I see some pessimism in these comments, but IMO one needs to consider the problem from both genders (assuming we're talking about straight dating exclusively for a sec).
The problem with OkCupid is that the experience is horrendous for women. While the men would love to have choice, and "unlimited" matches, in reality this only means one thing:
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam spam. More spam.
The success of Tinder should be in large part attributed to the fact that the basic interaction model removes spam. Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches", making women the actual gatekeepers of conversation - and this model works, though you obviously lose a lot of nuance and depth along the way.
She talks about how easy OkCupid is for women, how she recommends her female friends to try it out, but how she also dissuades her male friends from trying it. Because the site is so difficult for men.
I think the reality is a bit more complex. Women have "more choice", expressed in the form of an avalanche of messages that would take a part-time job just to cut through.
Which is a bit of a false freedom. You're presumably there to find promising dates, not take on a new part time job sorting messages.
Except women on OKC can just ignore the spam messages, look at a couple of profiles and send their own messages. Their messages won't be buried in piles of spam. The best interactions I had on OKC worked that way.
It is really taxing for women to have to deal with the spam, though, and that can really burn users out of even using the site. Too many messages and too few messages are both problems for different (sometimes overlapping) groups of people.
I think you're missing the idea that women can just ignore all incoming messages, and get a much better response rate for outgoing messages than men do.
I've dated several women that I've met on OKC for various lengths of time and they all agreed that for the most part OKC was a good experience. I could see how people without a thick skin could be turned off by the spam, but that hasn't been the case in my experience. The women I've met have mostly seemed to treat the spam similarly to YouTube comments, it's just accepted that most of them are garbage.
One of them described the experience with something like "It's Amazon for boys, for negative money." which seems like a pretty positive review to me.
Sifting through messages from people already interested in you and sifting through profiles trying to come up with a clever attention-grabbing first message to send to a girl who will respond maybe 10% of the time are not even remotely on the same level in terms of time commitment and inconvenience.
"one needs to consider the problem from both genders"
Exactly. I think Tinder's model is more aligned with how men and women meet IRL. As a guy, my modus operandi is to present myself as a high-valued man to everyone and have the women pre-select me so I can start the interaction.
How men use Tinder: likelikelikelike "Oops, I wanted to see the rest of her pictures"
How women use Tinder: nopenopenopenope "Oops, he was cute"
Its the 80/20 rule-- 20% of the guys will get most of the likes from the girls.
With all that repetition, I think there must be an even better model for matching people up...
That's a bit of faulty induction going here. Just because one site didn't work doesn't mean it will never work. There are all kinds of other variables involved, maybe it was just the execution. It is certainly insulting to say that women don't want to be in charge or make the decisions.
I've looked at sites that try the empower-the-women-depower-the-men approach. With depressing reliability, they all wind up re-introducing the ability for men to initiate contact.
That's quite suggestive. It's not perfect, but it's far from meaningless.
Also, just because it can be read as insulting doesn't mean it's not true. If we want to identify and address problems, we have to deal in truths. If it eases your conscience any, I can edit in verbiage to make extremely clear that I as speaking solely to typical behavior in the arena of online dating.
Yeah I've heard total horror stories from women. It's like men on OKCupid took the idea of "numbers game" way, way too far. Consequently I also didn't want to be on there and be lumped in with those guys either.
A seemingly obvious solution is to limit the number of women that men can contact, something like 2 every 24 hours. That way men are incentivized to put some effort into their messages, and women actually have an opportunity to read them due to reduced spam. It should be a win-win for everyone except the spammers, but I haven't heard of any sites that do it.
Now I have N accounts and message whoever I like with those N accounts.
Basically, a site has to offer something to both women and men to do better than OKC. That proposal just puts a minor speed bump in front of men. As a group, men have few compunctions about abusing sites in order to get what they want. Multiple accounts to spam women is not a significant obstacle.
Nah. Someone writes a script. It becomes a browser extension. Now it's zero work. Women abandon your site, because the experience is no better than OKCupid. Men follow suit, because they tend to go where the women are.
