The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell

It was creepy the moment it wanted to authorize so much information from Facebook. Got creepier the moment the site asked me to start involving my friends without me knowing whether or not they wanted to be involved. Got super frustrating that my ability to even see how this site worked required me to drag my friends into this mess without their consent.<p>And from what I can see, there's no way for me to specify which genders I'm actually interested in meeting. (Yes, I know if I make profiles from my friends I can filter the people <i>I'm</i> looking for, but do you give me filters to let people know I'm not straight and therefore not interested in <i>them</i>?) If you're not straight, this type of thing is really critical. I'm not interested in messages from men and on OKC, I use the wonderful checkbox that makes it so that straight people can't even see my profile. That checkbox alone plays a big role in turning online dating from a lousy situation into a bearable one. Your writeup makes it sound like you only considered the dating patterns of straight people and your site doesn't appear to even bother to think about anything else. You appear to have mostly made a better dating site for you and people like you without realizing that dating is <i>complicated</i> and a bunch of people involved in a good dating ecosystem aren't going to be you, or anything like you.<p>I'll stick with OKC. (Which, by the way, I think is mostly great.)

I think you're right about a lot of the problems with dating websites - I wrote about this recently too here (<a href="http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/</a>).<p>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.<p>Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?<p>Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).<p>I also think women are even less likely to use it considering your own point about them not wanting to involve their own friends. I would think people would also want to play a role in the selection considering it's a pretty subjective/personal thing.<p>Definitely awesome to see something new though and hopefully you prove me wrong and it works better than I suspect.

Maybe it's my social circle (busy pushing-30 professionals) but I think there is almost zero stigma among my friends over online dating. In fact, less so among women than among men. Men for some reason feel they have to play the bar scene even if they don't like it or aren't good at it, but women feel no such need. Indeed, for a lot of my women friends, online dating offers the very real advantage that it's socially acceptable for women to actively choose in an online context, while in meat space the social convention involves their waiting for the loudest, drunkest guy to come up and hit on them.

<i>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.</i><p>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 taboos surrounding sex! If only people stopped being petty and competitive and just openly admitted their desires and insecurities! We'd all be so much better off (me especially.)"

Brian from OkCupid Labs here...<p>This post contains some really interesting and spot on insights. Some of the data doesn't line up with our (match + okcupid, etc) internal estimates/figures. For example, our estimates are closer to 50% of US have tried online dating, and 50% havent; significantly lower than that in other geographies. The idea of serendipity is definitely a real issue, and a frustrating one, because just the concept in people's minds and expectations alone prevents them from trying solutions that might work for them.<p>The simple fact is that, for most people finding work is just like anything else: it takes a little bit of attention and work to find the best person for you. That's not romantic, but its real.<p>I'm not sold that the solution is having your friends help you create a profile, introduce you to their friends, or attest for you. It seems like a lot of work for them, to be honest, with very limited returns. At the labs, our minds are focused on finding the future of dating in mobile, big data, leveraging social networks, and discovering how to create serendipitous connections through the above.<p>To the OP -- if you want to chat, hit me up; would love to chat. We're in SoMa.

One theory on why the author might be having a little trouble with OkCupid comes down to this sentence:<p>"Unless your parents are Jewish and they threaten to disown you for not having a Jewish boyfriend...yea, you may not want to message me in that case."<p>I mean, I laughed, it's a funny profile, but ultimately it implies bitterness over your last relationship, which, in my experience, is a turn off for both sexes. Don't get me wrong, everyone's bitter after getting dumped, but your next significant other doesn't want to know about it (at least not at first). In fact, they don't want to know anything about your previous relationship, good or bad, period.<p>EDIT: This actually adds some merit to his idea...his friends would be objective and wouldn't make the same mistake.<p>I'll second the confusion over people thinking there's a stigma to online dating. I thought that was a 90's thing.

