Seems way off topic.
Sometimes it seems as if HN-users are feeling so guilty about the whole bro-gramming topic, that they up vote anything that has to do with women..
Sometimes it seems as if HN-users are feeling so guilty about the whole bro-gramming topic, that they up vote anything that has to do with women..
I think a story about the way an important aspect of human existence turns into a market response to the collected needs of individuals would gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
Someone who cracks that is going to be rich.
Perhaps one of the steps to cracking it is understanding why the current situation sucks for participants.
The basic problem comes down to money. Imagine you have a really good dating site and everyone finds their perfect partner within a matter of a few emails and dates. Thereafter they no longer need the services of the dating website.
Hence to make money from a dating website you need people to not find dates, find partners or marry. Because as soon as that happens they stop paying their subscription fees. Keep them suckered for as long as possible, as in years, offering glimpses of false hope.
Personally I don't see why it has to be this way. If I was a benevolent dictator I would make sure there was a free dating website, make it mandatory for single people to be on there and force the cruft dating websites out of business. Ultimately dating is good for the wider economy, a hopeful date is a no expense spared event for those with expense to spare. Our politicians are forever pandering to families and family values as if they are the only people that need to be looked out for.
That said, it's telling that Google has gone to such great lengths to add other features and services in order to present more adverts.
The person who does better than Match.com is going to be Zuckerberg-level rich.
In one bored night you could start a conversation with the cute girl that works with your friend Sara, your friend Jenny's sister, and your cousin Sue's roomate. Social media makes dating like shooting fish in a barrel.
In reality, they suck no worse than any other way of meeting people.
One thing that might help, would be reducing noise that women have to deal with -- e.g. by limiting number of messages users can send per day, or something like that...
In my experience, online dating has been noticeably way, way worse than other ways of meeting people. Meeting people through activity groups and friends of friends has consistently worked literally infinitely better for me. I.e., I've expended far more effort on online dating over the years, and had zero results (no relationships), and spent far less effort meeting people casually or through friends doing things I was already doing, and had lots of relationships that way.
(2) Many, perhaps most people, misrepresent themselves in their profiles, making "shopping" all the harder. In my experience this is true of women, but women say that men lie too.
Attraction is much easier to sense in person. Once you're attracted, the answers to a bunch of fact-based questions don't matter so much.
The website needs a large amount of potential matches on the site. So, once you sign up your profile is never removed. That means people looking sometimes have to trawl through dead profiles.
You earn money by charging people money. Sometimes that's for reading messages people send you. Sometimes it's for replying to messages. Many sites send fake messages.
Many sites are run by a small number of operators and they buy and sell profile information among themselves. This would be unacceptable if the profiles were genuine, but they're often fake. So there are huge amounts of fake people sending fake messages to real people on websites just to get them to pay to subscribe.
But even the good sites have problems. See, for example, OkCupid. (which is a very good site.) There's a small number of people on there who have little intention of actually dating. They're just meeting online people. OKC have taken steps to reduce that (really, they should have opened up a pay-for forums, a bit like suicidegirls. SG had "come for the titties, stay for the forums", OKC could have "Come for the dating, stay for the community". (Yes, I'd like a free sub if you ever do that, OKC)
Or people just have wildly unrealistic expectations.
And, on top of all that, you have the regular suckiness of dating.