Basically, your approach is the functional equivalent of DRM. With all the problems that go with that.
That still takes effort beyond just signing up. I think you're overestimating the willingness of the average guy to either script something up or go out of his way to find a browser extension. Most people's knowledge of browser extensions begins and ends with AdBlock anyway.
> men discovered that being a well-behaved actor is a losing strategy on dating sites.
The entire seduction and pickup community is based on the idea that women say they want a guy who's nice and plays by the rules but that that isn't what they respond to. They respond to assholes, bad-boys and dominant men. Obviously not every woman, but there are plenty of independent scientific studies to support this theory.
I'm aware of those studies, but skeptical of some of their methods and claims. I'm especially skeptical that when they claim causation and not correlation.
In any case, there's a big difference between 'spammer' and 'bad-boy' as well as a big difference between demonstrating the success of a strategy and demonstrating it's prevalence.
Edit: There may be some good studies demonstrating causation but I am not familiar with them.
So I went and googled this "#NotAllMen" tag you keep mentioning (I don't use twitter). The "but we're not all like that" response is inappropriate and unhelpful when one is talking about particular bad actors, a group of bad actors or even about a general form of behavior.
However, when the statements are of the general form about the group as a whole, I think it is a perfectly appropriate response. If you say "All men are misogynists" saying "no we aren't" is perfectly valid, so is taking offense to the statement.
Now if you have evidence that your assertion applies to the majority of men on dating sites, feel free to post it. Then at least your stereotype will be an evidence backed one.
I don't think so. While most spammers aren't particularly sophisticated, it doesn't take a genius to figure out you can copy-paste formulaic messages to hundreds of women in only a few minutes.
Even a user who isn't particularly nefarious and say, sends 20 original (not copy-pasted) messages each session, it's still an overwhelming amount of messages for women to sort through.
It's important to note that when I say "spam" I don't just mean "bad actors who deliberately attempt to game the system". I mean that even what appears to a user as a "natural" amount of messages in fact makes the system nearly unusable. It's almost trivial for female users to end up with literally hundreds of messages per day - just managing the messages themselves is a chore, much less viewing the profiles associated.
Women receive more messages from men then men receive from women. From complains that women leave in their OKCupid profiles I would say that a lot of these messages are not from people trying to intelligently converse with the women that they are trying to connect with. Seemingly common things:
- Messages that are too short. E.g. "hey babe" doesn't mean much, when a women gets 10 - 20 "hey babe" messages in a day.
- There are men that get frustrated at the lack of response from women, and start turning their messages into "form letters" which don't show any level of having read the woman's profile.
- Initiating conversation with sexual propositions.
- Depending on the platform, sending unsolicited pictures of genitalia.
While some of these might not qualify as "spam" compared to a 419 scammers emails, I would say that wading through all of that seems akin to wading through one's spam folder...
Broadly speaking, this is what happens when the effort/volume tradeoff runs into low response rates and low read rates. The effort required to write a better message does not correspond to a sufficiently high chance of a response. Couple that with strong evidence that profiles and messages don't matter nearly as much as photos.
The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.
This comes across as cynical towards the women on dating sites. The problem is that the women on dating site become a lightning rod for messages. If every message were of a kind that interested a particular woman, how would she respond to (e.g.) 10-20 messages from new people every day? She's likely not going to end up going on dates with multiple people at a time, and if she finds someone long-term, it's (more than likely) only going to be a single person. She likely will only be able to carry on a few meaningful conversations at a time, and the rest just get dropped. If she were trying to meaningfully respond to everyone then going on a dating site would end up being a significant chore.
Edit: Also, it's probably difficult to respond to someone that puts in the time to right a well-thought-out message, but doesn't come across as interesting (or expresses views that are contrary to your own -- e.g. an avid hunter messaging an animal rights activist). You don't necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, so it's easier to not do it at all (or you convince yourself that you'll respond 'later' but 'later' never happens).
