it seriously) and here I am with a going-on-three-years-now happy relationship. Match barely has any information to fill out and it makes me wonder if that ends up being a more successful model, as it pushes much of the "screening" process to meat space, where it's a lot easier to discern people's idiosyncrasies.
Of course, being open once you're offline is absolutely key. I'm just not sure how well it works for the first online impression.
Edit: I don't mean to attribute my relationship success to my choice of service, that was pure luck. I just wanted to point out that it'd be interesting to see more data about openness' influence on dating site success rates.
I'd firmly advice against being open about your personal information on the internet, especially on a dating site.
I understand every big internet corporation is pushing the idea that privacy is dead and that you ought to put every thing about you online for every one to see. But what made the internet great is its pseudonymous nature.
Don't lie on your profile, but don't put up identifying personal info either.
Your proposed solution seems really awful. Don't you know that such a power structure (see consumerium wiki about sysop power structure) will inevitably be abused. Also the recent Pycon incident should put some light on the usefulness of a "flag as offensive" button.
Your solution is Hard Security when Soft Security is way enough (refer to meatball wiki for more on these notions).
Not only that but this problem has already been solved a few times, a simple and effective but not perfect solution: a man cannot message a woman until explicitly allowed by the woman. a man can notify a woman her profile caught his interest with a poke-like of which he gets a limited amount per day. There goes the message overload for women issue.
Now remove the heterosexism component and make it so no one can message anyone until explicitly allowed by the recipient and not only you got the message overload issue under control but you get an incentive for people to put some care into writing their profile and reading other's.
There's probably a better way, but this one is IMHO at least an order of magnitude better than your proposition.
The solution is in challenging how we suppose this should work and not in trying to fix those broken assumption by placing additional layers on top of something defective by design.
The solution is even easier. There is no need to have messages individually marked, the system knows what is being sent and can handle it automatically.
Auto detect spam messages. If a guy keeps sending out the same copy and paste, after 2 or 3 sends, just forward future copies to /dev/null.
Now this has to be personalized! If a women responds to those types of messages above some certain threshold, then hey, let her receive them, no problem.
I was thinking of adapting xkcd's robot9000 to dating sites on the other day. Instead of searching duplicate messages from 1 user, you search for duplicates across the entire database, with exponentially increasing ban periods if your message is not original. It would definitely force men and women to write meaningful messages.
Wow. I'm going to e-mail you this weekend. You've really thought about this stuff, and I think you've got some great ideas. Would love to chat with you some more.
It covers a lot of subject matter, and all of it seems to be from ways of interacting with the world that are alien to me. Public complaining about your ex? Pick up artistry? Inteviewing cliques of women in bars? Bizzare charactures of the idea of romance? Weird superiority/inferiority posturing? Trying to reduce a first impression to one-liners?
It feels more like cable television than real life.
The one-liners thing really put me off too. I couldn't tell if they were being sarcastic. Works 10% of the time because 10% have a bar low enough for empty flattery? A friend of mine dated one of the more prolific figures in that realm (don't know his name, it was just a big deal among the group) and she said he was ultimately just making money off of his Narcissistic Personality Disorder and she never wanted to see the guy again.
I think a lot of people on dating sites are going about it the wrong way and making themselves feel worse in the process when they don't have to.
Find a forum or a chatroom about topics that interest you or that you want to know more about (for your benefit, in communities where the gender of your choosing makes up to 30-70% of the userbase). Get invested in the topic, meet people, learn some stuff and see if any connections arise. You meet people in the real world in situations that you have in common, and that's how finding relationships online should be too. Some people may want the instant-gratification of going out to a bar to meet this person or maybe they're just gunning for a one-night-stand, which is fine too. But if my friends are anything to base things off of, distance is no longer an issue for people looking for serious, long-term relationships. I've seen lots of people fly over oceans to be together, many end up staying that way.
I agree. The whole post made for some rather uncomfortable reading, with an undertones of desperation and bitterness all the way through.
I feel that the path he's gone down is quite an eccentric and possibly misguided way to deal with the feelings of loss stemming from an unpleasant break-up.
Here's what I'm getting at: if we were all more social about online dating, it'd suck a lot less. A majority of problems go away with online dating sites when you make it social.
