Interesting. Sometimes you need charging as a design feature, not just as a business model.
1) Hot or Not doesn't have the technical chops to reign in the spam.
2) Hot or Not isn't comfortable with the free dating model anymore, but wants to blame the switch back on something people might have sympathy for.
I actually would bet on the latter, but if it's the former (as they claim), I might be more worried about their future.
It's called spin. A representative of the business is giving a half-credible excuse for reverting to a process that will be unpopular but that will also generate more revenue. Politicians don't change their stances on abortion because of changes of heart...they do it because it will net more votes
For whatever reason it's taboo for a press release to say "we're taking this course of action because it's more profitable", unless you're talking to stockholders and not users, because 1. all business actions are taken with profitability, short term or long, in mind, so it goes without saying 2. you would piss off your users who care only what you give to them and rarely at all whether you're making money or not
Kind of a socialist sentiment, doncha think?
From what I know of the whole deal, these two dudes built the core of the business in 7-30 days, and layered in the payment/dating stuff later on. (pretty obvious/inevitable)
Sounds like a porn site. That's a terribly unmarketable idea.
eHarmony - Subscription
Match.com - Subscription
Myspace - Gets spam; though it's less of an issue because it seems like spammers haven't been able to figure out how to emulate a typical real profile, and because many people use the site to connect with people they know already. In other words it's not technology or effort from Myspace, it's that the model is different.
Facebook - Pseudo-dating site, like myspace, plus it has additional restrictions on creating an account.
Any other dating site I've seen has spam all over the place.
Also, dating sites aren't the only sites susceptible to spam. Craigslist would probably be a spammer's heaven if they didn't have such great community filtering features.
The difference with dating sites, though, is that they only work when members are active, aggressive, and open with their personal information. They work best in a way that spammers will rush to exploit, at which point everyone gets frustrated and stops using the service. This doesn't stop spammers, and pretty soon the ratio of valid profiles to fake ones is ridiculously small.
In that case, it was "asked" for by the users.
Fake profiles are still a huge problem. Facebook handled it early on by severely limiting their audience but that solution simply would not work for hotornot.
You tell me how to effectively solve this without driving your users away... I found some decent solutions but it's not nearly as easy as stopping spam.