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Comment by niccaluim | Hacker News Reader

Here's a real sample of most of the messages women get on dating sites:

hi [that's the whole message]

u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]

hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady

This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?

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I moderated on OKCupid for years, and this is so, so true.

In fact, it usually went more like:

"Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you"

"Thanks, but no thanks"

"Fine bitch, you ugly anyway"

That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.

The first site that can reliably filter this stuff out before it even gets to the target will probably make enough money to form a small black hole. As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?

>As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?

I also worked as a moderator for a (local) dating site. We only checked on the messages that were reported either by the users or by the anti-spam filters. Also this was clearly specified in the privacy policy and EULA pages.

No, it will cost them money because it's the men spending all the money on subscriptions. If they knew their messages were filtered they'd leave it droves.

You're assuming that everything would continue to work as it does now. I'm proposing that if you can filter out the dickheads, you could end up with a site where it's no longer just men signing up. If you're the only site where women actually want to sign up, then you'll get all the men too, and you'll rake in the cash.

Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.

I did see one girls 'research'. Any time a guy on a dating site told her how 'fine' she was, she said "Thank you" or "Yes".

9 times out of 10, the response was "Well, you ain't all that".

The implicit assumption was that girls should feel flattered to have some random man tell them they're attractive, and have no ego or self-confidence of their own.

Right, I know personally of more success stories from Everquest and WoW (and maybe one eHarmony story) or other random online communities than actual dating sites.

Maybe there's space for a site like this where only the women are allowed first contact.

you mean tinder for women? it's called bumble

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