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.
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.