Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says

> First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.

In my empirical observation it is not correct. Dating is local. The proportion of men and women on the sites in a locality will roughly match the proportion of men to women in the dating pool. Among the people that I know in NYC every woman who is single has dating apps. About the same percentage of men have dating apps. NYC is split fairly even between available men and women which if not to say that there are more women looking to date in NYC than men.

> The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.

Empirically, I again have to disagree. I had a very similar conversation with a couple of people at a party so we did an experiment the weekend after party -- all of us went to the Whole Foods on Bedford Ave, popped in virgin SIM cards into our phones and created Tinder profiles: One M4F, one F4M, one M4M and one F4F. We set the distance to one mile and spent two hours hanging around the store both inside and outside. Between 6 of us, during that hour we saw in person 19 people that all of us agreed were on Tinder, of those 11 confirmed that those were them ( all of us used the same "Hi. Excuse me. Me and my friends are having a bet about Tinder. Is this you?" -- men were more successful getting confirmation both when they were approaching men and women but not by much)

> Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone.

It is because men's messages are as bad when they are "spamming" as when they are "putting thought into it". Online dating is online sales: putting up a website does not lead to sales. You need to make it:

1) attractive

2) relevant

3) understand your pitch

4) qualify your prospect

5) lead your prospect to sale

If you don't have much to offer other than a badly built website ( bad photos ), with irrelevant product ( bad text pitch ), do not understand your pitch ( why should she date you and not Brad? ), do not qualify your prospect ( she lives 33 miles away in NJ. Are you seriously thinking she would be coming to Brooklyn to date you?! ) or lead the prospect to signing on the dotted line ( did you forget that you compete not only with Brad but also with a re-run of Law and Order or Netflix and she does not know you from Adam as of yet so why is she coming out again? ) you won't succeed.

I recommend watching "Groundhog day". That's the movie version of the "i can't get a date" problem before the internet era.

> I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

Online dating converged to "dating". The same people who are able to successfully convert seeing a stranger in a coffee shop to getting strangers number/instagram/facebook and going out with that person the same day/next day/next week are the people who can do it online. The medium is different but the process is exactly the same.

On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%

"...with whom I was..."

Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.

> You could write an algorithm that subtly punishes women for being too picky and at the same time punishes men for being unselective (only swiping right, then filtering later).'

Sounds like the dating rules of most Patriarch societies.

Women who aren't married at age X gets a social penalty. Men who marry are rewarded by social rewards.

The USA has thankfully left the shackles of Patriarchy and has enabled the liberation of women and women's desires. In this world of female first, women get to choose freely from the entire pool of men, and can dispose of them by a swipe of their finger. Should the woman like a child, there is plenty of DNA to choose from, even to be pregnant by insemination or IVF if she so desires.

You are experiencing Matriarchy in the 21th century. Welcome to the future.

> The only major remaining website that tries to match people based on interests is OKCupid. And even it is changing every few months. Unfortunately, the success of Tinder and move to mobile phones first ruined most of the dating websites, which try to emulate its success. Because people mostly use phone nowadays for dating websites, long profiles are mostly gone, sending long letters is gone, many conversations are single sentence now. Also, instead of matching based on shared interests/values, most of the matching is based on "swipe left/right on photo".

You should spend time talking women. They absolutely hated the long-form dating sites. Imagine she is sitting in a cafe. She is not out on a prowl to get married, get laid or go on a date -- she would not mind either of those three if ( long list of requirements ) but she is not here for that specific purpose. She is drinking her macha tea and reading her kindle.

Gentleman number one approaches. He smells like he did not shower in a week. He goes into a five minute pitch about his dog, Skippy, and his love for bananas. She is a cat person and she hates yellow things. The gentleman does not leave for thirty minutes

Gentleman number two approaches. He is lovely. He fumbles and cracks up a joke. She looks up at him and sees a bugger in his nose. She goes back to her book as he continues to talk to her. Eventually, she says "Look, I'm not interested." He becomes indignant and does not leave for another twenty minutes.

That's a long form dating.

Here's tinder:

She looks up, shakes her head no and a force field ejects him from her table. She does it 114 times. On a time 115 she looks up, nods and exchanges a few words with Mr. 115. If Mr 115 sparks her interest a bit and Mr. 115 decides he may want to see her again, they exchange numbers.

Ask your women friends which one of the two they prefer.