Hacker News Reader

Comment by nether | Hacker News Reader

Women have far more choice on OkCupid, it's the men who do not: http://www.alternet.org/why-online-dating-sucks-men

She talks about how easy OkCupid is for women, how she recommends her female friends to try it out, but how she also dissuades her male friends from trying it. Because the site is so difficult for men.

View on HN

I think the reality is a bit more complex. Women have "more choice", expressed in the form of an avalanche of messages that would take a part-time job just to cut through.

Which is a bit of a false freedom. You're presumably there to find promising dates, not take on a new part time job sorting messages.

It sucks for both sides, in different ways.

Except women on OKC can just ignore the spam messages, look at a couple of profiles and send their own messages. Their messages won't be buried in piles of spam. The best interactions I had on OKC worked that way.

It is really taxing for women to have to deal with the spam, though, and that can really burn users out of even using the site. Too many messages and too few messages are both problems for different (sometimes overlapping) groups of people.

I've dated several women that I've met on OKC for various lengths of time and they all agreed that for the most part OKC was a good experience. I could see how people without a thick skin could be turned off by the spam, but that hasn't been the case in my experience. The women I've met have mostly seemed to treat the spam similarly to YouTube comments, it's just accepted that most of them are garbage. One of them described the experience with something like "It's Amazon for boys, for negative money." which seems like a pretty positive review to me.

I think you're missing the idea that women can just ignore all incoming messages, and get a much better response rate for outgoing messages than men do.

Sifting through messages from people already interested in you and sifting through profiles trying to come up with a clever attention-grabbing first message to send to a girl who will respond maybe 10% of the time are not even remotely on the same level in terms of time commitment and inconvenience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com