Trying to make this sound cool by using the word "social" doesn't stop this from being the classic awkward kid's lament: "If only people were straightforward about mating and romance! If only there wasn't this forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding sex! If only people stopped being petty and competitive and just openly admitted their desires and insecurities! We'd all be so much better off (me especially.)"
He is, in a useless kind of way. It's one thing to think this way and another thing to propose that everyone voluntarily adopt social mores that put them at a disadvantage relative to the people who continue to use the same old stratagems. For something like that you need a social movement organized around a moral cause, with constant moral vigilance against cheaters (who would otherwise prosper, and might prosper even in spite of such vigilance.) That's unlikely enough, but it gets worse. Skill at organizing and inspiring a social movement is, by my guess at least, highly correlated with skill at succeeding sexually under the current social conventions. The people who are highly motivated to change current social mores around dating are exactly the people who are least likely to inspire a following.
Take it from someone who wasted his first five years after puberty learning the hard way :-|
Being open and honest about my desires and insecurities has worked out very well for me; the trick was learning to present it as confidence in who I am rather than an apologia for what I am not. Attitude is often everything during early stage interactions when you're both rapidly trying to size the other person up.
Then again, my taste in partners' personalities probably selects for people where that -will- work out well for me. Which for me is obviously a feature, but means I in no way am suggesting that it would work well universally.
I like the way you've characterized the awkward kid's lament -- I think you nailed it.
However, this seems more like making online dating (which generally includes many attempts at making things more straightforward) into something that more closely mirrors the way many people find dates offline, through being introduced and endorsed by friends.
As a former awkward kid, I can't imagine that making things more social would be seen as favorable by someone who struggles with socialization and maybe has fewer or less charming friends.
Hmmm.... I want to voice a modified version of it.
The real trouble is not the forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding sex. Sex is, so to speak, the easy part. Once you find a compatible partner with whom you can communicate solidly about your relationship (see below), your meatware substrates come pre-programmed for the sex act itself ;-).
The problem is the forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding basic human fragility. There's almost a bizarre, hypocritical handshake protocol here: to meet someone and make friends with them, you generally need to appear well-put-together, sane, and just generally competent at life -- all without seeming smug or overconfident or douchey, either. This mostly involves scrubbing off the parts of your self-projection to others that don't fit what other people think of as "competent at life".
Problem is, deepening and maintaining a relationship, romantic or otherwise, consists precisely of letting your guard down and showing your baggage. Your positive baggage too, not just the negative.
Among more reticent social groups or cultures, people rarely manage it at all. They're never willing to let their guard down or exchange baggage, so they go through life with a series of shallow "friendships" and "relationships" that keep seeming Just Fine until they abruptly end because there wasn't a strong enough bond to take even a feather's new weight.
Then you hit some arbitrary "getting older" age, look back, and realize you spent your youth fucking around, have few friends, and no marriage. Whoops, time for the Biological and Parental Expectations Clocks and the sudden run to the altar! In another couple years, time for a divorce!
Source: I have fairly close ties to most of my friends and I've been with my fiancee for going on five years now.
I can't help but comment on my experience here. While I do sense the stigma to online dating, I don't personally care. My best interpretation of it though is that it's hard work going out and meeting people. So online dating attempts to make it easier by pre-screening potential candidates. Hearing your friend met someone online makes them sound lazy I guess right?
I've tried online dating but it never works out for me. People put their best face forward online, but are quite different in real life.
Honestly, regardless of Hollywood, the best relationships I've been in have come from friends introducing us at events or just randomly meeting at a bar.
257 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadThat said, it will of course be gamed and manipulated and still have many of the problems of current online dating models, but that's just the nature of marketing; when there are a lot of products out there, the way to sell yours is to make it stand out, and a site that imposes a handicap just gives the cheaters an advantage.
EDIT:
As I thought a bit more about it, I also realized that you have to have some criteria for what you're looking for in a partner too. How will you know if you've found them? If all you can come up with is "a body like a swimsuit model", you deserve what you get. Looks might be one criteria, but maybe you'd be better off picking some other attributes to go with it? And perhaps weighting things like interests, life-goals, etc a bit higher.
I'd also recommend understanding your Myers-Briggs type and the types that are compatible (this is not your sign). Then learn the attributes that make up your compatible types and try to spot them in public.