This is the core problem of a dating site:<p>1. Forging connections between pairs of strangers where they will fall in love,<p>2. …under conditions of oppressive patriarchy.<p>Number 1 is a pretty easy numbers game. for each person, a subset of people match them algorithmically. Another subset will be good matches. If your algorithm doesn't suck, some of the first set overlaps the second.<p>Number 2 is the problem. If you are asking why women are being swamped with textual street harassment such that the noise quite drowns the signal, why women need pseudonymity and ignorable messaging and no-appeal blocklists, why women get shamed for taking an active role in seeking a date (such as OKC) and don't want to admit it, why Mills &#38; Boon nonsense holds so much cultural sway, and why social proof is the most effective way to get dates, the answer to all of the above is patriarchy. Rapey, commoditizing attitudes to sex are patriarchy. Passive, romance-movie, pedestal-putting, shaming, antisexual attitudes to love are patriarchy.

I think this may be solving a legitimate problem, but I think you are incorrect that the source of the problem is hollywood.<p>Online dating follows historically from personals classifieds. Personals ads contained very little information (in part because they had to be so short). This meant you were going on a date with someone you knew nothing about. It was worse than just a blind date... because you didn't even have any common friends to validate the person wasn't a psycho. People (esp. women) who valued their safety tended not to use personals ads, and there was a definite stigma that people who did use it likely had problems.<p>Though online dating is popular now, I think it was previously viewed as the high-tech version of printed personals ads. So the stigma carried over. It's certainly decreased over time, but I think that history is part of the stigma.<p>Again, I think you have a potentially viable solution to a problem people care about... even if I disagree on the source of them problem.

The problem with online dating boils down to: guys have no idea what they are doing. I've helped my friends and the secret is to write a three sentence message: an intro about why the message, a funny sentence, and finally a light question. It's pretty simple.<p>I used it on OkCupid and got about a 30-50% response rate. Now I'm 6'8" and in shape which skewed the results but my friends copied what I did and their response rates skyrocketed. Then you only send 2-3 more messages before asking her out for drinks. Worked nearly 100% of the time.<p>I think that it comes down to, people spend way too much time trying to write the perfect message or profile. Be yourself. Think of it as a filter to get rid of the girls that you aren't compatible with.<p>Then when you're on the date, relax and just have fun. I've heard so many horror stories from my female friends of guys that are super awkward. The group setting is a great idea as it relaxes people and gives them support. That's why wingmen exist.

Good luck with the endeavour. Some thoughts:<p>Requiring 100+ Facebook "friends" to join may serve as decent "this is a real person" filter for college educated urban 20 somethings, but you are likely filtering out lots of potential customers older than 30, people who never left their small town, etc. Is there a better way you can accomplish the same goal?<p>Also, I'm not sure that one can ascertain that "men don't read profiles" from a study that 21 men in a coffee shop spent half the time looking at picture as 18 women similarly accosted by market researchers. That's a pretty thin read to make a decision on. Have you a/b tested how profiles might work for your users?<p>I'm wondering how the "I was looking on behalf of a friend, but stumbled across someone really appealing." thing plays out.<p>Again, good luck.

I'm honestly really surprised to hear that anybody thinks there is still stigma attached to online dating. I don't know what it's like for straight people, but online dating definitely has zero stigma for gay folks. I mean, compared to Grindr -- where all criteria for meeting somebody have been reduced to "I don't want to have to walk more than a couple of blocks" -- online dating like OKCupid is staid and respectable.

I think the lie told is not one of predestined love, but of perfect love. That you'll find the person of your dreams, they will sweep you off your feet, and you'll never have a negative feeling about them. It will all end storybook.<p>Of course the next 20 chapters are ones of compromise, empathy, regret, and apologies, with happiness and perfection in between.

My 25+ year marriage is actually the product of "predestined love" and I think most people <i>could</i> end up with a love like that. The reality is that you have to keep your eyes open if you want to notice the person that's right for you ... and you have to meet enough people to find them.<p>EDIT:<p>As I thought a bit more about it, I also realized that you have to have some criteria for what you're looking for in a partner too. How will you know if you've found them? If all you can come up with is "a body like a swimsuit model", you deserve what you get. Looks might be one criteria, but maybe you'd be better off picking some other attributes to go with it? And perhaps weighting things like interests, life-goals, etc a bit higher.<p>I'd also recommend understanding your Myers-Briggs type and the types that are compatible (this is <i>not</i> your sign). Then learn the attributes that make up your compatible types and try to spot them in public.

Recently single, I took the bait.<p>Funny story, though: everyone above the fold (eight women) is someone I've either dated or wanted to. The first one? My best friend.<p>I am lucky my screen isn't any bigger though, because the next person on the list is my sister.

Nice idea. I've been saying this forever - getting friends involved in matching was the way forward for dating sites. But all glory to the person who executes.<p>This also removes the stigma of being on the site - you're not there for you, you're just there to help out your friend!<p>However I find it to be too creepy to sign up friends without their knowledge. You're asking me to reveal personal information about them to a third party site and an unknown audience of people. And there's a lot of potential for abuse, if I want to embarass a "friend".<p>Even if I find someone I think they'd like, how am I supposed to explain that I was pimping them out? I think there should be invitations first, like "hey, I made a profile for you on CupidWithFriends, check it out." Or ideally, do it with peer pressure, like "your 3 friends made this profile for you on CWF, they want you to accept." Then if the profiled person like it, they click a button to accept and only then does it go public.<p>EDIT: actually, what if you changed the focus to "stories about friends", where dating was a sort of side effect? I think I'd feel less creepy if I felt I was making a little tribute to a friend, rather than selling them.<p>This could work for any situation where you want to match people up. Even in matching jobs to people. LinkedIn sort of does this, but they ask for super boring testimonials like "implemented action items with diligence." Stories are so much more interesting, and they are what really sells you on somebody anyway.

Relevant discussion of the perfect mate myth, in hilarious song form: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeZMIgheZro" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeZMIgheZro</a>

Another question is, of course, if straight dating can be fixed at all. After short stints on all the major dating websites, and of course trying to date in the real world, I've come to believe that the basic expectations people have can't really be satisfied, mostly by virtue of mathematics.<p>The following is a male perspective, but I think the observations should be on par for the other side as well:<p>First, there is supply and demand. There are not a lot of available women around (once you exclude the spam accounts), and that may very well be in large part due to Hollywood expectations. There are, however, a lot of men. That fact alone means that for most men, this won't work out at all. Once you get past a certain age (say 30), this mirrors the situation of the physical world <i>exactly</i>. At this point, it's a game of playing musical chairs that a lot of us simply can't win. But it only gets worse.<p>While most of the female profiles portray fundamentally damaged people, the men are overwhelmingly fit, handsome, and great in general. This could mean that women are just more honest in filling out these profiles, but it could also mean that women only join online dating sites <i>if they have absolutely no other alternative left</i>, whereas men <i>create profiles as a matter of course</i>.<p>So being me, I can't begin to compete with the other guys on attractiveness, or money, or general awesomeness. Not only that, I'm so vastly outnumbered it's not even funny. And the very limited resource we're competing on seems to be mostly reluctant, frustrated women who hate being on the site in the first place.<p>And in what I can only assume is a typical pattern, I meet exponentially more women AFK than online. Now if it continually isn't working out in meatspace, there is really no reason to assume it's going to be any different if the introduction was through a website. If anything, online-induced meetups are vastly more awkward. At least if you meet organically, it can always be in a friendly non-committal social context. When you meet online dates, it <i>has to be</i> about dating.<p>I don't think this is fixable. I'm not sure <i>it should be</i> fixable. There are plenty of people who still profit from online dating, but it doesn't really provide any discernable advantages for people who are already at a disadvantage. The perception that there <i>must</i> be someone out there for every single one of us is also a Hollywood myth.<p>In fact the only reason I can conceive where online dating makes sense is for attractive people who just don't get to meet a lot of potential partners in their daily lives. Now, that's not a small market. It may even be the majority of cases. But it took me a while to figure out that there is not a lot online dating can do for you if you don't belong to that group.<p>Having friends make your advertising for you doesn't change these mechanics. Of course it might improve the quality of the experience for the above-mentioned privileged group, but at the end of the day I'll have exactly the same odds as on any other dating site. To some degree, all dating sites (even those genuinely interested in making online dating not suck) capitalize on the Hollywood illusion that somewhere out there is my reasonably perfect match. They're playing on the assumption that everyone is dateable, and they in fact have to deceive you into thinking that the world of dating is not as depressing as it actually is.<p>Online dating works well for people who are already likely to be successful at dating AFK. For these people, online dating could probably be optimized. For others, probably not.

