Why Online Dating (Still) Sucks, and a Simple Attempt at Fixing It
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But the thing is, dating sucks. Full stop. And online dating is merely trying to slightly reduce the friction for the very tiniest part at the very beginning of it. It seems to miss the whole fundamental reason why online dating is hard, which is that dating is hard, and not easily abstracted.
Online dating is a misnomer, it's basically just online meeting of people.
Often, the only way would be online. My idea with this app was to reduce the stigma by relying more on Facebook, which is more legitimate and more "real," and to find a way to filter out our existing social circles.
Dating is certainly tough, but so are many parts of life. Meeting people and enabling the process doesn't have to be so tough, and that's where the web can fill a void.
Bingo. Now, here's an interesting question. If you're a profit seeking entity that charges monthly rates for introducing people and you want to increase your take, how do you do it?
You need to keep them wanting to meet more people. As in, you do not want them to find somebody they really like or they'll no longer want to meet other people.
In other words, there is a huge profit motive for you to keep the experience mediocre. Not terrible enough for you to leave, but also not great enough for you to leave with someone you like. There is a huge motive for mediocrity.
BTW I met my wife who is sitting next to me, pregnant with our first kid, on an online dating site. It took me two years and about a hundred first dates. That's after using every filtering mechanism provided to me by the site. It was an avalanche of mediocrity. Good enough to keep you going, but bad enough to keep going.
But if you pre-judge the people you date before you even meet them, they tend to notice. And dismiss you in return. It's pretty easy to tell if you're honestly interested or just playing the numbers.
(Unless you want a shallow ditz. Then by all means, pre-judge ;)
It's as real as rush hour traffic and rainy days, and eventually you learn to just deal with the contingency and not take it personally. You don't judge the person specifically, you just know it's possible. You plan dates at places where you'll still have fun by yourself and so on.
Wait, what? No, dating in person is awesome. New people, endless possibilities, women laughing at jokes, stories and anecdotes your actual friends already heard 50 times, that slight rush with every approach, the new persona every time you're a little bored with your life... it's like travelling but less expensive and only takes an evening at a time.
Online dating sucks because it turns all that delicate social interaction into comparing of compatibility lists while those lists go out the window two minutes into a conversation in real life. Dating sites completely lack the ability to transmit behaviour, mannerisms, social reflexes, looks (photos barely count), all those characteristics of a person that actually matter, and instead basically allow anyone to publish their dating resume.
Because I can't think of anyone, besides those Seduction knuckleheads, who enjoys dating. Single people I know hate dating. People in relationships I know see the end goal that justifies all the awfulness that is dating, but are happy to move past it. And people I know who were in relationships but are now single again (divorced predominantly)are horrified by the thought of being back there.
I think all the people I've managed to convince to meet me have been pleasant to hang out with. It's not so hard.
There are a few scenarios that might seem bad. If you're trying very hard to make an impression, it can make the situation unnatural and you won't feel comfortable either. Another reason might be feeling disappointed if the other person is not attracted to you.
I'm quite talkative and interested in many subjects though. If the other person plays along normally, it's easy to get laid back interaction. It would have been much harder to go on dates when I was 18. And probably the "opponents" have improved a lot too.
I also respect other people's right to not be interested in me. We all have our own lives.
For me the worst part is the early part when you're supposed to get some response out of the women, to get them to meet you in person. The yield is so low that it often feels like it's not worth the effort.
I think I've gotten myself motivated when thinking of it as meeting a random, likely nice and potentially interesting person. And both of you can decide what happens after that. Most likely not much. But even then it's been a quite pleasant experience compared to sitting at home on a computer.
Of all the people I've met through internet dating, I've ended up dating with one, am friends with many and don't keep contact with a few. But all have been positive experiences.
If I reverse the "filter" idea and think about the women that have had the most influence on me, I'd say it'd be pretty hard to separate them from a general mass of good people. So the filtering has probably a really low probability roof.
In keeping with the reverse problem theme, one could of course try the Bayesian approach. You take people who you know match and examine what makes it so you get a probable model. And then apply that model to unknown people. There are probably some general models (people like this are attracted to people like that) but also person specific models (this person is attracted to people like this).
I never understand that point of view, because I love dating - pretty much for all the reasons the GP said. New people, new experiences, etc.
And yes, I know you can start with a date but then switch into something less defined. I'd rather skip the date nonsense altogether. It's not to say that the coffee can't end with a nice coffee and toast in the morning, but "date" assigns way too much importance to that, and not enough importance to, say, building a funky website together, or just talking about mind-controlling ant fungus for half an hour.
Where I live (Scandinavia) we don't do anything fancy. We just go for a coffee or "watch a video" at hers or your place.