Edit: I should say though I completely agree (about everything except the predestined part), people need to keep an eye out and know what they want, and not just physical qualities.
And congrats on 25+ years - you're obviously doing it right :)
You might as well recommend dowsing to find available mates.
With some fava beans.
Presumably they wouldn't be allowed to use your real name or super-identifying photos or anything, so this "dating persona" they set up from you is divorced from the rest of your identity, and nobody will find it by looking for you.
Funny thing is IINM this is probably illegal in several countries around the world, both setting up an online profile for someone else, without his/her knowledge being aggravating, and not providing exact personal information.
If my friends did this to me, it would probably put a definitive end to that friendship.
By making it against the TOS of the site, and banning profiles that do it.
> probably illegal ... not providing exact personal information.
Presumably it's a profile about you, but it's not a profile impersonating you. They don't sign up using your name/birthdate/et al; they have their own account, which they use to fill in the details of your profile.
To be clearer: the concept isn't really that you're filling out someone else's profile. Instead, it's more like (exactly like) a "review" site--friends giving "product reviews" of friends, talking about how you should "buy" this friend or that. They just appear without attribution, conglomerated into a "consensus profile" of "what others think about this person." I imagine it's very clear that the person themselves didn't make the profile, any more than hockeyfan3392 on Amazon made the Macbook his review is attached to.
The difference is that if it's not online, then it's purely interpersonal; a social, private, ephemeral (as in not recorded) sort of activity. But if it's online it's like publishing something in public; it's broadcast to a large number of strangers and it's recorded for a long time. Big difference, I would say.
Of course the next 20 chapters are ones of compromise, empathy, regret, and apologies, with happiness and perfection in between.
I have several friends who met their significant others online, and are now happily married with children. But you just laugh...?
to put it in the perspective of this forum, all of my VC buddies put online dating plays in the category of domain specific search. that's a fairly sterile way to look at the process of finding a life partner, don't you think?
but beyond that, there is no credible statistical data, i.e. stats not produced by the companies themselves and peer reviewed, that would indicate these services produce anything like a non-niche impact on the occurrence of marriage in the US.
there are however numerous more deliberate commentaries on the topic of technology and its impact on the social fabric of culture. one of my personal favs is "Alone Together" by Sherry Turkle.
The more interesting question in all of this is why exactly online dating functions are even viable. IMHO the fact that people, particularly in the business we are in (i'm assuming you are in the software biz as well) spend so much time chained to a desk that they cannot go out and actually interact physically with other human beings is the point of my original response.
I have several older divorced and single friends (mostly women) and they date on-line for one main reason: it's just too damn hard to have an active social life while you're raising kids.
I got married before the whole internet dating took off, but the 90s did have "date-lines." It was basically an voicemail system.
However, any dating-for-dating's sake does underplay the best way to meet compatible partners: meeting them while you're doing something you really enjoy. I met my spouse in a Jazz singing class.
I've always thought meeting people based on social skills (in person) or good photography (on-line) is fine, but I think it's inefficient because you're selecting the database on the least relevant criteria.
I don't think online dating is perfect as it's currently structured, but it has a lot of potential. I'd picture something like a dating site where you couldn't search for people ad-hoc, but which interest-specific discussion forums could link into. You'd create a profile, but only be found by people who reached out through some interest-specific site. This serves two purposes: it prevents women from getting spammed as easily, and it provides some context (posting history) for them to evaluate.
From your past posts it looks like you're NYC-based. NYC is by far (IMO) the best place to set up an online dating shop, since this city is by a very long shot the most accepting of online dating in the US.
Disclaimer: I work for a NYC-area online dating shop.
In many other cities, and in many subcultures and scenes, online dating is still very much stigmatized. I can't help but think that author would've gotten a very different perspective if he didn't choose to interview people at a bar in the SF Marina of all places (read: notorious area for meathead jocks and their female counterparts).
Silicon Valley is the opposite. Too many single men, not enough women, inevitably means a sucky online dating experience for guys (unless you're in the very top attractiveness percentiles). I don't think any dating site can fix that, unless it matches Silicon Valley men to New York women or something.
