You're completely right, people are lazy, but online dating is also way more work than it has to be.
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.
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.
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 & paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.
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.
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.
[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.
Your proposed solution seems really awful. Don't you know that such a power structure (see consumerium wiki about sysop power structure) will inevitably be abused. Also the recent Pycon incident should put some light on the usefulness of a "flag as offensive" button.
Your solution is Hard Security when Soft Security is way enough (refer to meatball wiki for more on these notions).
Not only that but this problem has already been solved a few times, a simple and effective but not perfect solution: a man cannot message a woman until explicitly allowed by the woman. a man can notify a woman her profile caught his interest with a poke-like of which he gets a limited amount per day. There goes the message overload for women issue.
Now remove the heterosexism component and make it so no one can message anyone until explicitly allowed by the recipient and not only you got the message overload issue under control but you get an incentive for people to put some care into writing their profile and reading other's.
There's probably a better way, but this one is IMHO at least an order of magnitude better than your proposition.
The solution is in challenging how we suppose this should work and not in trying to fix those broken assumption by placing additional layers on top of something defective by design.
The solution is even easier. There is no need to have messages individually marked, the system knows what is being sent and can handle it automatically.
Auto detect spam messages. If a guy keeps sending out the same copy and paste, after 2 or 3 sends, just forward future copies to /dev/null.
Now this has to be personalized! If a women responds to those types of messages above some certain threshold, then hey, let her receive them, no problem.
I was thinking of adapting xkcd's robot9000 to dating sites on the other day. Instead of searching duplicate messages from 1 user, you search for duplicates across the entire database, with exponentially increasing ban periods if your message is not original. It would definitely force men and women to write meaningful messages.
These points are good, esp. the aided detection of spammers. But what you are proposing is basically some amendments to classic dating sites, nothing about the very premise of this startup helps.
And honestly, I believe the idea of having friends writing your profile is very flawed. Maybe it's my own personality, but I cannot see that happening to me or any of my friends.
Online dating is never going to be perfect because no dating is ever going to be perfect. But roughly speaking, everything is already invented. Dare I say, pay sites do the bulk of the filtering by having people pay (mostly us males), and that just works and finances the site. As simple as it is. And this is why they still exist.
So yeah, you can add a few elements, maybe some enhancements to traditional dating sites but the basic mechanics are just that: everybody self-promoting and looking for other people, following their basic instincts. How much can you direct that to be more effective? probably not that much more.
Completely agree. I only read the post. I didn't check out the guy's dating site because I'm in a relationship and I'm still working on trying to make it more open.
The one habit I think still needs to be taught to people on dating sites is the value of publicness and openness. About two years ago I got my mom to sign up for OkCupid (a few years after her divorce) and the biggest problem I encountered was her reluctance to be open. People are afraid to put any identifying information or any information that deviates from the public image they maintain at work and in social circles. This basically sets themselves up for failure because connecting with the right people for you really is dependent on both parties being open enough to find real connections. Jeff Jarvis I think has given one of the best talks on the value of openness. If you've never seen it, definitely check it out.
While your point is valid, I'm left wondering if too much openness becomes a problem. When I was single, I made an OkCupid profile and decided to, for better or worse, be as open and honest as possible (a principle I adhere to in meat space as well). I had over 1200 questions (this is a lot) answered and never tried to make myself seem like something I wasn't.
I figured I was doing everything right, and I was optimistic (a good handful of my friends had great success on OkC), but I barely got any dates, and the ones that I did ended up being duds. I did this for maybe 8 months.
Contrast that to the couple of months I signed up for a paid match.com account (pro tip: paying for a service and looking for someone else who has paid for a service shows a mutual seriousness about the service; OkC's barrier to entry is practically zero so many people don't end up taking it seriously) and here I am with a going-on-three-years-now happy relationship. Match barely has any information to fill out and it makes me wonder if that ends up being a more successful model, as it pushes much of the "screening" process to meat space, where it's a lot easier to discern people's idiosyncrasies.
Of course, being open once you're offline is absolutely key. I'm just not sure how well it works for the first online impression.
Edit: I don't mean to attribute my relationship success to my choice of service, that was pure luck. I just wanted to point out that it'd be interesting to see more data about openness' influence on dating site success rates.
I'd firmly advice against being open about your personal information on the internet, especially on a dating site.
I understand every big internet corporation is pushing the idea that privacy is dead and that you ought to put every thing about you online for every one to see. But what made the internet great is its pseudonymous nature.
Don't lie on your profile, but don't put up identifying personal info either.
Wow. I'm going to e-mail you this weekend. You've really thought about this stuff, and I think you've got some great ideas. Would love to chat with you some more.
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.
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.
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 & paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.
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.
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.
[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.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect