Online dating is a sausagefest. It's the biggest sausagefest ever. I'm not basing this on any scientific or quantitative information at all, just my own personal experiences from online dating from 2004-2008, the end of which was when I met my now-fiancee.
The "sausagefest syndrome" is inherently why so many online dating sites suck. Guys sign up and get barely any responses to their profiles or messages. Girls sign up and get immediately overwhelmed with messages, some interesting but the rest mostly boring or creepy. Guys get frustrated at the lack of traction and leave. Girls get overwhelmed by too much attention and leave. It doesn't help when the online dating sites start using fake profiles and pictures to give the false illusion it's not a sausagefest.
I've seen friends sign up for Match.com and be like, "this sucks, they have no matches for me," and then I find they're looking for half-Asian half-Russian college-educated non-smoking dog-owners in a 2.5 mile radius, or something like that. That's almost guaranteed to not work. Unfortunately the alternative is some sort of "shotgun strategy," which if done poorly, means sending a message to 50 girls with the same copy-pasted canned sentences, which only contributes to the women being overwhelmed. You still need to aim the shotgun. I effectively had a routine where I'd spend an evening looking through profiles, only ruling out absolute deal-breakers, and then sent a message that while mostly short, at least made some reference to the actual girl. Out of 20 messages I'd get like 5 responses, which would lead to 2 phone calls, and probably 1 actual date. Rinse, repeat.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying to fill out a profile and all that, but to me that's never been the problem. I feel there's a lot more social friction to get women to sign up for these sites, because while online dating to guys is basically, "well, why not, it's another possible way to meet girls," to girls it's, "this is admitting I am incompetent at/undeserving of finding love." Until that's overcome, online dating will always be a poor experience for a lot of people that try it.
How do you overcome it? In a drunken night with friends a couple months ago, I started rambling about an online dating site that embraced the male-female disparity, and basically would pair up something like 3-4 guys to every girl, and set up dates where you'd all go out like "The Bachelorette." There's a lot of reasons why that idea would be a hard sell, but if anyone ever does successfully do it, just make sure to give me my cut[0].
The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena.
For the "unfortunate" women who tragically receive too many messages, just implement something like LinkedIn's brilliant "InMail" system. Make it cost money to send a premium message. Now these women can focus on premium messages if they don't have time for the spammers. Even better, let the women choose how much it costs to send them a message. There, real-life dating boiled down to its essence.
If that's your "real-life" dating experience, maybe you should date different people. Yes, some women look at wallet size. Most (of the ones I know) don't.
Yes, even the ones who don't date within roughly their own socioeconomic strata - but that's a) the same for men, and b) not the same as what you're implying.
The male/female ratio is close to 50/50. Men on online dating sites just don't seem to realize online dating is simulating real world dating. In real world dating, the guys tend to go for the girls not vice versa. On online dating, it is still the same.
Alpha male and evolution as reasons would make a lot of sense to me prior to the modern era, where options for women were limited, survival of new families was more difficult, and women were generally not encouraged to be so forward.
I don't think it is required, but it is an interesting question why it turned out that way.
Could be that women are simply lazy and avoid the risk of rejection. They will be approached anyway, so they don't have to move themselves. Also, women usually do make the first step, just not the obvious one of walking up and talking.
I just had to think that it might be a bad strategy for women, because I am a bit like that with recruiters. I am usually too lazy to approach companies I desire to work for and end up working for the next best project a recruiter pushes to me once my bank account falls below a certain threshold. Naturally that way I end up with lots of sub par projects.
IRL, most men are too timid to approach women the same way it's done on dating sites. Can you imagine a bunch of average guys going around in the streets and talking to random women in broad daylight with no hesitation?
When you take away Approach Anxiety, of course you're going to have a massive storm of sausage looking for action. Because, while it sounds cliché, men really are pigs (or more accurately, chimps). :-)
> "The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena."
I think it's more complex than this.
It's a convergence of many problems really. The first, and greatest problem with online dating is:
1 - Words are a really fucking shitty communications medium. Few people are good writers, and even fewer people are good writers when limited to the span of a few paragraphs. Body language and personality are far more self-expressive, but we have no good ways to pushing this information across the internet. Because of this, there is a tremendous reduction in range of communication. All the profiles start to read the same, because we've essentially topped out how expressively a regular person can get with 3 paragraphs to describe themselves.
In other words, when you've crunched down people's self-expression to really short paragraphs and a bunch of multiple choice answers, personality disappears. And its place, the only sane metric one profile from another is physical attractiveness. Which leads to the next big problem...
2 - There are no salient indicators of competition online, quite unlike the real world. How many of us here go after statuesque model-types, exclusively? Bueller? But we do it online, because without the ability to appreciate someone's personality, looks are the only measuring stick you've got left. In the real world this is balanced out the fact that competition is extremely visible, especially in an environment like a club or a bar.
You see a girl being hit on by an endless stream of guys. Do you line up and join the fray? Or maybe you find something else?