Online dating follows historically from personals classifieds. Personals ads contained very little information (in part because they had to be so short). This meant you were going on a date with someone you knew nothing about. It was worse than just a blind date... because you didn't even have any common friends to validate the person wasn't a psycho. People (esp. women) who valued their safety tended not to use personals ads, and there was a definite stigma that people who did use it likely had problems.
Though online dating is popular now, I think it was previously viewed as the high-tech version of printed personals ads. So the stigma carried over. It's certainly decreased over time, but I think that history is part of the stigma.
Again, I think you have a potentially viable solution to a problem people care about... even if I disagree on the source of them problem.
Also, I can't figure out why the alleged Hollywood lie would only impact online dating. Wouldn't all forms of dating affected? Certainly the "fate" aspect of true love isn't exactly new--Rom coms didn't usher in wave of zero dating.
The OkCupid profiles make more sense: you make them so that you look good and you get dates. Work -> reward.
Like can me and my buds set up a fantasy football league and see how our team scores against other teams (or against women teams??)
Because gamification, social media, that's money in the bank right there.
i never had to go out alone to find a significant other. Sure a few days i had to stay home because none of my friends wanted to go out. but that's life.
... you will probably not meet, and be happy with, someone you meet in a dive bar, or online dating. it's just common sense, or you may call it stigma.
Huh? Since OkCupid, and many others, work and are very popular, how can it be common sense that you won't meet someone you'll be happy with? Can you explain that?
Just as with employers looking for employees, some of the people who are looking just haven't found the right fit yet. The rest are people nobody wants. The former churn (or dwindle if the market isn't being replenished), while the latter remain constant.
The game-theoretic optimum in a market for lemons--whatever you might think of it--is to avoid "dating" to begin with, and instead just find someone desirable and seduce them away from whoever they're currently with. In employment, this is called "headhunting." :)
A more apt economic analogy is that dating is a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low. Online dating reduces transaction costs, in the same way EBay does.
Also,
> a market where deals are hard to match up, transaction costs are high, and the repetition rate of testing compatibility to lead to a possible deal is low
This describes the housing market perfectly. It's also a market for lemons, or rather, it would be--homeowners are incentivized to hide defects in their homes--but we have house inspectors to remove this property from the system. There are no date inspectors.
One of my best friends got married with a girl he met online dating. Another one met his wife on an online forum we both frequented. I met my last girlfriend (3 years) and my fiancée (getting married this summer) in bars/clubs.
[1] Ivy-educated, Ph.D.-holding, tenured professor girlfriend.
The whole reason "becoming exclusive" is a thing/phrase, is because it's acceptable and expected to "date" multiple people.
I don't see the need to brag about her education? Was that in some way relevant? It sounds like you might be feeling like you need to compensate for her to timing behavior.
Seriously? That's uncalled for. I hope you were just having a really shitty day, or something, and didn't actually mean to insult both me and my girlfriend.
Obviously, what I wrote wasn't clear enough. Read the other responses.
That doesn't even make sense. Want to try again?
But what Grindr does, is it creates a virtual space of people around you, which makes it a lot more like real life bar dating, where you just have faces, and yet the straight version of it - I forgot what it's called - is not as respected as OKCupid, so there's still some way to go.
I used it on OkCupid and got about a 30-50% response rate. Now I'm 6'8" and in shape which skewed the results but my friends copied what I did and their response rates skyrocketed. Then you only send 2-3 more messages before asking her out for drinks. Worked nearly 100% of the time.
I think that it comes down to, people spend way too much time trying to write the perfect message or profile. Be yourself. Think of it as a filter to get rid of the girls that you aren't compatible with.
Then when you're on the date, relax and just have fun. I've heard so many horror stories from my female friends of guys that are super awkward. The group setting is a great idea as it relaxes people and gives them support. That's why wingmen exist.
Wonder why guys can't figure that out?
there are thousands of articles and dozens of discussion sites out there related to self-improvement and success with women. there is a huge spectrum from bad PUA stuff all the way to general fitness and nutrition focus, avoid the ones that turn you off and read the ones that appeal to your common sense.
i repeat - do NOT just "be yourself". tall fit white guy's advice does not apply to you if you are not tall and fit and white. you need to put in the work to improve yourself if you are not the hollywood marketed image of 'perfect guy'
ignore this guy and improve yourself in other more meaningful ways. attractive women do not exclusively go for good looking tall guys, not by FAR. women are not actually that shallow. it's more about personality and fitness.
