Hi, I Want To Meet (17.6% of) You!

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it. "Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals). Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell: Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the system has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site lists your profile in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

I realize that every time I write something along the lines of "They should do it this way instead of the way they do it now", whether for search engines, spam filters, content rating systems or whatever, I leave some people shrugging and wondering why anyone should switch to my idea. So let me try something new: I want to prove mathematically that this change would result in some (in fact, most) of the participants being better off, while nobody would be worse off (what economists call a Pareto improvement). I am not necessarily saying that it would lead to a good outcome for everybody; basically, it will lead to better outcomes for most users (although some of those will still be bad outcomes), and will do so in a lot less time.

If as soon as you read the phrase "I can prove mathematically" you thought, "Oh well no wonder he gets such a low response rate if he talks like that all the time", then I humbly submit that (1) while I like my Slashdot persona of a pedant banging people over the head with what I think is a brilliant idea, I do have other programmable settings, like conversation about movies, and (2) for once, it's not just me. Sites like eDateReview.com list hundreds of reviews for the most popular sites like Yahoo, Match.com and eHarmony, all of which got an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Another site hosting reviews of online personals services, DatingSitesReviews.com, posted a message urging people to take the predominantly negative reviews with a grain of salt, since users with a bad experience are much more likely to post a review than users with a positive one, but that only generated comments from the site's users reiterating, "No, they really do suck." Most of the complaints from men are not just about the number of obviously fake profiles (which led to lawsuits against Yahoo and Match.com), but about the low response rate even from women who are ostensibly real.

Not that I blame the women. Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes, some of them get far too many messages to reply to (and even if they had time to reply, they'd only be leading on most of the correspondents, since there would never be enough time to actually meet all of them). Yahoo Personals formats your inbox so that you see each person's picture along with the first few words of what they wrote, so if you have too many messages, all you can really do is scroll through the pictures (yes, women do care about that). In fact, Yahoo has a feature that lets you see the users who have viewed your profile -- which may have revealed more than Yahoo intended, since sometimes after writing to 20 or 30 people, I find out that none of them even clicked through to my profile anyway -- so if you're a guy, take Yahoo's advice about "polishing your profile" with a grain of salt. (In fact, many users with Yahoo Personals profiles are not paid members, which means they cannot reply to the messages you send them except with boilerplate like "I liked your message", and Yahoo blocks you from sending them your e-mail address. So Yahoo is listing them as people that you can contact through their service, even though Yahoo knows those people won't be able to write you back. If this strikes you as something between bad site design and actionable fraud, then you are not a Yahoo employee.)

So, yes, there is a problem worth solving. For the purpose of describing the response-rate system, I'm going to dispense with political correctness and refer to the people sending the messages as the "men" and to the people receiving messages as the "women". I hear from the pilot episode of Sex and the City that after the "mid-thirties power flip", the odds shift the other way (due to women getting older and the men accumulating more money, although the show doesn't put it quite so bluntly), so if you're in that age bracket, substitute the appropriate genders in the discussion below.

Note that I when I talk about listing women's response rates, I am talking about their response rates to men who meet their criteria. If you only want to meet men aged 28 to 29 who are interested in paddleboating, then your displayed response rate is only affected by the percentage of messages that you respond to from men in that group.

The mathematical argument commences: If you're a man writing to women on a site, for every women there are two essential variables: the probability P that she will reply to you, and how much value V you would place on getting a reply from her (say, on a scale of 1 to 10). For any woman that you write to, if P = (probability of getting a reply) and V = (value of getting a reply), then then probabilistic benefit of writing to her is P x V. (And I swear I didn't notice this until after I'd written the article, but I do not want to hear anything juvenile about framing a discussion of men meeting women in terms of the "P" and the "V".) If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s may also be the ones that you have the highest chance of getting a reply from, since fewer other men are writing to them, and P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge. Unfortunately, if your tastes are fairly typical, then the women you consider to be 9s and 10s are also getting lots of messages from other men, and have the lowest probability of replying to you. So as V = (value of getting a reply) goes up, P = (probability of getting a reply) goes down, and the product doesn't vary as much as you would like. There's nothing that the response-rate system can do about that.

In any case, if you're allocating your time rationally, you would first write to the members where you estimate P x V to be the highest, and then write to the members where P x V was the next highest, and then based on the cost-benefit principle, you'd continue writing until P x V of writing to the next person is exceeded by the value of the time it would take you to do it. (The incremental value of each additional minute of your time is not constant -- after a long time spent sending messages, you might get bored, and would require a larger incentive to spend an additional minute of your time doing it.) All of this is basically intuition and common sense, even if people don't think of it in terms of these equations (except me!).