What's the incentive for my friends to do all this work for me for free? Why would I bother setting up a profile for a friend? It seems like a lot of work for no benefit.<p>The OkCupid profiles make more sense: you make them so that you look good and you get dates. Work -&#62; reward.

I'd find it more than a little creepy if my friends were setting up a dating profile for me without my consent.

I remember times when online dating was not broken.<p>Times where it was not organized by a third party trying to make a profit out of it.<p>It happened on IRC which was quite different: it happened in real time, it was text based (no pictures until you had proven yourself worthy). Though it already featured the too many messages towards women issue but it was easy enough to put the offenders on ignore and as once disconnected there was no way of messaging you they didn't pile up in your absence.<p>Online dating sucks but to me the main reason is that online dating is mostly governed by businesses trying to build a profitable business model for them, putting their own interest before those of the people using the service.<p>First comes the somewhat innovative idea, then the launch of the service with the accompanying marketing in order to gather a comfortable bunch of profiles and it's monetizing time in a stupid way usually by putting artificial barriers effectively killing its usefulness. From there it is inertia for a while, then the cycle starts again.<p>Hollywood may have some responsibility in shaping some people expectation of love but I don't think this is much related to online dating being broken. Actually I failed to find any link in your article which seemed to be a shameless marketing attempt at driving more people to your dating profile service, as is expected during the launch phase.<p>Then I would not touch anything facebook related with a 10 foot pole, let alone a dating profiles website where facebook friends, a.k.a. not actual friends, are in control without me knowing about it.<p>IANAL but I wonder about the legality of this, I'm not sure one is entitled to fill an online profile for someone else, it may be considered a form of identity theft.

I don't know where the author gets his statistics from, but I am skeptical that 75% of the population in the US uses online dating. It often takes decades for social and sexual mores to change (if you don't believe me, take a look at the ample evidence from history). I suppose I fail to grasp the value proposition of a service such as this, though it is certainly an interesting experiment.

It has a flaw of requiring a person to have friends.

100 "friends"? I've been on the facebook for seven years and I don't have that many, because I only fried my actual, uh, friends.

Wait, what? My friends might be setting up a profile for me without even knowing it? I sure hope that's qualified by "if I'm signed up", because otherwise I might need to engage in some rage.

So what happens if you don't have a lot of friends, or in my case, if all your friends are engaged or married and have no reason to be on a dating site?<p>I think what happens is, this model falls flat on its face. It's a good idea though, for a group of single friends.

Sign Up is broken.<p><a href="http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry" rel="nofollow">http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry</a> : Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.<p>The same issue with Chrome: The webpage at <a href="http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry" rel="nofollow">http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry</a> has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.<p>I've tried to sign up under different fb accounts.

