[tomphoolery]

Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the men are sending messages to basically every girl that they see. They play the numbers game, and it's all about how big of a net you can cast. I don't foresee any dating site being more successful than the current heavyweights until they can get rid of "fishing" so women aren't unmotivated to go on the site and men aren't wasting their time sending the same message to 1,000 different people.

[beat]

And at that point, they're competing not against automation, but the very human process of "Wouldn't those two make a cute couple?"

I like setting up my friends. Lots of people do. I've had some success at it, too (a couple of marriages, even). And I suspect, although I have no evidence, that friend-driven setups and blind dates are more likely to succeed than dating sites are.

fwiw, Grindr got around that particular problem by focusing on gay men. But that's a large niche, really.

Beyond the problem of men drowning women in messages, there's a question of the quality of those messages. The crap I see my female friends get online from dating sites is appalling. So many men have no idea how to approach women and make themselves appear attractive - and many of them have no idea just how much competition there is. Meanwhile, women have to plow through dozens of dick pics, hoping to maybe find one guy worth talking to. Their odds aren't any better, but for different reasons. Sigh.

[Kalium]

Hi. I am a male. I have seen how abysmally low the typical message quality a woman receives is. I learned from it.

Sad to say, what I learned is that given the sheer quantity of low-quality messages, investing in message quality is a poor decision. The quality may be significantly higher and there may be an elevated chance of a response... but the odds of the message being read at all are quite slim.

The chance of an unread message getting a response is, obviously, zero.

[klipt]

Well I wish I had a friend who tried to set me up. Instead I spent about 6 frustrating years getting nowhere with online dating, then eventually lucked out with the right girl, and only now do I get the 'cute couple' comments.

[Kalium]

There's a wrinkle that makes it worse. Specifically, sites that deliberately invert the power dynamic run into the problem that when women must initiate all communications, you don't get a lot of communications. Tinder avoids this by requiring blind consent from both parties.

What do both have in common? Women feel they have the power. In the case of Tinder, women have the power, don't get spammed, and men devolve to the common case of spammy behavior.

It's the best of both worlds. Or worst, since users tend to be exactly as shallow as their technology allows.

[onion2k]

I'm sure you could solve that by "spam filtering" people's inboxes, just with a slightly tweaked heuristic model. People would get fewer messages but they'd be of a much higher quality. To be honest I'm surprised sites don't already do this.

[asnyder]

Co-founder of a relatively new service (http://www.meshbetter.com) that incorporates this via our unique "Mismatch" technology, while it protects women and gives them better experiences, our data shows that Men don't necessarily learn from this.

[Kalium]

OKCupid tries something similar with its filters. Men lie their asses off to get around it.

[onion2k]

I'm talking more about filtering on the message content than filtering based on account settings. For example, if a message is 90% the same as the previous 3 messages the user sent just silently redirect it to /dev/null. Users would quickly learn that a cut'n'paste approach gets rapidly diminishing returns. That alone would slow down a lot of the men who just spam messages to every woman on the site, improving the experience for them while leaving the genuine men on the site unaffected. But I'm sure OKCupid could do much cleverer things.

[Kalium]

Users would quickly adapt. Something simple like spinning syntax would address that. I agree, OKCupid could be more clever, and build systems much harder to get around.

That said, I don't think the incentive is there for them to do it. Even if they removed 100% of all spammy behavior, I don't think it would solve the problem of message volume. If we assume that skimming a profile and writing a personalized message takes five minutes, a "genuine man" user is able to churn out a dozen messages an hour. Women would get less than the hundreds of messages they get today, but still far too many to work with.

From what I've seen, there's a basic contradiction at the heart of online dating. In general, women only want to be contacted by men who they are attracted to and interested in. Also in general, men live in fear of being ruled out and missing their chance with a woman they find interesting.

No spam filter can help you there.

[woah]

Do you mean the multiple choice questions? Or do they actually have message filtering?

[Kalium]

Last I knew - and it's been a while - you could set filters on criteria such as age to avoid getting messages from users you wanted to exclude.

But yes, the multiple choice questions are subject to the same problem.

[jaredsohn]

Here are the choices for message filtering (they updated it over the past year or so): gender, age range, whether they are located nearby, whether they are single, match %

Also, if the user pays for A-list they can filter on: how long the messages are, hide if it contains certain words, filter by attractiveness.