Online these signals do not exist, which means all men will simply line up to hit on the hottest subset of the population without knowing just how long this sausagefest-line is, and the complement of this is that anyone who isn't in, say, the upper quartile of physical attractiveness, will get crickets (or the spamalot shotgunner-types).
tl;dr, the problem is twofold: poor communication medium means that personality and unique traits are impossible to express well over the dating network, leading to physical attractiveness becoming the only major factor in almost all decisions, and everyone (guys and girls) become way pickier than they would be IRL. Lack of visible competition drives traffic to only most attractive portion of population, where in real life visible competition will drive a considerable amount of "traffic" back towards average lookers.
On OkCupid, they show a dot on each profile to indicate how responsive the person is. My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot, since it is impractical for her to respond to all of those messages. They also have star ratings, which should indicate how generally desirable the person is on the site.
On OKC star ratings are not exposed to users - you get to rate someone, and they get to rate you, and those are (to some extent) visible, but there's no such thing as "average user rating" or anything remotely close to it.
> " My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot"
Except... every guy has a green dot and nearly every girl as a red dot. This is not a salient indicator of anything - for all you know she's just very particular, but doesn't get a lot of messages (I've certainly seen profiles like this). Or, she might be getting literally hundreds of messages a day. Or hell, maybe she's getting spammed with one-liners but never gets a real message. In anycase, whatever the reason, when 90% of your population has a red dot, it ceases to become a filter for anything.
The "replies selectively" messaging on the site is borderline useless, and certainly doesn't accomplish the competition signaling that would actually work to drive some traffic from one group to another.
Also, all 1, 2, and 3 ratings are seen only by the person who made the rating so there is no penalty for rating someone low.
But it doesn't matter if the ratings are distributed evenly; there will still be some variance. Users who pay to have "A-List memberships" can use those ratings to search for matches of at least {3, 4, 5} stars to restrict their matches to the more heavily sought.
Huh. Your list of the greatest problems of online dating sum up why online dating really works for me.
1. I'm really, really verbally oriented. If you're not at least decent with words, which usually carries over into being a pretty good writer, that conversation would peter out pretty quickly, whether it started online or not. The people I'd be interested in anyway appear to have plenty of personality.
2. I don't have a picture up on my profile. I recommend this to every girl that bitches to me about online dating. I therefore get almost none of the "Hurr, you're cute, wanna go out?" messages, and when I do, they're obvious dumb spam cause, well...no picture. If someone messages me/replies to a message from me, it's because they think I'm fun.
Thanks for sharing your usage - I don't think dating sites are one-size-fits-all, and it's great to hear that you've made them work for you. I love your idea of not having a picture up there. So simple, yet probably hugely helpful for you.
Maybe one could prioritize the messages in the inbox, and assign a lower priority if the sender has contacted more people in a reference time frame (eg last 7 days). That way people that mass-mail others get ignored pretty much automatically.
Of course that system also has its downsides, it encourages creating multiple accounts.
Actually I think it is a direct result of the asymmetric biological "worth" of men and women. Women have much higher reproductive value, men are next to worthless and exchangeable (biologically). The good old "a man can father hundreds of kids, but a woman can only have kids every 9 months".
Therefore women are "the price" and men have to compete to get them (and by compete I mean "scramble and write hundreds of messages"). Women don't really have to compete to get pregnant.
Women compete too, but for the top men aka the alphas. The richest, most handsome, most famous, most combat-fit, most connected, etc. Or often in today's world: the most caddish.
And what is alpha is always relative to something else, which means that rising female incomes, for instance, will raise the bar for competition.
True - and I suppose if Brad Pitt signed up on an online dating site he would get a lot of messages (or whoever todays women are into, not sure).
A richer hubby presumably increases survival chances for the offspring (independent of the actual biological father of said offspring). But the fact remains that a woman can easily get laid any time, if she wants to.
There was this famous experiment where students approached other students on university campus and asked them if they would like to have sex. Don't recall the numbers, but there was a real high discrepancy between the sexes, basically most men who were approached by women said yes, whereas hardly any women said yes. So basically as a chick, just walk up to some men and ask.
Of course modern society complicates it a bit because men now have the risk of paternity charges (a societal construct).
1) Only done on 16 girls. Sample size is small.
2) More than 30 years old. Changing mores.
3) Women are likely to fear random men who approach them, the reverse is not true. This experiment should have been done differently: they should have achieved some rapport/comfort with the mark and created some sexual tension, and then asked for sex. My guess is that at least a few of the women would have responded favorably in that case.
One Night Stands happen, at least according to popular mythology. So obviously women can be convinced to have sex. But I think what you describe would be a completely different experiment. For starters, would you assume that any men would be able to "create some sexual tension" with any women? Otherwise your setup would already contain a lot of bias.
The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena
I think it goes much deeper than that. Think evolutionary psychology and mating dynamics.
The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe.
Where do you get that information? I believe that directly contradicts the old (pre-Match.com takeover) OKCupid blog, which, to my knowledge, is the only vaguely unbiased source of dating site statistics.
I'm somewhat surprised there aren't any dating sites that have set up a built-in "brown M&Ms" system to help with the shotgun strategy problem.
