[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.