Comments on: Falling out of love with e-dating

By: Patricio

Patricio — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:41:24 +0000

Also noteworthy is Dan Ariely’s interview about online dating and why it is “so unsatisfying”.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/20749

“Online dating sites assume that people are easy to describe on searchable attributes.”

By: LaserDragon

LaserDragon — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:53:47 +0000

Another problem, which no one ever seems to notice, or mention, is that dating sites are companies with no incentive to effectively provide the advertised service. If you find your perfect match you’ll cancel your subscription and go and enjoy your wonderful new relationship. If you occasionally find a date but it never works out you might continue paying that subscription fee indefinitely. These companies are much better off only half working, and that’s the way they are likely to continue. There’s a kind of natural selection going on, any dating site that actually solved the problems mentioned above would fail before it properly established itself.

By: Ben Artin

Ben Artin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:38:51 +0000

That already exists, and it’s called okcupid.com. On top of that, the people who run it are crazy-awesome nerds, and blog about their mathematical analyses of various dating-related notions — including an analysis about why online dating as done by for-pay matchmaking companies is doomed; see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/

By: W.

W. — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:45:03 +0000

Actually, OKCupid works in a very similar way- when you view a profile, it shows you alternative matches in the sidebar, tagged according to their personalities.

So you’ll view X, and in the sidebar it says “Y- like X, but less geeky” or “Z- even geekier”.