151–160 of 258 posts
This post is very, very strange.
I feel that the path he's gone down is quite an eccentric and possibly misguided way to deal with the feelings of loss stemming from an unpleasant break-up.
I think you're right about a lot of the problems with dating websites - I wrote about this recently too here ( http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/ ). I remember checking your site out when you posted it and it's nice to see someone trying something actually new, but I feel like this concept doesn't solve the common problems and adds some new ones. Women will still be over messaged and men are still u…
Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change? Aren't you more interested in reading what somebody's friend has to say about them rather than what they're saying about themselves? Also, we have Facebook accounts (100+ friends required to join) which are not easy to replicate and we can rate limit. On OkCupid, the worst that…
I'd be reluctant to date anyone who has 100+ friends on Facebook, that seems to me to indicate a degree of shallowness. After 7 years I have 59 and I honestly need to pare that way down. (Wow pruning my friends list, amazing how many people have closed their FB account! A good 10% of past "friends" no longer have accounts)
But hey, thanks for excluding introverts! Really nice of you.
My primary issue is that I only have about 3 or 4 people on Facebook who actually know me well and who interact with me on a regular basis that I'd trust to help fill out my profile.
In addition to that, the entire "guys only look at pictures" thing is BS. Yes I look at pictures first, right after that I read the profile. If the woman in question doesn't have indicators that we are a match in ethics and values, then I am not going to bother sending a message.
Indeed the primary problem I suspect your dating site has is the same problem sites like match.com have, they really don't allow for filtering by value systems. This is OKCupid's single strength that nearly makes up for everything else that is wrong with it.
I really don't care if a woman's friends say she is fun to hang out with. I do care what books she reads and what her feelings on various social and political issues are.
You're completely right, people are lazy, but online dating is also way more work than it has to be. Women receive so many messages that it becomes overwhelming and too much work and men try sending earnest messages for a little while and then concede that it's basically a numbers game. These two phenomena are self-reinforcing. The more messages women receive, the less likely they are to respond. The more messages a…
Auto detect spam messages. If a guy keeps sending out the same copy and paste, after 2 or 3 sends, just forward future copies to /dev/null.
Now this has to be personalized! If a women responds to those types of messages above some certain threshold, then hey, let her receive them, no problem.
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I didn't find it strange; the fact that you do is surprising, and therefore potentially interesting. Would you care to elaborate?
It covers a lot of subject matter, and all of it seems to be from ways of interacting with the world that are alien to me. Public complaining about your ex? Pick up artistry? Inteviewing cliques of women in bars? Bizzare charactures of the idea of romance? Weird superiority/inferiority posturing? Trying to reduce a first impression to one-liners? It feels more like cable television than real life.
I think a lot of people on dating sites are going about it the wrong way and making themselves feel worse in the process when they don't have to.
Find a forum or a chatroom about topics that interest you or that you want to know more about (for your benefit, in communities where the gender of your choosing makes up to 30-70% of the userbase). Get invested in the topic, meet people, learn some stuff and see if any connections arise. You meet people in the real world in situations that you have in common, and that's how finding relationships online should be too. Some people may want the instant-gratification of going out to a bar to meet this person or maybe they're just gunning for a one-night-stand, which is fine too. But if my friends are anything to base things off of, distance is no longer an issue for people looking for serious, long-term relationships. I've seen lots of people fly over oceans to be together, many end up staying that way.
Here's what I'm getting at: if we were all more social about online dating, it'd suck a lot less. A majority of problems go away with online dating sites when you make it social. Trying to make this sound cool by using the word "social" doesn't stop this from being the classic awkward kid's lament: "If only people were straightforward about mating and romance! If only there wasn't this forest of doublespeak and taboo…
Would you say that's a bad idea in general, or maybe good for long-term relationships but bad when you're in the earlier stages of dating?
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So...90% of people, give or take, are straight. Online dating is a clusterfuck of failure for straight people (ask anyone who's tried it, or the OP.) Online dating mostly works for gays and lesbians (you say so, I've seen the same from others.) And this guy is an idiot for trying to cater to the straight dating market? Precisely why?
> So...90% of people, give or take, are straight. And a lot of those straight people may one day get involved with, have been involved with or may find themselves interested in someone who isn't straight. Many of whom are bi (or queer or whatever label) and most of whom do very very much care about being on a site that doesn't just serve straight people since they're open to dating both straight and non-straight folk…
Not if you live in an area with skewed gender ratios. The thing that makes gay dating in such an environment "easy" compared to straight, is that supply (gay men) and demand (people looking for gay men) is essentially the same (plus or minus a handful of bisexuals).
Whereas straight dating is fractured into two supplies and two demands, and
straight women = demand for straight men
straight men = demand for straight women
What you really want is for the diagonals (supply and matched demand) to be equal, but they aren't in a lot of places.
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I have to disagree that colleges are the best place to start, from your blog. We actually started all of this at Stanford, talking directly to fraternity and sorority presidents. They all sounded excited when we said we'd taken them out for drinks to get their thoughts, but when it came time to pull the trigger and sign up, they wouldn't do it. Why? Because the Greeks have it perfectly. They're basically paying fees…
Yeah I don't think greeks are a good place to start because they probably don't need it, but I'd imagine other college kids would use it especially because they're busy with classes and other things. Definitely agree that college kids have more opportunities than new grads though to meet people. I think the matching idea (tinder/let's date) is a good one, but like you I noticed the problem seems to be that girls don'…
Yep. We weren't sure at first, so we asked girls: would you rather meet a group of guys at an event or a venue, or would you rather just go to bars? They want to go to bars because there's alcohol and it acts as a social lubricant. Everyone becomes more sociable.
Meeting people with groups of friends is hands down the single best experience out there. Figuring out how to replicate the experience on CWF is going to be a real challenge. It might not even happen, we might leave that to Flock. But what we do still solves a vast majority of the problems with all online dating sites, mainly the identity problem.
There's a natural filter when you go out to bars. It takes some courage--probably some alcohol too--to go up and start talking to girls. But it also requires some degree of social proof to get friends to comment on your profile, so I think it carries a similar effect. You're right that most dating sites suck for men in their 20s, but that's what we're trying to fix.
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> That's a little tricky Ahh, the enthusiasm of a new startup. :) Relationships are such a spectrum that this part is actually really, really hard. OKC gets it mostly correct, which is one of the reasons they're really popular with that crowd.
> Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. -pg I know its considered a bit tacky to quote pg, but I am not as eloquent as he.
"User growth" will flatline next week. Engagement will be low. But we're going to figure it out.
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I have to disagree that colleges are the best place to start, from your blog. We actually started all of this at Stanford, talking directly to fraternity and sorority presidents. They all sounded excited when we said we'd taken them out for drinks to get their thoughts, but when it came time to pull the trigger and sign up, they wouldn't do it. Why? Because the Greeks have it perfectly. They're basically paying fees…
Yeah I don't think greeks are a good place to start because they probably don't need it, but I'd imagine other college kids would use it especially because they're busy with classes and other things. Definitely agree that college kids have more opportunities than new grads though to meet people. I think the matching idea (tinder/let's date) is a good one, but like you I noticed the problem seems to be that girls don'…
I think it is dating that is shitty for men in that range. They have a limited pool of women in an age range that most of them want to be involved with. Those women in turn have socially acceptable dating opportunities with men of a much wider age range, including many men with better financial means than most men in their early to mid twenties. The result is too many men chasing too few women.