[1]http://onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/
I remember checking your site out when you posted it and it's nice to see someone trying something actually new, but I feel like this concept doesn't solve the common problems and adds some new ones.
Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?
Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).
I also think women are even less likely to use it considering your own point about them not wanting to involve their own friends. I would think people would also want to play a role in the selection considering it's a pretty subjective/personal thing.
Definitely awesome to see something new though and hopefully you prove me wrong and it works better than I suspect.
Aren't you more interested in reading what somebody's friend has to say about them rather than what they're saying about themselves? Also, we have Facebook accounts (100+ friends required to join) which are not easy to replicate and we can rate limit. On OkCupid, the worst that happens is they ban you for spamming, and then you come back under a different username. Sure, girls might recognize the same photos, but you're fundamentally a free radical in the system.
Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).
It relies on reciprocity, and it's actually fun when you try it out. If you're commenting on your friends' profiles, they'll naturally want to comment on yours. All of the comments on my profile happened not because I asked my friends to do that, but because I started out by commenting on theirs.
With the stigma, it's largely an issue skewed by age. More women in their 30s using dating sites socially, the sites just aren't designed to be social.
I see your point about the reciprocity, makes sense and I wouldn't worry about the stigma - if your site catches on the stigma will just die faster.
I'm not sure I'd be more receptive to what a friend has to say about someone, but that's generally because what anyone says doesn't matter when the sent/received message ratio is so bad (which is what I tried to fix with the marking idea).
Cool though - will definitely keep following it to see how it goes.
Wait, are people with lots friend "high quality people" or "low quality people"?
I'd be reluctant to date anyone who has 100+ friends on Facebook, that seems to me to indicate a degree of shallowness. After 7 years I have 59 and I honestly need to pare that way down. (Wow pruning my friends list, amazing how many people have closed their FB account! A good 10% of past "friends" no longer have accounts)
But hey, thanks for excluding introverts! Really nice of you.
My primary issue is that I only have about 3 or 4 people on Facebook who actually know me well and who interact with me on a regular basis that I'd trust to help fill out my profile.
In addition to that, the entire "guys only look at pictures" thing is BS. Yes I look at pictures first, right after that I read the profile. If the woman in question doesn't have indicators that we are a match in ethics and values, then I am not going to bother sending a message.
Indeed the primary problem I suspect your dating site has is the same problem sites like match.com have, they really don't allow for filtering by value systems. This is OKCupid's single strength that nearly makes up for everything else that is wrong with it.
I really don't care if a woman's friends say she is fun to hang out with. I do care what books she reads and what her feelings on various social and political issues are.
My girlfriend has over 400 friends (and she aggresively culled). But she was secretary for a political party, and also has a lot of "friends" from an online game ("My Fishbowl").
It's odd to find a girl with LESS than 100 facebook friends. Men in my social sphere, OTOH, don't have as many facebook friends unless they're actively trying to date through facebook itself.
But a heterosexual dating site isn't of much use if members of predominantly of one gender!
Funny thing is in my online dating profile, I have a requirement similar to yours: that people getting in touch with me have no facebook account.
Why? Because the Greeks have it perfectly. They're basically paying fees for students to put together their social life for them. So actually, I just caught myself here: college students might be a good starting point, but Greeks are the absolute worst starting point. They don't need what we're building. And most college students I think would be reluctant to sign up anyway, they have their classes and student clubs they can join. They have a lot of opportunities.
But the problem becomes very apparent as soon as you move and graduate. You don't know anyone. You can't date people from work because that's shitting where you eat. You avoid talking to girls at the gym for the same reason. You're left with the bar scene, which isn't too bad. It still feels a lot more natural for me to meet someone in a bar than online, even though I've met several girls from OkCupid.
Your point about mutual interest addresses the pain of rejection, and agree with you on that. Let's Date is a great mobile app that addresses this perfectly. I guess Tinder is in the same boat, but neither of those actually worked for me. How many people did you meet from using it? I only met one girl from Let's Date, the rest I assume are fake or ended up deleting the app shortly after downloading it.
How was the checkin experiment you ran?
