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Comment by ianterrell | Hacker News Reader

> The worst side effect of the current scoring system, is that a spammer could easily answer only the questions with obvious answers (basic facts and display of non-bigotry) and get a decently high match percentage with a lot of people.

That is exactly what I did which led to my meeting my (now long-term) girlfriend. I was receiving about 5 profile views/week with 500 questions answered. I scrapped them all, answered 20 or 30 questions with non-offensive answers, and skyrocketed to 60-100 profile views/week.

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I don't know what your view/message ratio is but I can't imagine any guy has any decent ratio. The thing I have noticed with online dating is this: girls get a gang of messages + views and guys get some views. This is true with all the guys I know who are on okcupid. The 60-100 views/week for you is what girls I have dated on there say they get in messages, which I'm sure you know is much harder thing to accomplish.

The art of online dating, IMO, is not in the questions answered but the messages sent and secondly how non-offensive your profile description is. Include keywords "Hiking, Laughing, Friends/Family, Good Beer" and you're in like gin.

My 2cents :)

Depends what you're looking for. But sure, adapted to your, um, target market.

If you keep the denominator low, you can get a high view/message ratio. Mine is like 20%, but I only get like 5 views a month. ;-)

Side note: your view count seems to depend a lot on how active you are. I check back perhaps once every couple weeks, which means most of the time I never show up in the all-important "Online now" or "Online in the last day" search results. Hence girls who find my profile tend to be really looking, and more likely to message. If I'm online regularly for a couple days in a row, my view count goes up, my message count stays constant, and the view/message ratio goes way down.

A funny profile helps a lot too. I copied Dr Evil's family therapy monolog[1] into "The most private thing I'm willing to admit here," and got over a dozen messages in a week, including my first contact with the woman I'm now married to. :-)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMIDpJ8H7H0#t=1m58s

But do you actually want 60-100 profiles/week? It's not like you can go on 60-100 dates/week.

I guess I can't argue with success, but it seems like the best use of the site is to select for the kind of people you would actually enjoy meeting. And the best way to get people to look at your profile is to write them a message which you spent ~5 minutes thinking about.

That assumes 1 view = 1 date, when I'd bet the conversion rate of views -> messages -> dates is probably way, way lower.

100 views = 10 messages = 1 date seems like a ballpark, but there are so many variables that it must be different for everyone.

As a guy, my ratio is more like 3000 views = 10 messages = 2 dates.

Of course views/week is not necessarily the best measure of success. Those 5 views a week for 500 questions may have been excellent matches, whereas hundreds might have been poor matches. I admit though that it's more likely a numbers game.

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