By "brown M&Ms", I mean something like Van Halen's Brown M&Ms rider condition; some key piece of text that requires an actual profile read to answer. Almost like a captcha but based on certain pieces of the profile.
The profile owner writes "List 5 of my interests, and my dog's name" and provides a list of acceptable keyword responses. Only messages where the not-captcha is properly filled out get through. (Or, alternatively, they get downgraded in priority.)
This would require people to actually read and parse the profiles, and put some minimum degree of effort into contacting someone.
I can think of several dozen problems with this approach, but I suspect they're surmountable with sufficient cleverness.
(In case the reader hasn't heard about this: Van Halen's extensive rider required a bowl of M&Ms to be provided, with all the brown M&Ms removed by hand, on penalty of show cancellation. The entire purpose of this clause was as an easy way to see if the venue had read the damn contract, and took it seriously. Any time they saw brown M&Ms, they knew something else would be wrong, (probably something dangerous and technical) and started a full re-check of the venue from scratch.)
A simpler version of this would be to use fuzzy matching on the person's history of messages. Which would rule out copy-canned messages right away, and would also prevent them from just changing a dot here or there in the message.
I'm very interested in dating sites btw, and I have quite a few ideas up on http://ideashower.posterous.com (no time to go thru and pick out the dating-related ones right now, alas).
The real problem is that the incentives are wrong for the sites. If they only got paid when there was a match that resulted in at least 3 months of dating or friendship then you can bet they'd actually get that kind of result.
Instead they actually get paid by letting men message women irrespective of how appropriate the match is(1), and by getting page views by suckering in people to believe more "connectivity" is available than really is there.
If there was a way to reliably match people algorithmically, we'd have seen it implemented by now. Sure, people would leave the site faster, but it would also provide an EXTREMELY in-demand service, allowing such a site to charge massive one-time fees.
If I sold a bona fide 95+% chance of finding one's perfect mate for say $1000, then I would have a LOT of happy buyers. Problem is, it can't be done. Or at least it would require some kind of human-level AI.
You wouldn't have a lot of happy buyers - you'd have far fewer. You are assuming that everyone on a dating service has a good match on that same dating service, which isn't the case. From the business side you have a choice, get a small amount of money from most participants or get a large amount from very few. Even if the totals are the same, the latter is far more risky.
There are quite a few human run expensive dating agencies. It is what rich people use. This one for example costs about $100k to sign up.
http://www.orlythematchmaker.com/
An article from a few years ago titled "Professionals pay matchmakers to be headhunters for the heart" about expensive human run dating agencies:
So it's really an automation problem. It should be easy for males to broadcast a crafted message to everyone. It should be easy for females to filter messages using complicated criteria. However, this requires a lot of computation and dating sites form monopolies at which point they stop innovating.
The solution to that is open-data peer-to-peer. Sematntic web technologies solved that problem. Use an ontology editor like Protege to create your profile and publish the data as rdf. Other people would download the data and queries on it.
I was surprised this wasn't mentioned in the article because this is, to me, the biggest issue with dating sites: too many guys, too many messages to women.
I've seen some of my friends (women) sign up and get messages within an hour. Even with a barely filled profile.
The "sausagefest syndrome" is inherently why so many online dating sites suck. Guys sign up and get barely any responses to their profiles or messages. Girls sign up and get immediately overwhelmed with messages, some interesting but the rest mostly boring or creepy. Guys get frustrated at the lack of traction and leave. Girls get overwhelmed by too much attention and leave. It doesn't help when the online dating sites start using fake profiles and pictures to give the false illusion it's not a sausagefest.
I've seen friends sign up for Match.com and be like, "this sucks, they have no matches for me," and then I find they're looking for half-Asian half-Russian college-educated non-smoking dog-owners in a 2.5 mile radius, or something like that. That's almost guaranteed to not work. Unfortunately the alternative is some sort of "shotgun strategy," which if done poorly, means sending a message to 50 girls with the same copy-pasted canned sentences, which only contributes to the women being overwhelmed. You still need to aim the shotgun. I effectively had a routine where I'd spend an evening looking through profiles, only ruling out absolute deal-breakers, and then sent a message that while mostly short, at least made some reference to the actual girl. Out of 20 messages I'd get like 5 responses, which would lead to 2 phone calls, and probably 1 actual date. Rinse, repeat.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying to fill out a profile and all that, but to me that's never been the problem. I feel there's a lot more social friction to get women to sign up for these sites, because while online dating to guys is basically, "well, why not, it's another possible way to meet girls," to girls it's, "this is admitting I am incompetent at/undeserving of finding love." Until that's overcome, online dating will always be a poor experience for a lot of people that try it.
How do you overcome it? In a drunken night with friends a couple months ago, I started rambling about an online dating site that embraced the male-female disparity, and basically would pair up something like 3-4 guys to every girl, and set up dates where you'd all go out like "The Bachelorette." There's a lot of reasons why that idea would be a hard sell, but if anyone ever does successfully do it, just make sure to give me my cut[0].
[0] http://xkcd.com/827/