Definitely agree that college kids have more opportunities than new grads though to meet people. I think the matching idea (tinder/let's date) is a good one, but like you I noticed the problem seems to be that girls don't actually use it - which is critical since otherwise nothing happens.
Never got a chance to run the checkit experiment because I ended up graduated early to move out here for a job. I do think meeting people out (at bars and things) is critical and the dating sites now don't take advantage of that - the check into places idea.
Dating sites set the bar low for messaging which contributes to the over messaging problem, there is a high social barrier to go up and talk to someone or ask someone out in person. The social barrier is actually a good thing because it means that if you go and talk/ask you already have a large advantage since most people were already self selected out. I think something that helps break the ice or helps with this meeting process in a specific place would be valuable. Otherwise I think most dating websites are shitty for heterosexual men in their early to mid twenties.
Yep. We weren't sure at first, so we asked girls: would you rather meet a group of guys at an event or a venue, or would you rather just go to bars? They want to go to bars because there's alcohol and it acts as a social lubricant. Everyone becomes more sociable.
Meeting people with groups of friends is hands down the single best experience out there. Figuring out how to replicate the experience on CWF is going to be a real challenge. It might not even happen, we might leave that to Flock. But what we do still solves a vast majority of the problems with all online dating sites, mainly the identity problem.
There's a natural filter when you go out to bars. It takes some courage--probably some alcohol too--to go up and start talking to girls. But it also requires some degree of social proof to get friends to comment on your profile, so I think it carries a similar effect. You're right that most dating sites suck for men in their 20s, but that's what we're trying to fix.
I think it is dating that is shitty for men in that range. They have a limited pool of women in an age range that most of them want to be involved with. Those women in turn have socially acceptable dating opportunities with men of a much wider age range, including many men with better financial means than most men in their early to mid twenties. The result is too many men chasing too few women.
I think older men also tend to know themselves better. After a few decades you've grown into your own personality; you have good enough friends that there's no mad hustle to be what other people want you to be.
So you're comfortable in your skin. And that shows.
I've had dates at the same sort of cafés I'd have gone to as a younger man, so it's not as though I'm using fancy French restaurants as a status signal. It's just that I know myself better and don't feel as much like I need to prove anything.
One of my current partners is about the same age as her.
The 'man should ideally be at least slightly older' norm is counterproductive and I hope one day it goes away.
(I'm not saying there aren't underlying reasons why that norm often works ... just that I wish people would consider those underlying reasons and give up on age as a hard filter rather than a probability contributor)
"Unless your parents are Jewish and they threaten to disown you for not having a Jewish boyfriend...yea, you may not want to message me in that case."
I mean, I laughed, it's a funny profile, but ultimately it implies bitterness over your last relationship, which, in my experience, is a turn off for both sexes. Don't get me wrong, everyone's bitter after getting dumped, but your next significant other doesn't want to know about it (at least not at first). In fact, they don't want to know anything about your previous relationship, good or bad, period.
EDIT: This actually adds some merit to his idea...his friends would be objective and wouldn't make the same mistake.
I'll second the confusion over people thinking there's a stigma to online dating. I thought that was a 90's thing.
X person meets a non-X, they get along, and then X's parents turn the screws, ruining the relationship.
Women receive so many messages that it becomes overwhelming and too much work and men try sending earnest messages for a little while and then concede that it's basically a numbers game. These two phenomena are self-reinforcing. The more messages women receive, the less likely they are to respond. The more messages a man doesn't get a response to the more likely they are to put less effort into their messages. If you solve this problem, you effectively solve attrition rate in dating sites.
If you look at an old inbox full of sent of received messages for a man versus a women, you'll notice something interesting. The woman's inbox will be full of avatars next to almost all the messages. Men don't delete or suspend accounts. Now if you look at the inbox of the men on the other hand you'll notice that more and more of the messages have the default avatar next to the name as you move back in time in the inbox. This is because many women become totally overwhelmed by the number of messages, the quantity of them that are vulgar, etc.
I've talked to a bunch of people about this (because I'm one of those few people that has no problem talking about online dating because like you I think it is the future) and the conclusion I've come to that many people agree with is that online dating needs the equivalent of the spam button in many email inboxes. However instead of saying the words "Mark as spam", there should be two buttons, one that says "Mark as did not read my profile" and one that says "Flag as vulgar or offensive". The first button is to be used every time a women (or a man) receives a message where someone sends a one line message with no content specific to the recipient or any message which is obviously cookie cutter (cut & paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.