Very astute observation. I agree, it's absolutely not worth it. No one should expect anything but a short canned message. Regardless, why should it matter anyway? If you like the person--something you'll know mostly from pictures--who sent you the message go out on a date! What a novel idea. If not, move on. To publicly opine that you want detailed messages tailored to your profile is presumptuous.
If OKCupid has all of these messages, couldn't they algorithmically rate your message (based on sender patterns, receiver patterns, and/or site wide patterns) before you send it. While it wouldn't be perfect, it would act like the minimum reading level from most grammar checks. (This feels like something that must have been tried, or dismissed, before.)
I believe it will increase message quality but maybe not in a good way: now it's easier to train oneself in sending message that score well but are still a bad conversation starter. What gets measured, gets improved. Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
Real success is extremely hard to quantify, which is why i'm not suggesting that as the goal. The goal is to grade spam messages, and encourage people to not repeat known spam patterns. (And, if you show the score to the recipients, it also acts as a spam filter.)
Encouraging / forcing people to write less spammy messages might improve the overall message quality, just by increasing the cost, in effort and time, of sending the messages. It also provides some minimum level of feedback to the people who get zero responses from their messages.
> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
IIRC, when the user disables/deletes his/hers OkC account, they can specify the reason: "met someone on OkC (they can type the other person username)", "met someone elsewhere", "not interested anymore", etc. So they probably have lots of good data on success.
Thing is that people who comment on HN are used to writing longish form text with correct spelling and grammar. There are also many people who have a lower education level but still want to use OKCupid and might be a good match for someone.
-Men that are frustrated should now that being funny and referencing something in their profile, or talking about something they both like are good conversation starters. Just as they are in real life.
-Sexual propositions is good, you can ban them or not, at least you know exactly what they want. They are bring honest.
-Send dick pics gets you banned.
This leaves you with a good set of people. The next step would be for the system to learn what the user wants, and start to filter these messages.
As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.
Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.
Tinder is considered a success? I've used it and maybe I'm just a loser, but my experience and I believe the general consensus is that it is mostly for hookups. I am highly doubtful that women are meeting men that are actually interested in a long term relationship. There are a lot of issues with Tinder that have already been mentioned in this thread, such as 20% of the guys (I'm betting on less) get most of the likes and that women are the gatekeepers; which is good for them not having to trudge through spam, but it perpetuates the problem that guys already have IRL at social scenes and just keeps the women playing into the players' hands.
No dating app is going to solve the problem that 80% of the men on the app are unappealing to 80% of the women. That's a fundamental social issue, and there's no magic fix for the 80% of men having trouble finding success on these apps.
Taking the decision of who is appealing away from women (and men, as if the 80% ever had any selection power) by using matchmakers seems like a promising fix to me. Although women still have the power to reject the date, they at least might be relinquished of the power to all go after the same guy (much to the chagrin of the guy who wants to fool around with all those women). Too bad I currently have so many other issues in my life more critical than wasting time in the dating scene, or I would try this one out.
But the truth is, in society, 80% of the men and women do find each other. So the problem isn't that its impossible for apps to match these people to each other as it never happens, rather how to facilitate it on dating apps, what happens in real life.
Right, but a large majority of the 80% of men and women finding each other have done it for millennia without the need for dating apps. In general, dating apps have a higher percentage of traditionally "unappealing" users than the real world, for obvious reasons. Because males are generally the aggressors, in the sense that they compete for attention from females (from an evolutionary biology perspective), obviously there will be more males on dating sites. And if there are a) more males on dating sites, b) more "unappealing" users on dating sites than the real world, then it follows that there will be a lot of unappealing males on dating sites. Not exactly a winning proposition for women.
Women generally get lots of low-effort messages, so they start to ignore most of them; men then generally realise that the probability of their messages getting read is low, so it's not worthwhile to put a lot of effort into them, but better to send lots of message to maximise the probability of being seen.
A lot of men find it easier to send short and generic messages ("Hey ur cute wats up?") to many women rather than taking time to write something thoughtful. The logic is that if you message 100 women, at least a few are going to respond.