You're completely right, people are lazy, but online dating is also way more work than it has to be.<p>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 man doesn't get a response to the more likely they are to put less effort into their messages. If you solve this problem, you effectively solve attrition rate in dating sites.<p>If you look at an old inbox full of sent of received messages for a man versus a women, you'll notice something interesting. The woman's inbox will be full of avatars next to almost all the messages. Men don't delete or suspend accounts. Now if you look at the inbox of the men on the other hand you'll notice that more and more of the messages have the default avatar next to the name as you move back in time in the inbox. This is because many women become totally overwhelmed by the number of messages, the quantity of them that are vulgar, etc.<p>I've talked to a bunch of people about this (because I'm one of those few people that has no problem talking about online dating because like you I think it is the future) and the conclusion I've come to that many people agree with is that online dating needs the equivalent of the spam button in many email inboxes. However instead of saying the words "Mark as spam", there should be two buttons, one that says "Mark as did not read my profile" and one that says "Flag as vulgar or offensive". The first button is to be used every time a women (or a man) receives a message where someone sends a one line message with no content specific to the recipient or any message which is obviously cookie cutter (cut &#38; paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.<p>Every time these buttons are used it should impact a score on both the sender and the recipient. For the sender, they're "doesn't read profiles" score should go up and for the recipient that used the button, their "cares that senders don't read and consider their profile" score should go up. The same goes for vulgarity/offensive content. The balance of these two numbers should determine if the message makes it through to the recipients email inboxes at all in the future. You could even warn senders when their score starts getting too bad, like "This message will not be delivered to this user because you've been flagged as someone who doesn't consider the content of user's profiles when crafting a message" or "This user only receives messages from people who take time to craft a personal message". If the sender then goes back and significantly modifies their message before sending again (verified via a text diff and possibly the passage of time), then send it through. This time however, if that message gets flagged by the recipient, then it counts very negatively towards their score.<p>If you use an approach like this you should be able to keep the inboxes of females (and desirable males) with a high signal to noise ratio. This will greatly improve their experience and lead them to respond to more messages and not get so fed up with the bullshit messages that they either quit responding or quit the site entirely.<p>[0] The only counterpoint to this are messages that achieve the Forer Effect[1]. One of my friends has crafted some particularly generic messages (his own admission) that presses all the right buttons just like horoscopes texts do and he gets a pretty solid response rate despite the fact that those messages are just cut and pasted. He's even frustrated that his well thought out personal messages often perform worse than his generic ones that play to a recipients own positive self image. TBH, I'd like to take Forer's original text, and modify it for OkCupid to see how it performs. Besides crafting the message, I'd need to figure out how to produce an acceptably generic profile that still conveys enough authority for the recipient to think the fake profile has the authority to make those statements/judgements.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect</a>

I always love this article about what it's like to be a woman on an online dating site: <a href="http://www.esquire.com/features/hotwoman0507" rel="nofollow">http://www.esquire.com/features/hotwoman0507</a>

My experience is mainly with OKCupid. I presume most other dating websites are variations on the same theme.<p>The problem is that OKCupid is a geek's worldview distilled. Whether a girl is visible to you is largely based upon algorithmic analysis of a questionnaire, which in turn is based on nothing more than pseudoscience.<p>So you have a questionnaire written by a team of computer programmers acting as gatekeeper to you contacting someone? Do you see the potential problem here? Who says the questionnaire is relevant?<p>Add to this fact that the quality of women on these sites is low on average, and it doesn't bode well for guys. Lots of guys will of course chime in and say it works for them. My interpretation of this is that given the sheer number of users, there will always be people who "luck out".<p>Cupid Plc (another online dating company, unrelated to OKCupid) is under heavy suspicion in the UK for faking high quality female profiles. I don't know if OKCupid does this, but the site really has no built-in mechanism to give you much trust in the profiles you see.<p>Overall, I think the problem with online dating websites is that they are not actually solving any of the difficult problems of dating. Online profiles are useless because they are 90% equivalent. Oh, so you like tall, athletic men? And you enjoy movies and wine, music, art and watching Game of Thrones? You are mainly good, but have a wild side? You are unique?<p>Given this, why the focus on these profiles? Guys are only interested in the photos (having put the effort into reading through fifty identikit profiles already).<p>...and then there's the transition to meeting up. This is fraught with difficulty because you have know way of gauging how to approach the issue. For some people "let's meet" will be enough and looked upon positively as decisive and confident. For others it is seen as completely inappropriate. The site gives you, the guy - it will usually be the guy - no way of knowing which strategy to use and so you lose 50% (or more) of the time on the basis of not having enough information to make a good decision. Given already low probability of finding someone who "suits" you on these sites, this is incredibly wasteful and not addressed.<p>So... good luck to anyone trying to improve things.

