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.

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.

> " 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.

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.

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.

Why in a world where we are trying to promote equality do we 'require' men to make the first move?

Societal equality can't override our biological notions of attraction

Nowadays... eh.

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.

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). :-)

Of course that system also has its downsides, it encourages creating multiple accounts.

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.

And what is alpha is always relative to something else, which means that rising female incomes, for instance, will raise the bar for competition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/female-hypergamy-g...

http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-all-abou...

Supposedly, only something like 40% of men got to reproduce in the Neolithic...

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).

The googling brought up lots of fun stuff :-)

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.

Your worldview is a bit bizarre, dude :p

I think it goes much deeper than that. Think evolutionary psychology and mating dynamics.

Wealth is a mate quality metric for males, just as much as attractiveness is for females.

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.

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.)

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).

Edit: pulled them out via Google. Here they are:

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-misc-dating-site-ideas

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-slideshow-a...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-profile-improvem...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-that-gets-r...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with-gamifi...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-walk-in-my-shoes-dating...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-my-dating-profile-did-w...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-staff-of-fe...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-smartphone-video-speed-...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-adsense-for-dating

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-photo-album-widget-for-...

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.

(1) Explained in an OKCupid blog post they pulled but a copy is at http://interestingreads.posterous.com/why-you-should-never-p...

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.

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/

  http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2008-02-12-matchmakers-main_N.htm

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've seen some of my friends (women) sign up and get messages within an hour. Even with a barely filled profile.

It seems like a solution should be possible here - maybe estimate quality (ratio of no's to yes's) and limit messaging to popular accounts?