The issues isn't the activity choice, it's the assumption about the goal of the meeting. I find that constraining.
By the way, I just thought what I'd like to see in dating websites: (one, stop making them about dating, let's just make it 'meet people) when you get a message, add a button somewhere that says "the sender is being obnoxious". This (quietly) blocks the sender from messaging you (at least for some time), and adds to the user's obnoxious stat. Let's say that a conversation that involves more than 5 messages in a week adds to "interesting" stat. Once you messaged enough people (say, 10), and your obnoxious/interesting stat exceeds some value, you get told that up front, and won't be able to send more than, say, a message every two days until the stat improves.
How would you prevent abuse, though?
Or are you afraid of bots?
Btw, we should talk. You have some cool ideas.
The second thing, getting marked as obnoxious means you're routinely messaging the wrong people. The only change I'd consider to combat this is the site warning you, that the kind of people you're messaging are obviously not that into it, along with any hints it could mine from the data.
Also, I consider your fear misguided. Trust me, the most common reasons for rejection of men by women on dating sites are not looks. The other way around, though...
Well, you need to get out more then, methinks :)
After you send enough messages, you get some vague idea. Say, "people who answered questions x like this are likely to think you're obnoxious", "people don't even read your message — there's something wrong with your nick or the small version of your photo", "if you use the following words, the probability of answer goes up this much".
BTW, on OKC, I would totally love the ability to get analytics on questions I wrote.
Maybe the site could use its users as "captcha" solvers, in the form of rating/tagging content.
Ie the site pops up a random picture of another user occasionally, which the user must rate according to several dimensions ("photo quality", "objective attractiveness", "subjective attractiveness", "fashion impressiveness", "charisma", etc).
Or the site could pop up another user's profile and ask the user to rate it on interestingness, spelling & grammar, charmingness, etc.
But fundamentally it's a numbers game -- the more people you meet, the more likely that you'll find someone that you're compatible with on enough levels. To that end I think that online dating can be really helpful: it makes it much easier to find many other people that you know are also (presumably and hopefully) single.
So, dating sites don't necessarily make dating suck less, they just make it more likely that, with enough effort, you'll be able to stop dating.
The "sausagefest syndrome" is inherently why so many online dating sites suck. Guys sign up and get barely any responses to their profiles or messages. Girls sign up and get immediately overwhelmed with messages, some interesting but the rest mostly boring or creepy. Guys get frustrated at the lack of traction and leave. Girls get overwhelmed by too much attention and leave. It doesn't help when the online dating sites start using fake profiles and pictures to give the false illusion it's not a sausagefest.
I've seen friends sign up for Match.com and be like, "this sucks, they have no matches for me," and then I find they're looking for half-Asian half-Russian college-educated non-smoking dog-owners in a 2.5 mile radius, or something like that. That's almost guaranteed to not work. Unfortunately the alternative is some sort of "shotgun strategy," which if done poorly, means sending a message to 50 girls with the same copy-pasted canned sentences, which only contributes to the women being overwhelmed. You still need to aim the shotgun. I effectively had a routine where I'd spend an evening looking through profiles, only ruling out absolute deal-breakers, and then sent a message that while mostly short, at least made some reference to the actual girl. Out of 20 messages I'd get like 5 responses, which would lead to 2 phone calls, and probably 1 actual date. Rinse, repeat.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying to fill out a profile and all that, but to me that's never been the problem. I feel there's a lot more social friction to get women to sign up for these sites, because while online dating to guys is basically, "well, why not, it's another possible way to meet girls," to girls it's, "this is admitting I am incompetent at/undeserving of finding love." Until that's overcome, online dating will always be a poor experience for a lot of people that try it.
How do you overcome it? In a drunken night with friends a couple months ago, I started rambling about an online dating site that embraced the male-female disparity, and basically would pair up something like 3-4 guys to every girl, and set up dates where you'd all go out like "The Bachelorette." There's a lot of reasons why that idea would be a hard sell, but if anyone ever does successfully do it, just make sure to give me my cut[0].
I've seen some of my friends (women) sign up and get messages within an hour. Even with a barely filled profile.
It seems like a solution should be possible here - maybe estimate quality (ratio of no's to yes's) and limit messaging to popular accounts?
For the "unfortunate" women who tragically receive too many messages, just implement something like LinkedIn's brilliant "InMail" system. Make it cost money to send a premium message. Now these women can focus on premium messages if they don't have time for the spammers. Even better, let the women choose how much it costs to send them a message. There, real-life dating boiled down to its essence.
Wealth is a mate quality metric for males, just as much as attractiveness is for females.
Yes, even the ones who don't date within roughly their own socioeconomic strata - but that's a) the same for men, and b) not the same as what you're implying.