As a result of this, female members are under a constant barrage of mindless messages, which is what's being referred to as spam.
> The logic is that if you message 100 women, at least a few are going to respond.
While this is true that some people subscribe to this logic[1], the number of messages (good or bad) that women get seems to out-weigh the number that the men get. I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply[2].
[1] I heard a similar story of someone (a "dad's friend" of a friend a long time ago) that would basically ask every woman at a party for oral sex. He would get lots of slaps in the face, but he never went home empty-handed (allegedly).
[2] I would personally liken it to investing time into job-hunting (i.e. trying to craft a decent cover letter) and then just getting no response from the potential employer. Though depending on the situation one other the other might be more stressful (e.g. searching for a job while unemployed).
I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply
This was documented on the old OKCupid blog. I think the post was taken down after Match bought them.
Men grow frustrated and get tired of wasting their time, so they stop sending in-depth messages. Women are then even less likely to respond, which ultimately sends men into a downward spiral of desperation.
It's not just that if you message 100 women, a few will respond. It's that you tried being thoughtful and genuine and discovered it was a waste of time.
Though it's of course anecdata, this is a huge problem for basically every woman I know who's used the service. Not only is it mostly spam, a lot of it is pretty horrible and demeaning. A few friends post the worst of it to Facebook and tumblr and it's cringe-inducing.
Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.
The male experience on dating sites is soul-crushing. It consists mainly being utterly ignored by everyone. Then, when you read profiles and put in effort, you discover that you're shouting into the void. So you move to copy-paste in part because it hurts less and in part because it gets you more responses.
It's a marketing effort. Your goal is to communicate the benefits of your product (you) to your prospective customers. And just like real marketing, there is a ton of other marketing competing for the same customers. If nearly everyone else is sending copy-paste short messages, do you really think doing the same is going to succeed?
Yes, it sucks to actually read profiles, compose thoughtful initial intro messages, and then be ignored. Just like it sucks to come up with a great startup marketing campaign and then not get the results you were hoping for.
Instead of that's too much work, let's change from rifle/targeted to shotgun/blast, I think you just have to keep iterating and changing how you target, change your marketing media (different sites/venues/ways of meeting people), etc.
I understand the "trough of sorrow" of shouting in the void. But I don't think the answer is to start doing what everyone else is doing - unless you want to get the same results as everyone else of course.
(Not meant to you specifically, Kalium; "you" is meant in a general sense above)
What you've missed - and I implied instead of stating outright - is that the "same results as everyone else" is in fact more desirable. Mainly because it is something other than the null set.
The copy-paste-spam method produces better net results that the thoughtful, targeted approach. The only other more successful method I've ever even heard of rests on data mining OKCupid's users, carefully crafting your profile for them, and so on. Described here: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
EDIT: Also, getting meaningful data is nearly impossible here. Generally all you get is positive response/no response. When most of your iterations come up with a lot of no responses, you've really got nothing to go on. You cannot target without data. The blast approach compensates for that.
Imagine doing a dozen very different marketing campaigns and being greeted with an identical total lack of response from all of them. Hard to learn from that.
Someone mentioned "HerWay" in another comment. I checked it out, and one unique thing they offer (if you are a male user) is, a limited form of analytics on your profile. Important, because men can't initiate contact.
This had one really important piece of information, that seems counter to what a lot of people are suggesting in these comments: a short initial message is all you need (if the match is good.) He finally settled on a single initiating message “You seem really cool. Want to meet?” and it worked.
I was the one who mentioned HerWay. In fact, men can initiate contact to any woman whose profile they can see. Think about what it would take for a site centered on the idea of taking power from men and giving it to women to make that product move.
The guy basically data-mined OKC and gamed the matching system. Then suddenly the site began working for him, since he looked like The Perfect Match to a sizable number of people.
OkCupid is one of the few dot-com companies whose customers have a bad experience (for example by getting no replies), and then blame themselves rather than blaming the company.