This post is very, very strange.

Wait isn't this selling the same lie?

I can't help but comment on my experience here. While I do sense the stigma to online dating, I don't personally care. My best interpretation of it though is that it's hard work going out and meeting people. So online dating attempts to make it easier by pre-screening potential candidates. Hearing your friend met someone online makes them sound lazy I guess right?<p>I've tried online dating but it never works out for me. People put their best face forward online, but are quite different in real life.<p>Honestly, regardless of Hollywood, the best relationships I've been in have come from friends introducing us at events or just randomly meeting at a bar.

There's a site similar to this in the UK called My Single Friend which you might be interested in looking at: <a href="http://www.mysinglefriend.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mysinglefriend.com/</a>

OKC is pretty predictive, due to quality questions such as: "STALE is to STEAL as 89475 is to..."<p>The depressing thing is jt2005 got it wrong :( It's the single most predictive question I've found on OKC.

Hey @joshmattvander, I started Mojo in 2009, (<a href="http://staging.mojo.co" rel="nofollow">http://staging.mojo.co</a>). I agree with many of the points you make in your post. I am now working with groceries self-checkout space but dating remain something that I am now very passionate to solve. Perhaps we could share some insight, shoot me an email my_username@gmail.com.

Have to say while reddit for me has been great for most things, /r/startups is pretty bad. I can relate to the author's frustration

It's interesting that I've never seriously encountered "you have zero control over who you end up with in life, and any attempt you make at dating is futile" in the wild where I live.<p>Online dating is still shunned upon, but for the opposite reason that you're not working hard enough on finding your match if you're "just" tapping buttons in the internet.

"That might be partially true, but that's like deciding not to swing for fear of getting a strike."<p>Hmm, not quite. It is more like not trying to swing for the fence, and trying to hit a double or single. Every once and a while you connect right in the "sweet spot" and the ball flys over the fence.

The on-boarding flow needs some work -- I got a "FBCDN image is not allowed in stream" error in both the ask friends to comment and share with &#60;friend&#62; pop-ups.<p><a href="http://imgur.com/J1isKcl" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/J1isKcl</a>

Good idea for a site but there is no way Im signing up on Facebook. :)

What's up with that Cetaphil and the tissues? Was that on purpose?

This lie is OK, so long as this startup takes off. Right?<p>The stigma of online dating is such rubbish. I am as much of a stranger as the guy on the barstool next to you.

Fantastic post. Thanks for the great breakdown :)

