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A Quantitative Analysis of Online Dating
imjustatomato writes "Never before has something so human and primitive as dating been reducible to such discrete values. A study analyzes the data of an online dating service. When do you like someone like yourself? Among online dating members, "marital status" and "wants children" are the two most influential characteristics to match. Other interesting findings are: men initiate 73.3% of messages, but their initiations are 17.9% less likely to be reciprocated; 78.2% of messages are never responded to."
I had mostly positive experiences with online dating after my divorce. I met several women, some were romantic friends, some were regular friends and one just didn't work out at all.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I always thought discrimination against religion and smoking were bidirectional. Religious people are more likely to not want to date non-religious types, than the other way around. Non-smokers will prefer to date non-smokers, but I doubt smokers have much of a preference. It would be interesting to see if there are characteristics that work in the opposite manner. Opposites attract, don't they? Guess not
I cannot believe geographical distance wasn't a factor. Who is going to date someone a two hours drive away? Then again, ignoring this probably helped in making the number of messages sent the best predictor for number of messages received, giving more false hope to quicktyping nerds. Bet the author was one.
blow your mind already
> none of the numbers seem all that surprising, except that 55% of active members are women
> (63% of all members were men).
"Members" are anyone who'se ever signed on for an account and not deleted it. They keep the numbers looking good by continuing to carry these. Not surprising, ISPs have done this for a long time. Men don't remain active members because they get so little response (ref. the original paper).
Women remain active more because they tend to keep coming back to the chat rooms, mostly with other women. They hang around just in case a guy comes along to try to chat with them. Then they'll all play hot chat with him, and afterwards fail to respond to him at about the same rate as in email.
I've been doing some research of my own. But I don't see anything surprising enough about it that makes it worth writing about. It's the same sort of behaviors I've seen since the time when BBSs started gaining general public members, prior to the spread of internet connection turning them into ISPs. I'm not surprised by the fact the article is new and the paper is 2 years old. I'm surprised that someone bothered to write a paper about something that's been going on for 15 years. On the other hand, it was a master's thesis. Very few academics care what master's students write about as long as the research is done halfway decent.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Did they confine their research to just Match.com? Because my experience with the greedy Match.com was poor. If you haven't paid, not only can you not send messages, you can't read messages others send to you. Even if those others have paid, you can't read their messages. When I was a paying member, I got one genuine unsolicited message which was from a woman who seemed nice but was more than twice my weight, and one genuine reply which was, sadly, negative. The rest of the messages I got were spams and scams. I wasn't doing as well as a 10% response rate, let alone the even higher numbers this research claims. Possibly it's because I refused to put down an income range. After I quit paying, I was still getting notices whenever someone sent me a message, but no info on who sent it or what the message was. A wink at least mentioned who. Damned if I was going to pay more just to find out it was another scam message. Now I think Match.com's lousy policies had a lot to do with the low response rate. It's not that all the women really were that rude, or swamped, it's that Match.com stinks. I get much better response rates on okcupid.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I've had much success with "internet dating", but it seems to depend on where I live. When I lived in Houston the girls were plentiful and fun. Living in Des Moines is a completely different story. The only ones I get replies from here are trollish freaks that probably couldn't get a date if they didn't post fake pictures of some model, or at least some hot chick from down the street. I'm still amazed at the enormous differences in both quality and quantity of women from the online world between the two cities.
You're nothing; like me.
Even if those others have paid, you can't read their messages.
I wonder if that was made clear to paying members, before you send them. Or before you join.
I was similarly disappointed when I tried out the system of eHarmony a year ago. I could understand not being able to initiate communications until becoming a paying member, but I was very surprised that I couldn't communicate back. Someone who could initiate with me would have to be a paying member. But to me this lessens the value of membership. Esp. if they aren't told when someone they're being matched up with isn't currently a member and as such cannot respond. Otherwise they're partly paying for the privilege of being tricked into helping the site recruit more members.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Having done online dating in the past my top criteria was religion - not what religion they were following per se, but what religion they were looking for. "Catholics seeking Catholics" seemed to be the most common requirment in my area on match.com. As someone who is Jewish, albeit barely practicing, I was forced to skip these profiles over. What really irked me were profiles seeking a "Christian, Muslim, Taoist, Atheist" etc. and they had to go out of their way to de-select the option of dating someone who was Jewish, rather than just select "All religions"
I'm still surprised that no one has caught on to the fact that of the top 10 dating sites right now, at least 4 of them employ the use of fake profiles and even pay employees to chat with their members in order to get them to pay for premium membership. I know, because i've seen it happening first hand.. why doesn't anyone catch on to this?
Ever recieve a flirt/wink from another rather attractive member, only to find he/she doesn't reply back when you message them? Or how about receiving large numbers of flirts/winks in a very short period of time when your member profile contains close to no information?
Do a test yourself. go to www.mate1.com, make a profile, but profile no personal infomation about yourself. wait a week and see what happens. odds are you'll be messaged by about 15 people who are all supposedly interested in you.
MABASPLOOM!