Why in a world where we are trying to promote equality do we 'require' men to make the first move?
Societal equality can't override our biological notions of attraction
Nowadays... eh.
Could be that women are simply lazy and avoid the risk of rejection. They will be approached anyway, so they don't have to move themselves. Also, women usually do make the first step, just not the obvious one of walking up and talking.
I just had to think that it might be a bad strategy for women, because I am a bit like that with recruiters. I am usually too lazy to approach companies I desire to work for and end up working for the next best project a recruiter pushes to me once my bank account falls below a certain threshold. Naturally that way I end up with lots of sub par projects.
When you take away Approach Anxiety, of course you're going to have a massive storm of sausage looking for action. Because, while it sounds cliché, men really are pigs (or more accurately, chimps). :-)
I think it's more complex than this.
It's a convergence of many problems really. The first, and greatest problem with online dating is:
1 - Words are a really fucking shitty communications medium. Few people are good writers, and even fewer people are good writers when limited to the span of a few paragraphs. Body language and personality are far more self-expressive, but we have no good ways to pushing this information across the internet. Because of this, there is a tremendous reduction in range of communication. All the profiles start to read the same, because we've essentially topped out how expressively a regular person can get with 3 paragraphs to describe themselves.
In other words, when you've crunched down people's self-expression to really short paragraphs and a bunch of multiple choice answers, personality disappears. And its place, the only sane metric one profile from another is physical attractiveness. Which leads to the next big problem...
2 - There are no salient indicators of competition online, quite unlike the real world. How many of us here go after statuesque model-types, exclusively? Bueller? But we do it online, because without the ability to appreciate someone's personality, looks are the only measuring stick you've got left. In the real world this is balanced out the fact that competition is extremely visible, especially in an environment like a club or a bar.
You see a girl being hit on by an endless stream of guys. Do you line up and join the fray? Or maybe you find something else?
Online these signals do not exist, which means all men will simply line up to hit on the hottest subset of the population without knowing just how long this sausagefest-line is, and the complement of this is that anyone who isn't in, say, the upper quartile of physical attractiveness, will get crickets (or the spamalot shotgunner-types).
tl;dr, the problem is twofold: poor communication medium means that personality and unique traits are impossible to express well over the dating network, leading to physical attractiveness becoming the only major factor in almost all decisions, and everyone (guys and girls) become way pickier than they would be IRL. Lack of visible competition drives traffic to only most attractive portion of population, where in real life visible competition will drive a considerable amount of "traffic" back towards average lookers.
On OkCupid, they show a dot on each profile to indicate how responsive the person is. My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot, since it is impractical for her to respond to all of those messages. They also have star ratings, which should indicate how generally desirable the person is on the site.
Also, all 1, 2, and 3 ratings are seen only by the person who made the rating so there is no penalty for rating someone low.
But it doesn't matter if the ratings are distributed evenly; there will still be some variance. Users who pay to have "A-List memberships" can use those ratings to search for matches of at least {3, 4, 5} stars to restrict their matches to the more heavily sought.
> " My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot"
Except... every guy has a green dot and nearly every girl as a red dot. This is not a salient indicator of anything - for all you know she's just very particular, but doesn't get a lot of messages (I've certainly seen profiles like this). Or, she might be getting literally hundreds of messages a day. Or hell, maybe she's getting spammed with one-liners but never gets a real message. In anycase, whatever the reason, when 90% of your population has a red dot, it ceases to become a filter for anything.
The "replies selectively" messaging on the site is borderline useless, and certainly doesn't accomplish the competition signaling that would actually work to drive some traffic from one group to another.
1. I'm really, really verbally oriented. If you're not at least decent with words, which usually carries over into being a pretty good writer, that conversation would peter out pretty quickly, whether it started online or not. The people I'd be interested in anyway appear to have plenty of personality.
2. I don't have a picture up on my profile. I recommend this to every girl that bitches to me about online dating. I therefore get almost none of the "Hurr, you're cute, wanna go out?" messages, and when I do, they're obvious dumb spam cause, well...no picture. If someone messages me/replies to a message from me, it's because they think I'm fun.
I think it goes much deeper than that. Think evolutionary psychology and mating dynamics.
Therefore women are "the price" and men have to compete to get them (and by compete I mean "scramble and write hundreds of messages"). Women don't really have to compete to get pregnant.
And what is alpha is always relative to something else, which means that rising female incomes, for instance, will raise the bar for competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-g...
http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-abou...
Supposedly, only something like 40% of men got to reproduce in the Neolithic...
A richer hubby presumably increases survival chances for the offspring (independent of the actual biological father of said offspring). But the fact remains that a woman can easily get laid any time, if she wants to.