Every time these buttons are used it should impact a score on both the sender and the recipient. For the sender, they're "doesn't read profiles" score should go up and for the recipient that used the button, their "cares that senders don't read and consider their profile" score should go up. The same goes for vulgarity/offensive content. The balance of these two numbers should determine if the message makes it through to the recipients email inboxes at all in the future. You could even warn senders when their score starts getting too bad, like "This message will not be delivered to this user because you've been flagged as someone who doesn't consider the content of user's profiles when crafting a message" or "This user only receives messages from people who take time to craft a personal message". If the sender then goes back and significantly modifies their message before sending again (verified via a text diff and possibly the passage of time), then send it through. This time however, if that message gets flagged by the recipient, then it counts very negatively towards their score.
If you use an approach like this you should be able to keep the inboxes of females (and desirable males) with a high signal to noise ratio. This will greatly improve their experience and lead them to respond to more messages and not get so fed up with the bullshit messages that they either quit responding or quit the site entirely.
[0] The only counterpoint to this are messages that achieve the Forer Effect[1]. One of my friends has crafted some particularly generic messages (his own admission) that presses all the right buttons just like horoscopes texts do and he gets a pretty solid response rate despite the fact that those messages are just cut and pasted. He's even frustrated that his well thought out personal messages often perform worse than his generic ones that play to a recipients own positive self image. TBH, I'd like to take Forer's original text, and modify it for OkCupid to see how it performs. Besides crafting the message, I'd need to figure out how to produce an acceptably generic profile that still ...
And honestly, I believe the idea of having friends writing your profile is very flawed. Maybe it's my own personality, but I cannot see that happening to me or any of my friends.
Online dating is never going to be perfect because no dating is ever going to be perfect. But roughly speaking, everything is already invented. Dare I say, pay sites do the bulk of the filtering by having people pay (mostly us males), and that just works and finances the site. As simple as it is. And this is why they still exist.
So yeah, you can add a few elements, maybe some enhancements to traditional dating sites but the basic mechanics are just that: everybody self-promoting and looking for other people, following their basic instincts. How much can you direct that to be more effective? probably not that much more.
The one habit I think still needs to be taught to people on dating sites is the value of publicness and openness. About two years ago I got my mom to sign up for OkCupid (a few years after her divorce) and the biggest problem I encountered was her reluctance to be open. People are afraid to put any identifying information or any information that deviates from the public image they maintain at work and in social circles. This basically sets themselves up for failure because connecting with the right people for you really is dependent on both parties being open enough to find real connections. Jeff Jarvis I think has given one of the best talks on the value of openness. If you've never seen it, definitely check it out.
[0] http://buzzmachine.com/2010/04/22/privacy-publicness-penises...
I figured I was doing everything right, and I was optimistic (a good handful of my friends had great success on OkC), but I barely got any dates, and the ones that I did ended up being duds. I did this for maybe 8 months.
Contrast that to the couple of months I signed up for a paid match.com account (pro tip: paying for a service and looking for someone else who has paid for a service shows a mutual seriousness about the service; OkC's barrier to entry is practically zero so many people don't end up taking it seriously) and here I am with a going-on-three-years-now happy relationship. Match barely has any information to fill out and it makes me wonder if that ends up being a more successful model, as it pushes much of the "screening" process to meat space, where it's a lot easier to discern people's idiosyncrasies.
Of course, being open once you're offline is absolutely key. I'm just not sure how well it works for the first online impression.
Edit: I don't mean to attribute my relationship success to my choice of service, that was pure luck. I just wanted to point out that it'd be interesting to see more data about openness' influence on dating site success rates.
I understand every big internet corporation is pushing the idea that privacy is dead and that you ought to put every thing about you online for every one to see. But what made the internet great is its pseudonymous nature.
Don't lie on your profile, but don't put up identifying personal info either.
You'll never thank me for this because you probably won't have to face the worst of identity theft thanks to it.
Your solution is Hard Security when Soft Security is way enough (refer to meatball wiki for more on these notions).
