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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Women receive more messages from men then men receive from women. From complains that women leave in their OKCupid profiles I would say that a lot of these messages are not from people trying to intelligently converse with the women that they are trying to connect with. Seemingly common things:

- Messages that are too short. E.g. "hey babe" doesn't mean much, when a women gets 10 - 20 "hey babe" messages in a day.

- There are men that get frustrated at the lack of response from women, and start turning their messages into "form letters" which don't show any level of having read the woman's profile.

- Initiating conversation with sexual propositions.

- Depending on the platform, sending unsolicited pictures of genitalia.

While some of these might not qualify as "spam" compared to a 419 scammers emails, I would say that wading through all of that seems akin to wading through one's spam folder...

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Broadly speaking, this is what happens when the effort/volume tradeoff runs into low response rates and low read rates. The effort required to write a better message does not correspond to a sufficiently high chance of a response. Couple that with strong evidence that profiles and messages don't matter nearly as much as photos.

The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.

> women publicly opine to want

This comes across as cynical towards the women on dating sites. The problem is that the women on dating site become a lightning rod for messages. If every message were of a kind that interested a particular woman, how would she respond to (e.g.) 10-20 messages from new people every day? She's likely not going to end up going on dates with multiple people at a time, and if she finds someone long-term, it's (more than likely) only going to be a single person. She likely will only be able to carry on a few meaningful conversations at a time, and the rest just get dropped. If she were trying to meaningfully respond to everyone then going on a dating site would end up being a significant chore.

Edit: Also, it's probably difficult to respond to someone that puts in the time to right a well-thought-out message, but doesn't come across as interesting (or expresses views that are contrary to your own -- e.g. an avid hunter messaging an animal rights activist). You don't necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, so it's easier to not do it at all (or you convince yourself that you'll respond 'later' but 'later' never happens).

Yes, it is cynical, but it's a general cynicism. Dating sites are very much a "worse is better" sort of environment.

Very astute observation. I agree, it's absolutely not worth it. No one should expect anything but a short canned message. Regardless, why should it matter anyway? If you like the person--something you'll know mostly from pictures--who sent you the message go out on a date! What a novel idea. If not, move on. To publicly opine that you want detailed messages tailored to your profile is presumptuous.

It's the sort of presumption you feel you can afford when you have hundreds of people messaging you.

If OKCupid has all of these messages, couldn't they algorithmically rate your message (based on sender patterns, receiver patterns, and/or site wide patterns) before you send it. While it wouldn't be perfect, it would act like the minimum reading level from most grammar checks. (This feels like something that must have been tried, or dismissed, before.)

Thing is that people who comment on HN are used to writing longish form text with correct spelling and grammar. There are also many people who have a lower education level but still want to use OKCupid and might be a good match for someone.

> grammer

lol

Touché , edited!

Muphry's Law! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

I believe it will increase message quality but maybe not in a good way: now it's easier to train oneself in sending message that score well but are still a bad conversation starter. What gets measured, gets improved. Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.

> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.

IIRC, when the user disables/deletes his/hers OkC account, they can specify the reason: "met someone on OkC (they can type the other person username)", "met someone elsewhere", "not interested anymore", etc. So they probably have lots of good data on success.

Assuming the self-reporting is truthful. How many people are selecting the "this sucks I give up" box?

Self-reporting in general is fraught with problems, doubly (quadruply) so when it's something as close to the ego as dating.

Also assuming the account is shut off at all as opposed to simply idled.

> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.

Real success is extremely hard to quantify, which is why i'm not suggesting that as the goal. The goal is to grade spam messages, and encourage people to not repeat known spam patterns. (And, if you show the score to the recipients, it also acts as a spam filter.)

Encouraging / forcing people to write less spammy messages might improve the overall message quality, just by increasing the cost, in effort and time, of sending the messages. It also provides some minimum level of feedback to the people who get zero responses from their messages.

They have actually done the work: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exact...

I don't see any problem with that.

-Message that are too short get banned.

-Men that are frustrated should now that being funny and referencing something in their profile, or talking about something they both like are good conversation starters. Just as they are in real life.

-Sexual propositions is good, you can ban them or not, at least you know exactly what they want. They are bring honest.

-Send dick pics gets you banned.

This leaves you with a good set of people. The next step would be for the system to learn what the user wants, and start to filter these messages.

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