There was this famous experiment where students approached other students on university campus and asked them if they would like to have sex. Don't recall the numbers, but there was a real high discrepancy between the sexes, basically most men who were approached by women said yes, whereas hardly any women said yes. So basically as a chick, just walk up to some men and ask.
Of course modern society complicates it a bit because men now have the risk of paternity charges (a societal construct).
1) Only done on 16 girls. Sample size is small. 2) More than 30 years old. Changing mores. 3) Women are likely to fear random men who approach them, the reverse is not true. This experiment should have been done differently: they should have achieved some rapport/comfort with the mark and created some sexual tension, and then asked for sex. My guess is that at least a few of the women would have responded favorably in that case.
Your worldview is a bit bizarre, dude :p
The googling brought up lots of fun stuff :-)
Where do you get that information? I believe that directly contradicts the old (pre-Match.com takeover) OKCupid blog, which, to my knowledge, is the only vaguely unbiased source of dating site statistics.
Of course that system also has its downsides, it encourages creating multiple accounts.
The solution to that is open-data peer-to-peer. Sematntic web technologies solved that problem. Use an ontology editor like Protege to create your profile and publish the data as rdf. Other people would download the data and queries on it.
Instead they actually get paid by letting men message women irrespective of how appropriate the match is(1), and by getting page views by suckering in people to believe more "connectivity" is available than really is there.
(1) Explained in an OKCupid blog post they pulled but a copy is at http://interestingreads.posterous.com/why-you-should-never-p...
If there was a way to reliably match people algorithmically, we'd have seen it implemented by now. Sure, people would leave the site faster, but it would also provide an EXTREMELY in-demand service, allowing such a site to charge massive one-time fees.
If I sold a bona fide 95+% chance of finding one's perfect mate for say $1000, then I would have a LOT of happy buyers. Problem is, it can't be done. Or at least it would require some kind of human-level AI.
There are quite a few human run expensive dating agencies. It is what rich people use. This one for example costs about $100k to sign up.
http://www.orlythematchmaker.com/
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2008-02-12-matchmakers-main_N.htmBy "brown M&Ms", I mean something like Van Halen's Brown M&Ms rider condition; some key piece of text that requires an actual profile read to answer. Almost like a captcha but based on certain pieces of the profile.
The profile owner writes "List 5 of my interests, and my dog's name" and provides a list of acceptable keyword responses. Only messages where the not-captcha is properly filled out get through. (Or, alternatively, they get downgraded in priority.)
This would require people to actually read and parse the profiles, and put some minimum degree of effort into contacting someone.
I can think of several dozen problems with this approach, but I suspect they're surmountable with sufficient cleverness.
(In case the reader hasn't heard about this: Van Halen's extensive rider required a bowl of M&Ms to be provided, with all the brown M&Ms removed by hand, on penalty of show cancellation. The entire purpose of this clause was as an easy way to see if the venue had read the damn contract, and took it seriously. Any time they saw brown M&Ms, they knew something else would be wrong, (probably something dangerous and technical) and started a full re-check of the venue from scratch.)
I'm very interested in dating sites btw, and I have quite a few ideas up on http://ideashower.posterous.com (no time to go thru and pick out the dating-related ones right now, alas).
Edit: pulled them out via Google. Here they are:
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-misc-dating-site-ideas
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-slideshow-a...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-profile-improvem...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-that-gets-r...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with-gamifi...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-walk-in-my-shoes-dating...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-my-dating-profile-did-w...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-staff-of-fe...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-smartphone-video-speed-...
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-adsense-for-dating
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-photo-album-widget-for-...
Then again, to us euros, all Americans are worldview-challenged religious fundamentalists who mock dying poor people in the streets while brandishing an Uzi in one hand and a quadruple cheeseburger in the other. So it goes both ways.
Messages are a pretty important part of the online dating thing. Same thing with profiles. How someone reacted to your profile, how someone presents themselves, all that is really important when looking for people you'd like to talk with. And, personally, I have written quite a few messages on OKC, and never a canned one. Even if someone didn't answer, I hope I provided a bit of entertainment or amusement.
Now, the fact that OKC does thing like showing you profiles of people across the globe even if they're not interested with interacting with someone they might never meet – that's annoying.
I'm not a girl, but the top reasons that I hear about from girls in regards to online dating. 1) there's still a stigma about online dating that some girls won't get over. 2) too many "creeps" who message them. 3) they fear they are getting "played" or are getting a message from someone who just spams the same message. 4) they get way too many messages to sort through.
In fact most girls try to set up filters, "Don't message me if you can't spell or if you don't know the difference between, 'your' and 'you're'". Honestly though I find it hard to believe that girls are that concerned with spelling.