"Put your money where your mouth is" Paying online dating will always have better results because of this.<p>Also you take under consideration almost exclusively OkCupid.<p>OkCupid != Online Dating.<p>Because of how it works, OkCupid is full of needy girls (and starving guys).<p>They go there, put three pics, play the dumb-ass matching game (understand answer 30 questions) and then enjoy receiving 4000 messages the first day. Deep down, they feel "woa I'm that good!" and they wine about guys being lame (and their pick up lines).<p>But here is the cold truth (from what I saw in the silicon valley) 1/ most girls are gold diggers OR what-have-you-done-for-me-lately (Eddie Murphy-style) - including your ex. 2/ most guys just want to hook up.<p>You can't sort this out with friends or anything. Even if people have a tendency to protect themselves from bad-people by closing their circles that is a negative reflex when trying to do online dating.<p>And online dating, especially when free, is the perfect fuckable-meat-supermarket. (excuse my french, I am... French) So you can come up with any pickup line, as long as the quality stays the same, it's the looks that matters. With the few exceptions based on luck OR coincidences.<p>This is also why a lot of people have a negative image of online-dating. There is of course the geeky-desperate, you're-not-capable-otherwise image.<p>For at least some time, people will still have this image. If you try to educate the world about online-dating, you're screwed. You should try to kick ass at your website, and make it feel like it's _not_ online dating. Take distance from this image.<p>And it won't work if it is free or if you try to involve friends. It will work by solving the question: "how to raise the quality of the members commitment to the idea".<p>I think good leads could be: 1/ pure and guaranteed balance in girls/guys (for straight websites) - It can be extremely repulsive. 2/ remove un-active accounts. 3/ Push people to open themselves - more privacy, different layers, many technical ways. 4/ force them out of the website. (you provide the first contact, but try setting up the date, suggestions is a great step already) 5/ limited amount of members (increased by periods, without some elitist bs)<p>The issue is, it's all about quantity not quality. The big problem I foresee is that might go against a juicy business plan - at least at first, and definitely when raising money. (better have 200M people poking each-others virtual a-holes than 10k people doing something and paying for it).<p>As for Hollywood's lie, it's always the same bitching. Hollywood's lie is only as valuable as the number of people who believes it. The truth is, people want to believe in Hollywood-dreamy-love but they tend to take everything too seriously to actually catch it. But hopefully, they will one day get tired of it and get down to earth.<p>Good luck in your adventure.

Two years and counting. I hope it lasts :)

did you hear about mycutefriend.com? it was recently "unveiled" at Launch2013.

How about you lie to us too buddy?<p><pre><code> The problem is men don't read online dating profiles, they only look at the pictures. It's not just a difficult and repetitive task, but it's wasted time. </code></pre> I am a man, and I read every word of ~90% of the profiles I'm interested in enough to visit, and 100% of the profiles I send a message to. So what does that say about your statement? The study you linked to didn't even use OKC, it used two other sites that are structurally very different.<p>I really like OKC. I thought it was way better than any other dating site I looked at. I also found a wonderful woman on it whom I love dearly and who loves me, so I'm perfectly happy.<p>From your post, it sounds to me like you have a rather narrow viewpoint of what people think about online dating. There are many points of view, and if you want to focus on a niche of people who believe what you believe, that's perfectly fine. But don't go making objective statements like "men don't read online dating profiles" when that's simply not true. "A study that used X number of men and Y number women, looked at eHarmony and match.com and found that ... blah blah blah" is way better and way closer to the truth.<p>(I'm not a shill for OKC btw, I don't work for them, or know anyone who works for them. I'm just really really happy with their site and the results.)

I can't imagine that anyone's friends are as invested as they themselves are (or would put an equivalent amount of energy) in their dating success, but maybe I just have lousy friends. It's an experiment worth conducting.

I don't know how you figured "most of us use it". Most of us have probably created a dummy account and quickly said "to hell with this." I won't go near those things, not because of "predestined love" but because 90% of the girls on there aren't attractive and the ones who are I assume are screwed up in some way. And if it makes you uncomfortable reading something so cold and dismissive as what I just said it's just as uncomfortable thinking it, so to hell with it.<p>I can go up to the bar, have a beer, see a live band, talk to a pretty girl and know in 30 seconds if I like her and if she thinks I'm grotesque. Mother Nature is very efficient. No need to over-complicate things.

here's a novel idea dude. go interact with real people. in person.

Well... the destined love trope came from a lot heavier, and older forms of literature than Hollywood. It's just one of the things that people have fantasized, experienced, and encouraged for ages.<p>Really, the article didn't convince me a bit. The stigma comes because the idea is quite distinct from what we've all been doing for several thousand years...