- Messages that are too short. E.g. "hey babe" doesn't mean much, when a women gets 10 - 20 "hey babe" messages in a day.
- There are men that get frustrated at the lack of response from women, and start turning their messages into "form letters" which don't show any level of having read the woman's profile.
- Initiating conversation with sexual propositions.
- Depending on the platform, sending unsolicited pictures of genitalia.
While some of these might not qualify as "spam" compared to a 419 scammers emails, I would say that wading through all of that seems akin to wading through one's spam folder...
The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.
This comes across as cynical towards the women on dating sites. The problem is that the women on dating site become a lightning rod for messages. If every message were of a kind that interested a particular woman, how would she respond to (e.g.) 10-20 messages from new people every day? She's likely not going to end up going on dates with multiple people at a time, and if she finds someone long-term, it's (more than likely) only going to be a single person. She likely will only be able to carry on a few meaningful conversations at a time, and the rest just get dropped. If she were trying to meaningfully respond to everyone then going on a dating site would end up being a significant chore.
Edit: Also, it's probably difficult to respond to someone that puts in the time to right a well-thought-out message, but doesn't come across as interesting (or expresses views that are contrary to your own -- e.g. an avid hunter messaging an animal rights activist). You don't necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, so it's easier to not do it at all (or you convince yourself that you'll respond 'later' but 'later' never happens).
Real success is extremely hard to quantify, which is why i'm not suggesting that as the goal. The goal is to grade spam messages, and encourage people to not repeat known spam patterns. (And, if you show the score to the recipients, it also acts as a spam filter.)
Encouraging / forcing people to write less spammy messages might improve the overall message quality, just by increasing the cost, in effort and time, of sending the messages. It also provides some minimum level of feedback to the people who get zero responses from their messages.
IIRC, when the user disables/deletes his/hers OkC account, they can specify the reason: "met someone on OkC (they can type the other person username)", "met someone elsewhere", "not interested anymore", etc. So they probably have lots of good data on success.
Self-reporting in general is fraught with problems, doubly (quadruply) so when it's something as close to the ego as dating.
Also assuming the account is shut off at all as opposed to simply idled.
lol
-Message that are too short get banned.
-Men that are frustrated should now that being funny and referencing something in their profile, or talking about something they both like are good conversation starters. Just as they are in real life.
-Sexual propositions is good, you can ban them or not, at least you know exactly what they want. They are bring honest.
-Send dick pics gets you banned.
This leaves you with a good set of people. The next step would be for the system to learn what the user wants, and start to filter these messages.
As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.
Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.
Basic free-rider problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
As a result of this, female members are under a constant barrage of mindless messages, which is what's being referred to as spam.
While this is true that some people subscribe to this logic[1], the number of messages (good or bad) that women get seems to out-weigh the number that the men get. I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply[2].
[1] I heard a similar story of someone (a "dad's friend" of a friend a long time ago) that would basically ask every woman at a party for oral sex. He would get lots of slaps in the face, but he never went home empty-handed (allegedly).
[2] I would personally liken it to investing time into job-hunting (i.e. trying to craft a decent cover letter) and then just getting no response from the potential employer. Though depending on the situation one other the other might be more stressful (e.g. searching for a job while unemployed).
This was documented on the old OKCupid blog. I think the post was taken down after Match bought them.
Men grow frustrated and get tired of wasting their time, so they stop sending in-depth messages. Women are then even less likely to respond, which ultimately sends men into a downward spiral of desperation.
Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.
Yes, it sucks to actually read profiles, compose thoughtful initial intro messages, and then be ignored. Just like it sucks to come up with a great startup marketing campaign and then not get the results you were hoping for.
Instead of that's too much work, let's change from rifle/targeted to shotgun/blast, I think you just have to keep iterating and changing how you target, change your marketing media (different sites/venues/ways of meeting people), etc.
I understand the "trough of sorrow" of shouting in the void. But I don't think the answer is to start doing what everyone else is doing - unless you want to get the same results as everyone else of course.
(Not meant to you specifically, Kalium; "you" is meant in a general sense above)
The copy-paste-spam method produces better net results that the thoughtful, targeted approach. The only other more successful method I've ever even heard of rests on data mining OKCupid's users, carefully crafting your profile for them, and so on. Described here: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
EDIT: Also, getting meaningful data is nearly impossible here. Generally all you get is positive response/no response. When most of your iterations come up with a lot of no responses, you've really got nothing to go on. You cannot target without data. The blast approach compensates for that.
Imagine doing a dozen very different marketing campaigns and being greeted with an identical total lack of response from all of them. Hard to learn from that.
>http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
This had one really important piece of information, that seems counter to what a lot of people are suggesting in these comments: a short initial message is all you need (if the match is good.) He finally settled on a single initiating message “You seem really cool. Want to meet?” and it worked.
The guy basically data-mined OKC and gamed the matching system. Then suddenly the site began working for him, since he looked like The Perfect Match to a sizable number of people.
If more guys blamed OkCupid, maybe they'd be willing to try things like Dating Ring instead? That'd put pressure on innovators to innovate, rather than stopping at "men need to try harder."
But is OkCupid really the best we can do? Is there no combination of computer bits and human processes that would result in fewer guys getting ignored and more getting dates?
Men want to be able to contact the women who interest them (read: are attractive). Men desperately want to not be filtered out, and will stoop to basically any amount of lying to get around filters.
Women only want to be exposed to the men who interest them. Women want sites and systems to do their filtering and selecting for them.
Right there, there's some substantive conflicts. You have very different strategies from the get-go. But that's not all. It gets worse.
Women don't want to do any of the work or take any of the risk. Women expect men to approach them, and then they will sift through the suitors for the promising ones. And at the same time, men will lie, cheat, and otherwise bullshit to avoid being filtered out so they can spam dick-pics at every woman in range. Think of your typical hormone-driven bar scene.
You'd think you could change these patterns, by putting women in control on a site and inverting the central power dynamic. It turns out that when you do that, people still behave the same way. You wind up having to re-introduce the dynamic you were explicitly trying to avoid in order to get people interacting with one another at all.
In short, the world of online dating is a clusterfuck of opposing strategies and people who will systematically subvert any system you use to impede those strategies. OKCupid wins by not trying to force people to behave a certain way. The result is a shitshow for everyone, but all the alternatives seem to be worse.
No matter what you do, the pattern of men-as-supplicants/women-as-gatekeepers re-emerges. At a guess, it's because that's the culture we live in and it's what people are most comfortable with.
Also, people will be exactly as shallow as technology allows them to be.
The two don't match up well.
I got on okcupid a few years ago after being alone for years and years b/c of depression and social anxiety and in a matter of weeks I was swimming in dates, and in a matter of months I met the woman who's now my wife.
There's a lot that's unpleasant and stressful about online dating, but with a few classes of exceptions it's not society, it's not women, it's not the site, it's not anything else but you that's keeping you back.
While the feedback on Tinder (where there is less investment required by both to start a conversation) early on was positive in my circles, it's starting to turn really noisy too. In the end, I think we'll see a successful model where you have the low barrier to conversation as per Tinder but a bit more info about the person as per OKC.
The difference is so large it is kinda of looked at by both genders with humor. (The side-by-side screenshots are pretty funny if you Google for them.) Also take a glance at http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...