I, as a guy, have to deal with having to prove to girls that I'm not creepy, or spamming message, and on top of that have to message them something to catch their attention. Personally, it's even worse for me when the girl has nothing at all in her profile for me to ask them about.
So what I suggest is, automatically filter out "hey whats up gurl" messages for women. Conversely also filter out any messages that are more than 2 paragraphs in length. Show women pictures and have them rate the pictures by whether or not they would date said person then algorithmically find people on the site that look similar to pictures she favored.
I'm trying to think of some more, but basically make it easier for girls to filter out people they would never date. And somehow make it easier for the guy to know that the girl has some interest in him, besides weird, "winks" and icebreakers.
* Write a 250 word essay about your favorite british guitar pop
* Make a video of you cooking something using pumpkin (my favorite)
* Write me a song using the words panda and musk rat, and about Michigan (bonus points for name dropping the coffee shop with the best cheesecake in town - you'll know it if you've been)
etc.
1. The only good sites are the ones your potential mate is on. Size is a bigger feature than any you can design.
2. If your site sucks, then people get frustrated and everyone leaves. If your site is great, then people get paired off and everyone leaves.
Online dating doesn't just suffer from network effects, it suffers from second order network effects. Unless you're getting a constant stream of new customers into your site every day, your site will fail.
All innovation in online dating comes from the customer acquisition side, not the product side. If you manage to figure out an innovative new form of customer acquisition, you can make a go at creating a viable new entrant to the market. If you can't, it doesn't matter how good your product is, you will fail.
my only devil's advocate response would be that if a site delivers very well and people start hearing about people who successfully met on that site (and there isn't a stigma admitting it), then this could drive new users....
This solves the chicken and egg problem.
People can make money on this by offering hosting services. It can be a hassle for the average user to run and update the software on their computer so many might opt to pay for a cloud service.
This model can also be used for business discovery. Google and ebay can only do so much, you might want complex querying and reporting.
edit: The software solution can be as simple as publishing rdf data. The Protege ontology editor (open source) is already available. Users could simply start publishing their data profile right away, and conventions would form around what you should be putting in it. Protege also has querying facilities built in already. This was actually the semantic web vision.
This would be a complete dealbreaker for me, even without all the other things that this service would share from my profile. I would never want there to be an easy way for people from the dating site to be able to find me on another site - you can shut down a dating profile or discontinuing using the service if someone's bothering you, but with this it sounds like complete strangers would be able to find/message me on Facebook outside of the site's control, and I wouldn't want to stop using Facebook because of some creeper. And if it's using publicly available Facebook data, it means I need to make a ton of my information public and accessible for the service to be useful.
That's not really worth the risk of using the service to me, and is probably why you don't frequently see dating sites that reveal full names/near-exact locations as you're suggesting. If you can find a way to display Facebook profile details without revealing the person's full name, you'd probably have more luck recruiting people.
Your name is already out there all over Facebook - friends of friends, random people in groups you're part of, people going to your events - they can all see it... why is it different to give your real name to a (real) person who matches very specific criteria that you set yourself, and which basically just signifies "I'm Single, and you may be a match" ?
Yeah, and even that exposure can be a pile of hurt when it comes to stalkers, creeps and weirdos. I have to say I don't see the value in real names being visible to people on the dating site unless I choose to share that. The site should let you choose a pseudonym, full stop.
This said, I don't rule out the idea of signing up for this site. But I'm a male, so I don't have nearly the level of concern as women do, and rightfully so. There are creeps who devote way too much effort to tracking down chicks and harassing them--or worse. It's sickening.
For members of groups who I might not know - yes, people in groups I'm in know my full name, but probably don't know enough about my life to make it worth behaving creepily towards me - and if they did, any actions would likely remain virtual. However, your service is telling people my full name, and states that it will "sort by location" - so now someone knows my name, knows around where I live, AND knows that I am single (so it's more likely that I'm not living with a male)? That's not information that I'd feel comfortable broadcasting to people who have no accountability.
I know I'm focusing on the creeper/stalking issue, and I'm sure that's frustrating feedback when the majority of your users will be using this service with honorable intentions. I'm just trying to explain why I and most of my female friends would be instantly turned off by a service that shares this information - and from what I've read, attracting female members is a huge issue in the online dating space. It's really something you should try talking to female friends/family members/a focus group of potential online daters, because I don't think it would be an uncommon point of view and you don't want it to keep people from joining your site.
Instead of trying to use the Internet to solve a problem that is better solved in real-life (i.e. meet people and talk), why not create a whole fiction world where you can be anything you want. Basically, it's a game where you put the profile picture you'd like to have, and the 'about me' you'd like to be. So, you talk with lots of strangers and avoid the awkard thingy while still having fun and meeting people. Of course, after some time, it will naturally start to be more intimate and it'd be possible to share more real stuff.. but that's not even necessary.
