[jacques_chester]

I don't know if any of this strikes me as particularly new. Every new female account on any dating site gets absolutely hammered with messages in the first few hours.

What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city.

In Perth, Australia, for profiles above a 90% match to mine, there were 8 male profiles for every female profile.

For profiles averaging five stars, there were 8.5 male profiles for every female profile.

Supply and demand means that the females on the site can really hold out for more. I suspect that this means that the distribution of actual dating activity will be wildly uneven -- the 1% or 2% of males who are really very attractive will clean up almost the entire female pool's attention. And the 50% of females who are above average will have their pick of the top 25% of the male pool.

Perth is not necessarily a good sample, as this town already has a lopsided male:female ratio. But every city I looked at had the same phenomenon. If I turned attractiveness up to maximum and only went to high matches, males always greatly outnumbered females.

I've given consideration to setting up a dating website in a niche market, but that particular niche market will have an even more lopsided male-centric demographic. I've been seriously wondering about just letting men and women know up front what the current ratios are. The theory being that it will deter some men and encourage some women. Alternatively I might try bar tactics: men pay at the door, women drink for free. Again to deter male users and encourage female users.

Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.

[goodside]

"Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience."

Correction: There are more men using the site who happen to be similar to you than there are women. Filtering your pool to people with a 90%+ match percentage is like showing up at a comic book convention and saying "Damn, this city is a sausagefest!" There could simultaneously be lots of Perth women with stereotypically female tastes and interests complaining that those with 90%+ matches are all women.

[jacques_chester]

Granted, but most of the questions aren't of the "what are your favourite sub-cultural markers" variety.

Plus if I turned down the match % I literally never reached the end of the men.

[BadassFractal]

For ccomparison, it would have been extremely interesting to host this experiment in Eastern European countries such as Russia. Due to alcoholism and many other issues, quality women there outnumber quality men and have to deal with competition that is much more alike that for men in the West.

[entropyneur]

As someone who lives in Eastern Europe (Belarus) and has been a heavy and analytical user of dating websites (in fact there is only one in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet) I can say this:

1. Your assumption is false (it's the same as saying "due to obesity and other problems in the US quality men outnumber quality women").

2. Your conclusion is definitely false. The situation is exactly the same as elsewhere: the demand from men is many times higher than the supply of women.

[mootothemax]

It would have been extremely interesting to host this experiment in Eastern European countries such as Russia. Due to alcoholism...

I can't speak for alcoholism here in Poland, but after moving to Warsaw from London, I was quite surprised at the number of young, single ladies. I've wondered if a seeming small difference in the age 15-64 sex ratio[1] of 0.99 vs 1.03 could be responsible, but really have no idea.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

[dimitar]

I just tried quick 15 minute search on Russian-language dating sites. Most of them show how many people of each sex have been online recently. Again there are much more men, at least twice the number of women.

Google also advertised me a site: "Meet men online. Want to marry a foreigner?"

[pja]

For the reverse experience, try signing up a fake profile to Travel Girls (or any of the other similar sites). A new male profile will get pinged within minutes.

[jacques_chester]

So if I'm prepared to directly pay a woman, I can get company?

I kinda sorta already knew that.

[ashconnor]

But you pay in air tickets and hotel rooms.

It's not an escort site...honest.

[wpietri]

What is it, then? Anybody have enough experience to give us the HN-style breakdown (as opposed to the marketing pitch)?

[pja]

From a cursory scan of the online profiles, I'd say TG is a venue for both out-out and prostitution (search for profiles requesting "generous men only" and you'll see what I mean) whilst at the same time being a place for relatively well-off but friends-with-spare-time-or-money poor people to find travel partners (the stated goal of the site).

I have no idea what the breakdown between those two populations is though!

[untog]

I think he was being sarcastic.

[LinXitoW]

The question then becomes: Why are more men than women actively looking for partners?

[Tichy]

Easy: women can always get laid if the want to (not necessarily with whom they want to, but still). It's cheap for a man to try to pass on his genes by sleeping with a woman once. So why not give it a shot, even if the woman is not that attractive? On the other hand, for a woman it is very costly to pass on her genes.

[klipt]

That explains why men are more actively looking for casual partners, but there should still be women looking for long term partners (in fact there should be even more than men).

If there are fewer women than men on dating sites, that just shows that online dating is biased towards the casual.

[jacques_chester]

There's a bunch of wild hypothesising about why men use these sites more than women. For example:

"Men are more promiscuous, so will be on these sites even if they're already in a relationship"

or

"Women are ashamed to be a on a dating website"

But so far as I am aware, nobody knows.

[rmc]

Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.

Lots of men are jerks to women. There's this movement called feminism…

[klipt]

Feminism != lesbianism. Most feminists still want men as romantic partners.

Now if you're saying there are more jerks online than offline, that would be a valid point, but it has little to do with feminism.

[rmc]

I dunno why you're bringing lesbians into this. My point with feminism is that feminism is about treating women with with respect, and not expecting them to do thing, nor critizing their appearance all the time (too fat, too skinny, not enough make up, etc.) This could explain why some women do not like online dating.

[klipt]

Is this any worse in online dating than in real life dating?

If anything, women seem to benefit from sexism in online dating - they take advantage of the fact that men are expected to initiate by rarely doing so themselves. It's much easier and faster to sit back and read personalized messages than to write them.