If more guys blamed OkCupid, maybe they'd be willing to try things like Dating Ring instead? That'd put pressure on innovators to innovate, rather than stopping at "men need to try harder."
I know what you mean, "traditional" sites like eharmony and Match.com are truly awful. I haven't tried tinder yet, so I can't comment.
But is OkCupid really the best we can do? Is there no combination of computer bits and human processes that would result in fewer guys getting ignored and more getting dates?
The problem is that men and women want very, very different things from dating sites. Now I'm going to follow this by generalizing terribly, mostly because it's easier and faster than couching everything in the most appropriate disclaimers. As other conversations today show, someone will certainly take truly horrible offense to my doing so. That's their prerogative. I'm just trying to communicate the tendencies of groups.
Men want to be able to contact the women who interest them (read: are attractive). Men desperately want to not be filtered out, and will stoop to basically any amount of lying to get around filters.
Women only want to be exposed to the men who interest them. Women want sites and systems to do their filtering and selecting for them.
Right there, there's some substantive conflicts. You have very different strategies from the get-go. But that's not all. It gets worse.
Women don't want to do any of the work or take any of the risk. Women expect men to approach them, and then they will sift through the suitors for the promising ones. And at the same time, men will lie, cheat, and otherwise bullshit to avoid being filtered out so they can spam dick-pics at every woman in range. Think of your typical hormone-driven bar scene.
You'd think you could change these patterns, by putting women in control on a site and inverting the central power dynamic. It turns out that when you do that, people still behave the same way. You wind up having to re-introduce the dynamic you were explicitly trying to avoid in order to get people interacting with one another at all.
In short, the world of online dating is a clusterfuck of opposing strategies and people who will systematically subvert any system you use to impede those strategies. OKCupid wins by not trying to force people to behave a certain way. The result is a shitshow for everyone, but all the alternatives seem to be worse.
No matter what you do, the pattern of men-as-supplicants/women-as-gatekeepers re-emerges. At a guess, it's because that's the culture we live in and it's what people are most comfortable with.
Also, people will be exactly as shallow as technology allows them to be.
I got on okcupid a few years ago after being alone for years and years b/c of depression and social anxiety and in a matter of weeks I was swimming in dates, and in a matter of months I met the woman who's now my wife.
There's a lot that's unpleasant and stressful about online dating, but with a few classes of exceptions it's not society, it's not women, it's not the site, it's not anything else but you that's keeping you back.
While I appreciate the attempted positive message, it's pretty clear to me that it's simply not an accurate reflection of reality. The common experience for guys on OKCupid does not involved any amount of "swimming in dates".
Where do you live? The gender balance on OkCupid varies a lot by region, and needless to say when your gender is rarer (lower supply per demand) you'll have a better experience.
Pretty sure OkCupid is worse for guys in the Bay Area because the influx of software engineers (who are both mostly male, and the kind of people to try online dating) skews the site's demographics.
This is exactly what I've found and exactly what I used to do. So much less painful and so many more dates. The dates themselves, however... didn't always get me what I wanted.
Yeah, that's the risk you take. That said, you're more likely to get what you're after with many runs at a high-risk process than no runs at a low-risk process.
There's actually something of a negative feedback loop that's taking place. Women get a ton of junk messages (spam, inappropriate, etc.) while men get responses to their initial messages very rarely (most often just dead silence). So the women continue to be frustrated by the dozens of terrible messages they get and men continue to get frustrated by the low return on their efforts when they take the time to read profiles and craft thoughtful messages. In the end, it's a lot of effort on both parts to even establish a conversation.
While the feedback on Tinder (where there is less investment required by both to start a conversation) early on was positive in my circles, it's starting to turn really noisy too. In the end, I think we'll see a successful model where you have the low barrier to conversation as per Tinder but a bit more info about the person as per OKC.
Well not spam per exactly, but the ratio of messages is like a couple of orders of magnitude different. A woman's OKCupid inbox can hit the > 100 to 1000 message each week.
> Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches"
Great stereotyping you have going there. Could you share some more insight into your "Women as the gatekeepers and men will hit on anything" life view? Maybe some men would prefer not to have to "swipe right" and face constant rejection? Maybe some women might prefer to approach men first instead of waiting on a man to present himself? Naw, what am saying? Gender roles were defined for a reason. Let's all just stay in our places.
Men and women statistically behave differently in known ways on dating websites.
This is a fact, not advice or a prescription. This also says nothing about how you behave or should behave, or how any particular person you know behaves or should behave. Recognizing this does not mean that you think that the behavior causes the expectation, as opposed to the expectation causing the behavior, the expectation and the behavior both being caused by a third thing or combination of things, or the behavior and the stereotype being a result of random coincidence. It also doesn't mean that other behaviors shouldn't be accommodated, even if it inconveniences the most common usages.
Specifically for Tinder, this is a good strategy. Dating is a numbers game. Online dating, even more so. By spamming right swipes, you increase the chances of finding someone who swiped right on you.
Unless you're a good looking guy. To which, I am not.
ETA: I ended up deleting my account, because even with finding a match, and sending a decent intro message, I still got radio silence from 70% of the matches, which was probably less than 1% of my right swipes.
Eh, I felt it was accusatory and putting words in my mouth (though I didn't downvote it - I can't, since he replied to me).
He seems to have taken my description of general gender dynamics in online dating to be an endorsement of said gender dynamics. This is in no way true.
He seems to also have taken my description of aggregate gender behavior in huge user bases to indicate specific individual behavior - this is also in no way true. There are plenty of users on both sides who don't subscribe to the larger usage trends, but ultimately the trends are pretty overwhelming.
I for one am all for upending gender roles, but we're talking about how online dating works right now, not how it could hypothetically work in a society where gender roles as we know them didn't exist.
It was the phrase "and this model works". You could have said "and this model is very profitable". But "works" implies correctness and fit for purpose which is seen to me as an endorsement.
But yet it works. The tricky thing about gender roles is that while they may not be progressive nor just, much of the participation is voluntary.
There isn't exactly the Gender Role Police sitting around going "NO! SWIPE RIGHT!" "NO, SWIPE LEFT!". These trends are voluntary from the participants.
This may be a bit tragic - i.e., people voluntarily disempowering themselves by reinforcing gender roles that work against them - but yet this happens. En masse even.
"It works" doesn't imply correctness. It just implies that it produces the desired result to a sufficient level of consistency/reliability.
Again with the generalizations that lead to stereotyping.
Beyond that, you must realize that a platform(environment) can reinforce and even encourage a particular behavior. To say that they are all 100% rational actors is not accurate. Research has shown many times that people react differently based upon their environment.
One may see Tindr's popularity happening for a different reason. Dating sites are a network effect business like no other. Tindr was very effective at their initial marketing push at colleges. Could it actually be Tindr's very effective network building and marketing at the early stages that has to do with it's success? Could it be that Tindr is closer to how college age daters work? And once the network effect took hold it spread to other demographics the mechanics were not the reason for it's growth? I'm sure some will agree that much of OkCupid's early success had to do with the fact that people just thought the quizes were fun. Plenty of people go to clubs with music they don't really like because they want to meet new people and that is where the people are right now.
All of a sudden we might discover a situation where a platform is reinforcing gender stereotypes proactively. In many cases against the wishes of non trivial portions of their users simply because that is where the people are? This reinforcement can actually change the views of people outside an environment once they have spent significant time inside of it.
Unfortunately, all of this is a lot more complicated just like stereotypes are. And is why we should take a step back and be careful when saying things that might reinforce them.
The problem with OkCupid is that the experience is horrendous for women. While the men would love to have choice, and "unlimited" matches, in reality this only means one thing:
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam spam. More spam.
The success of Tinder should be in large part attributed to the fact that the basic interaction model removes spam. Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches", making women the actual gatekeepers of conversation - and this model works, though you obviously lose a lot of nuance and depth along the way.