Think about all the guys and girls in couple who'd like to have fun dating again but can't because they're already in relationship? Or single players who just want to have fun?
Here it is. It's rough around the edges but I hope it inspire someone.
People have implemented that in meat-space as the city of San Francisco.
If people find that the rest of their life tugs on them, perhaps you could sell an all-in-one escape month? It'd be perfect for the baby boomer who wants to try one month at not being the same person. Just take care of all necessary daily/weekly/monthly chores for a month.
(Obvious expansion into doing people's chores for them, pairing with tourism boards, etc.)
This might work for an online game, but not for dating. I've used many of major online dating sites over the years and one of the things that bothers me the most is people mis-representing themselves.
It usually leads to awkward situations and hurt feelings. This is why I try to get a phone number and meet in person as soon as possible.
Your game would have this built-in and only make the situation worse (as far as dating goes).
If I want my romantic life and social life to intermix that will be my decision, not that of some webapp. There is a reason Dating Sites exist separated from Social Sites, and it is not because no one has thought of the idea before.
Personal Preference: Ne'er the twain shall meet.
Just to be clear, it is a good idea, but I personally would not trust that small a level of separation between social and romantic life. There may be a market in it, I am not a member of that demographic.
EDIT: In other words, my Facebook profile is not a dating profile.
I think YC was right when it said you have to concentrate on solving the chicken-and-egg problem.
"...anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."
If you're passionate about building an online dating site, I'd spend all of my time iterating ways to get users. Try a bunch of different ideas. And fail fast.
You're missing at least two things. Assuming (as is reasonable) that you're principally aiming at the heterosexual market, you face these issues:
1. Men and women are different. How do you address gender imbalances?
2. Not all women are equally appealing. How do you address attractive women being overwhelmed with male attention?
Some may object that I didn't include "attractive men" in #2. See #1. In particular, even the most attractive men are virtually never overwhelmed with female attention on online dating sites. (Those who are probably enjoy it.)
also, this is not principally aimed at heterosexuals - all orientations are welcome and i actually suspect that smaller groups like gay guys may find it more useful since these communities are smaller and filtering out current friends is more valuable.
This is really interesting if true (which I think it probably is) because real life is the opposite, at least if you measure by sexual partners: by definition, the average number of partners for men and women (in a heterosexual population) is the same, but it turns out that the variance for men is much larger; a few many get many women and most men get few, while most women get a typical number of men.
Incidentally, this observation puts the lie to the idea that having a stud/slut dichotomy is a "double standard". Having different standards for men and women makes sense; being a stud is hard, while being a slut is easy. Indeed, the vast majority of whining about "gender double standards" can be rebutted with the simple observation that men and women are different.
* CAREFULLY write your profile so that it will attract the kind of person you'd like to meet. be playful, fun, and funny.
* DO NOT BE OVERLY SERIOUS: unfortunately there's still a bit of a social stigma against online dating so people are often already on their guard and will already be wary of everything they read. so keep the profile and messages light and playful.
* okcupid has a great feature that lets you see who has visited your profile, use this to your advantage. you've already carefully written your profile to attract your ideal partner, so see who it's attracted. if someone has visited your profile a couple times already, the chances that they'd be receptive to a message are much higher
* do not get hung up on a single person. "OMGZ my soulmate didn't reply to my message! IM FOREVER ALONE!!" well, if you two were truly compatible, don't you think they'd find your profile and message interesting?
tl;dr be playful, have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously
Imagine a world where nobody is concerned about privacy. After a while, your search engine of choice infers from your search queries that you don't have a girlfriend, and occasionally shows you a message along side the result page, telling you about a girl who has search for several similar topics than you have, roughly your age and living not too far from you. She'll get a similar message, and if you both agree, a communication channel of some sort will be made available.
Don't reject the idea as being creepy. It might sound creepy, but it could actually work. Search engines know a lot about you, and might find matches without you having to set up a profile, and mostly bypasses the incentive to lie in order to make you look more attractive.
Oh and of course it wouldn't just work for dating, but also for finding friends in general.
If I had a job at Google, I'd love to try my hand at prototyping such a thing.
What they don't realize is that the simple choice of which service they use can act as a filter. For instance: I wouldn't want to date you privacy freaks and you wouldn't want to date me. Already filtered down the sea of singles by just signing up.
Just read any post on HN about any site that uses Facebook Connect. Half the comments will be about how they refuse to so much as look at that button.
I disagree that going full-on-public is the right approach.
