[jmclean]

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.

[Kalium]

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.

[Chirael]

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)

[Kalium]

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.

[A_COMPUTER]

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.

>http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/

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.

[Kalium]

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.

[Meekro]

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."

[Kalium]

I don't know about you, but I actually have gone exploring. It turns out the bad experience on OKCupid is actually better than most dating sites.

[Meekro]

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?

[Kalium]

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.

[Kalium]

In short, men want an endless buffet of women while women want the build-a-boyfriend workshop.

The two don't match up well.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

I think you must be doing it wrong.

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.

[Kalium]

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".

[klipt]

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.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

At the time I was in central NJ.

[klipt]

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.

[insickness]

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.

[Kalium]

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.