But here's the advantage of the response-rating system: With a conventional personals site, you're only guessing the value of P x V -- to be precise, you know the value of V (at least as well as anyone can possibly know it from reading someone's profile), but you're only estimating P, based on how many messages you think she's probably getting from other people. Because of that randomness, that means some of the time you are sending messages without the best possible P x V value, and probably some of the time you are even sending messages where P x V would not even be worth the effort of sending the message, if you knew how low P was. Whereas with a system that shows a woman's response rate to people who meet her criteria, if you're someone who meets her criteria, you know roughly the probability P of getting a reply. (Actually, the probability P for you of getting a response, might not be the percentage-response-rate displayed by the site -- if you have an especially attractive or unattractive face, but there's no way for the woman to specify that in her criteria, then your chance of getting a reply might be higher or lower than the displayed percentage-response-rate. But, then you could just scale all of the displayed response rates upwards or downwards to gauge your probability P of getting a reply. It would still be better than making a total guess on a conventional personals site that didn't display percentage response rates at all.) So this is an unambiguous improvement from the point of view of the men. Another reason why men would be much better off is a specific case of this: they would avoid the time sink of writing to women who do not or cannot respond to most of the messages they're getting. With a response-rate system, those women's profiles would gradually display lower and lower response rates until the percentage was low enough to dissuade all but the most optimistic (or handsome) suitors. Without a display of the response rate, those users continue getting ridiculously large numbers of messages for as long as their profiles are active (as some of my female friends with profiles could attest).

Then consider from the women's point of view. Suppose you're a woman interested in meeting people who meet certain criteria, and you're sincerely interested in replying to at least a significant portion of people who fit those criteria. The problem is that of the men who meet those requirements, some of their attention is still going to be siphoned off by them writing to other women who only have a low chance of responding. Even if you have very specific criteria, so the men who meet your criteria have a great chance of getting a reply from you, on a conventional personals site they might not realize that. But if your response rate were displayed by your profile, then when men searched for women whose criteria they met (and who met their own criteria as well), you would be listed as one of the people with the highest chance of replying, and you'd have a greater chance of hearing from men who met your requirements. (This is not a huge benefit for women, because most women get enough messages that there will usually be some who meet their criteria anyway. The response-rate system would mainly be beneficial to men; I'm just saying it would not be worse for women and would in fact be a little better for some of them.)

Now there's one group of people who would not be better off: Women who create accounts mainly for the ego boost of getting huge numbers of messages and not replying to them. I talked with a few women who used the personals sites for this purpose; some I knew in person, some of them I talked to back when Yahoo Personals would display a woman's Yahoo Messenger screen name, and if you sent them an instant message they would sometimes reply out of sheer boredom and admit that that was what they were doing. These people would not be better off in a system that displayed response rates, since after their response rates dwindled low enough, so would the number of messages. So this would not be a true Pareto improvement, since the definition of a Pareto improvements insists on nobody being worse off, and doesn't make judgments as to people's reasons. Fine, but I submit that people who use the personals sites for the ego boost of ignoring messages are going against the site's purpose, and any improvement that pisses them off but improves things for everybody else, is still a good thing.

You might worry that the ego-trippers would continue to game the system by writing trivially short replies to all the messages they got, in order to keep their "response rate" high and keep the messages coming. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be very common, because my impression from talking to the girls who do this is that the whole point of the ego boost is that the messages keep coming in without them having to do anything. If they had to exert themselves at all -- even long enough to reply to each message and say "yeah" -- then it wouldn't feel as much fun. Probably some would do this anyway. But of the men who kept getting responses like "yeah" and "I dunno", hopefully they would get the message quickly and stop wasting time. I could be wrong about some of these things, but my point is that it would not be any worse than the old system, where so many users already waste time writing to people who don't write back, and the new system would probably be better since it would eliminate some of the time-wasters.

There are some design decisions that I didn't specify here -- for example, do you display each user's response rate over their entire history on the site, or just over the last 24-72 hours, or both? A trickier question: Do you display the user's criteria that they have entered to specify what they're looking for, and which are used when the site calculates their response rate to all users who "meet their criteria"? Most sites do of course let users list what they are looking for. But suppose a woman is only interested in meeting men who make more than $75,000 per year, but she thinks it would be crass to list that on her profile. On the other hand, if she doesn't list it as a requirement, then her percentage response rate will be dragged down by all the men writing to her who make less than $75,000 but who she's not interested in replying to. One alternative would be that she could still have one set of public criteria displayed on her profile, and one set of "secret" criteria that included the $75,000 cutoff. Then men who made $75,000 or more would be steered toward her profile with the message, "You meet her criteria, and she responds to 50% of men who meet her requirements!" But you'd have the ticklish business of men who somehow find her profile, and meet all of her public criteria, but can't figure out why the system is telling them that they weren't a match for her -- and they contact the service to ask why, and tech support has to tactfully explain that sometimes you don't meet all of someone's secret requirements. In any case, a man would be able to reverse-engineer a woman's "secret" requirements by varying his own characteristics on his profile until the system said, "Ding! You're a match for her!" (But then what are you going to do, send her a message calling her a gold digger? Go ahead, it doesn't affect her percentage response rate anyway.)