Not only that but this problem has already been solved a few times, a simple and effective but not perfect solution: a man cannot message a woman until explicitly allowed by the woman. a man can notify a woman her profile caught his interest with a poke-like of which he gets a limited amount per day. There goes the message overload for women issue.
Now remove the heterosexism component and make it so no one can message anyone until explicitly allowed by the recipient and not only you got the message overload issue under control but you get an incentive for people to put some care into writing their profile and reading other's.
There's probably a better way, but this one is IMHO at least an order of magnitude better than your proposition.
The solution is in challenging how we suppose this should work and not in trying to fix those broken assumption by placing additional layers on top of something defective by design.
Auto detect spam messages. If a guy keeps sending out the same copy and paste, after 2 or 3 sends, just forward future copies to /dev/null.
Now this has to be personalized! If a women responds to those types of messages above some certain threshold, then hey, let her receive them, no problem.
It feels more like cable television than real life.
I think a lot of people on dating sites are going about it the wrong way and making themselves feel worse in the process when they don't have to.
Find a forum or a chatroom about topics that interest you or that you want to know more about (for your benefit, in communities where the gender of your choosing makes up to 30-70% of the userbase). Get invested in the topic, meet people, learn some stuff and see if any connections arise. You meet people in the real world in situations that you have in common, and that's how finding relationships online should be too. Some people may want the instant-gratification of going out to a bar to meet this person or maybe they're just gunning for a one-night-stand, which is fine too. But if my friends are anything to base things off of, distance is no longer an issue for people looking for serious, long-term relationships. I've seen lots of people fly over oceans to be together, many end up staying that way.
I feel that the path he's gone down is quite an eccentric and possibly misguided way to deal with the feelings of loss stemming from an unpleasant break-up.
Trying to make this sound cool by using the word "social" doesn't stop this from being the classic awkward kid's lament: "If only people were straightforward about mating and romance! If only there wasn't this forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding sex! If only people stopped being petty and competitive and just openly admitted their desires and insecurities! We'd all be so much better off (me especially.)"
Take it from someone who wasted his first five years after puberty learning the hard way :-|
Then again, my taste in partners' personalities probably selects for people where that -will- work out well for me. Which for me is obviously a feature, but means I in no way am suggesting that it would work well universally.
However, this seems more like making online dating (which generally includes many attempts at making things more straightforward) into something that more closely mirrors the way many people find dates offline, through being introduced and endorsed by friends.
As a former awkward kid, I can't imagine that making things more social would be seen as favorable by someone who struggles with socialization and maybe has fewer or less charming friends.
Would you say that's a bad idea in general, or maybe good for long-term relationships but bad when you're in the earlier stages of dating?
The real trouble is not the forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding sex. Sex is, so to speak, the easy part. Once you find a compatible partner with whom you can communicate solidly about your relationship (see below), your meatware substrates come pre-programmed for the sex act itself ;-).
The problem is the forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding basic human fragility. There's almost a bizarre, hypocritical handshake protocol here: to meet someone and make friends with them, you generally need to appear well-put-together, sane, and just generally competent at life -- all without seeming smug or overconfident or douchey, either. This mostly involves scrubbing off the parts of your self-projection to others that don't fit what other people think of as "competent at life".
Problem is, deepening and maintaining a relationship, romantic or otherwise, consists precisely of letting your guard down and showing your baggage. Your positive baggage too, not just the negative.
Among more reticent social groups or cultures, people rarely manage it at all. They're never willing to let their guard down or exchange baggage, so they go through life with a series of shallow "friendships" and "relationships" that keep seeming Just Fine until they abruptly end because there wasn't a strong enough bond to take even a feather's new weight.
Then you hit some arbitrary "getting older" age, look back, and realize you spent your youth fucking around, have few friends, and no marriage. Whoops, time for the Biological and Parental Expectations Clocks and the sudden run to the altar! In another couple years, time for a divorce!
Source: I have fairly close ties to most of my friends and I've been with my fiancee for going on five years now.
The stigma of online dating is such rubbish. I am as much of a stranger as the guy on the barstool next to you.
I've tried online dating but it never works out for me. People put their best face forward online, but are quite different in real life.
Honestly, regardless of Hollywood, the best relationships I've been in have come from friends introducing us at events or just randomly meeting at a bar.