For women, especially, they get bombarded with all kinds of creepiness. I think it'd be hard to get people to waive their right to hand out information at the pace they feel comfortable.
Anything that alienates women from a dating site is a deal-breaker, IMO. The dating sites that do well are the ones that can attract and retain female users.
That said, there's a kernel of an interesting idea here. The process of dating is revealing increasingly intimate details about ones life. If you reach a point where it feels uncomfortable, you break up.
For the "online" portion of online dating, e.g., sending messages back and forth on OKC, this is very explicit. Guy sends girl a message. Girl responds. Guy reveals name. Girl reveals name. etc. Until eventually contact information is exchanged, and then you arrange an offline date.
So the "core" problem of online dating is one of building comfort.
One Facebook-powered feature that could build comfort might be to show how many friends you have in common (but not who). Another might be to show where your Facebook likes intersect.
But forcing people to reveal all their information immediately really runs against the grain of the whole idea of dating.
But non-technical people under 30? No problemo.
If you aren't interested in those benefits, I would argue you're essentially not interested in the site and should use any of the myriad other sites.
http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-misc-dating-site-ideas
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(I just pulled this out of Google, so it's not sorted by awesomeness or anything).
And I think the reason for dating sites being quite bad is not, that nobody sees the problems. It's just that there are way bigger problems that need to get solved first and when these problems are solved you don't need to solve any other problem anymore to be successful (at least in the short run). And the big problem of all social communities and market places (dating site is something of both in my eyes) is that you need get people to come in. If there are a lot of people, other's will come automatically. If there are no people, nobody will come. The software or the service quality is only a second rank problem. So I wonder, how do u solve the community problem first?
"Setup your account! Don't want your friends to see your profile? click here! Want to see more people? Click here!"
So people connected through facebook can see everyone (minus their friends), and people who aren't can only see others who are not. Keep pushing them on facebook connect, when they do a search, tell them how many people they are missing out on! (3 results, 98 results if you click here!)
I remember seeing a very interesting idea for a dating website a while ago on HN, where you're matched based on activities/events you're interested in going to. I really liked the idea, as it matches based on interests, and it automatically answers the what-are-we-going-to-do question.
They've been doing a significant blast of advertising lately.
I agree with the concept of streamlining things. But I strongly oppose the requirement of real-names-only. It should be possible to use FB for authentication/etc, but still maintain anonymity within the "matching pool".
I think that this is the main issue with any online-based communication: it is an awful attempt to approximate talking to a person in real life. As a middle-ground solution, I think match sites should basically arrange for online games/experiences that show a person's reactions to things. That's how one truly shows their personality.
I don't mean games in a traditional sense, either. Maybe rounds of some kind of live trivia with a twist, or whatever. So basically, nothing new. Just usual meet-market ideas, translated better into online-only experience.
And of course the overall thing, too, is that it should be fun. The real goal is to enjoy the process, just like with meeting people in real life. It's so much better to just have fun with the overall journey of social interaction, rather than labour towards an abstract goal of filling a "mate" placeholder slot.
C'mon, Facebook is not the missing link.
- You're attractive
- You're a social person
- Both 1 and 2
You can be an attractive person, but shy, and still get dates pretty easily. You can be just average looking, but very social and outgoing, and still get dates pretty easily. If you have both, the world is likely your oyster. These types of people generally never visit dating websites, because they don't need to.
With that in mind, we can conclude the following:
- Dating websites are mostly full of people who do not apply to the list above (e.g. unattractive introverts).
- There are still of course attractive and social people using these sites for various reasons, but they are the minority.
- Some of those reasons that minority exists may be because they have "issues", and regardless of being attractive and/or social, have trouble maintaining lasting relationships offline.
This means we have a mix of unattractive introverts not only mixing with each other, but mixing with attractive extroverts who are unstable in relationships. Then you have the "sausage fest" factor that has already been mentioned in the comments tossed into the mix, along with some dating websites simply being really, really bad (the only good one I can think of, which still has all of these problems, is OkCupid). This all sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
My theory on what might actually work, and how online dating needs to evolve:
- In my experience, my best relationships have been a product of serendipity. You can filter through potential matches all you want, use data to try and find that perfect someone, but 9 times out of 10 when you actually meet, you'll feel absolutely no spark or connection, even if you both love all the same things. It's that spark that matters, and I've never experienced this through anything but a serendipitous encounter.
- The actual problem is that we shouldn't be sitting in front of our computers looking for potential mates. We should be out finding them, in real life, where the interactions actually matter, and serendipity can do its thing.
- This means we're trying to solve the WRONG problem. We're trying to make dating websites better. Instead, let's make it easier to get out of the house, and do the best we can to "engineer serendipity", or at least put you in situations where it's more likely to take place.
