[sage_joch]

They have identified the problem with online dating: men don't get responses and women get bombarded with messages. It seems like a simple fix might be to have a rule that says only women can initiate conversations (for the heterosexual segment). Has this been tried yet?

[jey]

Agreed. Maybe make it so women don't even have to send the first message, and instead just click an "I'm interested" button, which then notifies the guy so he can send a message if he wants. This addresses several problems: if women are going to be screening/filtering anyway, might as well have them do it upfront and only get messages from people they are interested in (instead of being bombarded with crap), and men would be incentivized to write better messages instead of sending a high volume of low-quality crap. This is also in line with some (possibly bogus) social psychology research[1] that suggests that women are the ones who usually initiate courtship by signalling through non-verbal cues, even though the first "overt" move (like going up and starting a conversation) is usually by men.

On the other hand, there's a real question of whether women would be willing to put in the time/effort to view profiles and mark them as interesting or not interesting, but I bet that on current dating sites women do browse profiles pretty regularly but stop short of actually messaging people they're interested in. (Can someone with access to actual data confirm/deny this?)

1. Stuff like this: http://evolution.anthro.univie.ac.at/institutes/urbanetholog...

[citricsquid]

(Normally) women don't initiate, even if they're interested.

[makomk]

Yeah, and on the flip side I doubt most men will be comfortable with women initiating until the social norms around turning women down become less messed up.