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Comment by imp | Hacker News Reader

So the summary is that a longer message has a higher chance for a response, but it's more efficient to just spew out a lot of shorter messages and spam everyone.

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Long, rambling messages inspire feelings of pity and guilt. The longer the message, the more likely the recipient will feel obligated to send a polite response. Also, when a woman sends a polite negative response to a man, he's likely to respond with, "Thanks for responding, good luck in your search!" That shouldn't count as "starting a conversation," but according to this blog post it does.

This carries the implicit assumption that everyone you're messaging is equally important for you to get a date with.

Overcommitting to any one person based upon an OkCupid profile without even having messaged them seems like a fallacy too. It's probably best to narrow down a reasonably sized bucket of people to message, without too many hopes or priorities about which one you end up with.

Oh, I'm not saying that you should 'overcommit.' Just that 'spamming everyone' isn't really a great idea.

At which point spending ten times as long on each message is probably still worth it.

Depending on the opportunity cost of your time, yes.

Short introductory messages are, however, useful for screening out people. After that you can go long. Even with a narrowed down pool, you're wide enough that being able to message the entire pool rather than a subset should be the more effective option.

copy/paste? How does that study account for that? Messages could be very long but copied very quickly.

Frankly, this is pretty close to link bait in my book (hot topic, no substance)

It is assumed that longer messages take longer to compose. But that's only true if you're starting from scratch every time. You should instead write one good generic message and send it out to many people, only inserting one sentence to reflect on something specific to the particular profile.

I think (smart) women can usually deduce that you've done that, and tend to react negatively.

Your assumption is that he is looking for smart women.

The reaction you'll get is, "He's really slick at promoting himself." Most women will speak this sentence with a curled lip and a tone of disdain, but if you're looking for women who like a guy with an elevator pitch, this just might work.

I think that's unlikely, but it would be an interesting experiment to find out for sure.

If so, then maybe some middle ground will work. E.g. the more interested you are, the more you customize the message.

Yes, this was my first thought. If I was seriously stressed for time, then I'd agree with idea of optimizing for overall percentages. But if you really want to optimize the chances that a specific person will reply to you, then it seems as if longer is better. Still, I'd like to compare a short, witty, well-crafted, personally tailored message to a longer, more-generic one. (Not that that could be measured statistically...)

On that note, it'd be interesting to somehow mix this data in with (self reported) happiness of people who end up together. Not sure how... maybe happiness (1 - 10) vs length of original message.

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