- While I'm not going to plan out an entire solution here, it would likely involve some of the following: It has a mobile aspect, it involves overlapping friend circles (think degrees of separation, or how you'd meet a match at a wedding or dinner party), it involves social events and situations, and it's built in a way that is perceived as safe, non-creepy, and by people who understand real world social situations and complexities (i.e. not made by the introverts who can't date without a website).
At the end of the day, we need a solution that helps you easily put yourself into social situations you wouldn't otherwise be in, and replicates what happens and actually works in the real world, without feeling creepy or forced.
Other than that I think this is really nicely done and a great idea. However, apparently there are no 20-40 year old girls in Seattle yet. :)
Why don't more sites stop trying to force some artificial romance virtually and study how to get groups of people to meet in person and foster relationships.
> Fake pictures. People always try to game the system, and the realm of dating is no exception. It's not unheard of to create a fake Facebook account for casual social engineering.
> Poor filtering. My personal experience doesn't match with this but YMMV. OkCupid has rather good filtering using not only quantitative data (e.g. location, age range, tagged interests) but also more qualitative data (e.g. question system). I suppose Match.com was somewhat less effective.
> Can't tell who is actually interested. That's dating for you. Also, being direct isn't creepy unless you're directly being creepy.
> Creating a profile is a huge pain. Probably the most legitimate beef with online dating. I found OkCupid pretty straightforward and well-incentivized, but YMMV. I wonder how indicative someone's Facebook profile is, though, of what they offer in a relationship; plenty of people have profiles brimming with the minutiae of daily life instead of statements about their fundamental beliefs and desires.
> You may see someone you know. This doesn't have to be a huge deal. I saw two of my friends on OkCupid, one of whom I was romantically involved with previously. We had a good laugh about it and moved on. Don't buy into the assumed social stigma of online dating -- it's not the end of the world for someone to know you're putting yourself out there.
> Data never disappears online. I didn't know what to make of this point, honestly. Don't people just delete/archive/ignore old messages? Is there some concern that these become public knowledge?
> Rejection is painful, and there is more of it online. As another commenter has said, dating is a numbers game. Online dating increases exposure to potential dates, so rejection increases -- though (based on my experience and those of friends who have also done online dating) roughly in proportion to what is experienced with in-person dating. There's always a point in dating where someone can get rejected; it can actually be liberating to have small rejections up front instead of big rejections down the road (for several reasons, not least of which is the lost opportunity cost of the failed relationship). No matter how much a site tries to shelter a user, it can't last forever. [ See also Rejection Therapy discussed on HN: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rejection%2... ]
> It just feels juvenile. OkCupid allows good flexibility in how you express yourself. The question system helps some people elaborate on topics that are particularly salient to their interests; other people are more comfortable writing short essays; still others are comfortable summing themselves up in a few bullet points. Also, on this count you've disregarded a crucial intermediate step between one's online profile and an in-person date: online messaging. The profile establishes interest, messaging confirms interest, in-person dates explore whether interest becomes a relationship.
krausejj, I'd be interested to know which sites you've used to reach your conclusions -- and, sincerely, best of luck refining the concept and creating a successful product.
In response to a few of your points: 1) It is very hard to fake a Facebook account. It's hard to get those 1000 friends and tacky drunk pictures from college. 2) OKCupid already does qualitative filtering ad nauseum - the efficacy is debatable but for someone who wants more objective filtering that they can understand and doesn't take a long time to implement, Circl.es could be better. 3) Rejection is part of the game, but it can be reduced by making sure that you're only considering people with whom you have a shot - allowing people to say "no" before you even see them, filtering both ways, and forcing people to make simple choices early on can reduce the pain.
To be honest, my biggest beef with OkCupid is the complexity. A new user coming the site can barely understand how it works - it takes time and a lot of work to use the system. The other day I had a friend join and I just typed okcupid.com/profile/his_name into my browser and pulled up his profile (I'm not a member of the site). He was horrified! I know they have privacy settings, but it takes time for new users to "get" this. Furthermore, I have personal doubts about whether personality matching really works - I think the depths of the human psyche might be a bit beyond computing.... but that's just my opinion.
Ultimately, OKCupid is a very cool site - many people love it. My site is different and, if it is successful, will have a different set of strengths in terms of matching people. If you weren't married I'd encourage you to at least Circl.es a trial run to see how different it is!
On topic: Can I expect more or less dates if I put my political views as Fascist...?
By the way, to my knowledge, nobody has tried peer-curated online dating. i.e. an interested friend does the awful work of searching and matching, forwards minimal details for approval from both parties, and coordinates the meeting. In other words, online dating which more closely approximates traditional social methods.