In concluding that "everyone" would be better off under this system, I did make the type of assumptions that are common in mathematical/economic models, such as assuming that all participants are cold rationalists maximizing benefit to themselves. Such assumptions often do model human behavior pretty well, even in romantic pairings -- it explains why 10's usually end up with 10's, 9's usually end up with 9's, and so on. But these axioms may not take seemingly "irrational" preferences into account. For example, I've assumed that if it would be a waste of time for a user to write to 10 women who are not going to write back, then the new system is an improvement if it dissuades him from ever writing to those 10 women in the first place, because the end result is the same (nothing) and you've saved them the effort. But on a conventional personals site, after someone has written to 10 people and before they realize they're not getting any responses, they still have the hope that they might get answers, and that can be a good feeling. They'll be disappointed later on once they realize they're not getting any responses, but if they have a personality that is especially receptive to hope and especially resistant to disappointment, then it could average out to a better overall experience under the old system. Well, the old-style Match.com and Yahoo Personals would still be around for people who prefer to dream. I'm just saying the new-style system would better suit people looking for results.

The real problem with starting a competing personals site around this system (apart from pulling in enough users to reach "critical mass", but assume you had an ad campaign to do that), is that even if your system produced better matches for everybody in the long run, Yahoo Personals and Match.com would still be better at luring people in with the hope of getting a fabulous match-up. Even if Yahoo Personals got rid of all the fake profiles, and even if they gave anyone listed as a "member" a way to reply to people who send them messages (which among other things would bring them in line with laws against false advertising), their gallery would still be glittering with all the profiles of people who are getting too much mail to possibly reply to it all -- but as a new user, you wouldn't know that. On the other hand, with a personals site that listed criteria-specific response rates next to each profile, if you didn't have a good chance of getting a response from the most popular users, you'd know that from the beginning. You could then come back down to Earth and focus on the users whose criteria you met and who responded to most of their mail. But the site wouldn't be able to use its superstars to lure people in and string them along like Yahoo and Match.com can do.

So, to the business that launches a personals site around this system, this is what I'd propose to do: Since your system really does work better, contact a bunch of single reporters (I mean, higher up than me) and tell them to sign up for an account with Yahoo Personals, an account with Match.com, and an account with your new response-rating site, and spend twenty minutes on each site writing to users that they're interested in meeting. Or sponsor a controlled study where dozens of users try the same thing. Your site will be the only one where the participants can find and write to the members with the highest response rate for people meeting their criteria, and if the system really does result in more efficient matches, then the reporters and the study organizers ought to be able to verify that. Then you have your new ad campaign!

It's easy to list all the problems that would occur in this system: People could lie on their profiles, you can't always judge someone from a profile even if they're honest, people could waste your time starting a conversation and then bailing on you, just because people meet through the site doesn't mean they'll be a good match in person, etc. But these are problems with any personals site. This system only addresses the specific problem of efficiency; I haven't come up with an algorithmic solution to all of the problems of dating and love. It's only Tuesday.

Do the rest of us a favour- just shoot yourself.

[trolltalk.com]

We don't need YAUDSBSWWTMAMBOOOPM (Yet Another Useless Dating Site by Someone Who Wants To Make A Million Bucks Off Of Other People's Misery).

Really, just admit that you don't know how to meet other people, and that you figure if you're running a dating site, you'll get to skim all the ads, etc., AND make money without having to really work. Its not going to happen.

Here is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Women are afraid men on the internet are going to kill them.

Men are marginalized by men who only want sex.

Fix that and you're rich.

Men Hunt, Women Gather

[Electrawn]

You can't apply Math to Sexual Attraction.

Obligatory: http://www.xkcd.com/55/ [xkcd.com]

What hasn't been thought out is the solution question: Will this complex system result in a resolution to loneliness/compatibility faster? Nutshell: More hookups?

I doubt it.

Tedious in the extreme

[pigiron]

Has anyone actually read the entire article? No wonder they can't get any dates!

OKCupid

[cromar]

OKCupid! [okcupid.com] has a much better implementation. Users post questions, users answer them, and a percent match is calculated. Wow!

I have a better idea

[EmagGeek]

Go out, socialize, have friends, and meet the person of your dreams au naturale.

I met my girlfriend at a game night another friend invited me to. Believe me, this method gives you all of the advantages of these silly social networking and dating sites, but without having to do any of the work. This is because this is how human socialization works anyway. You meet people through people, and the more well adapted you are socially, the more people you meet and befriend, and the more you value your interpersonal relationships.

So, P and V (RTFA if you haven't already) both get much bigger, which is always more fun.

Re:Tedious in the extreme

[GlobalColding]

Agreed, another example of Those who Can - DO, Those who Can't - Teach. I remember growing up, those of my friends who couldnt score kept talking about alternate realities and improbable multidimentional sexual scenarios. The rest of us were just having sex.

Much simpler solution

[truthsearch]

While I like to see computer systems help in solving problems, there's a much simpler solution. Use a niche personals site. The smaller the niche, the less people will be on it, the less bombarded the women are with initial messages, and the higher the response rate. The larger and more diverse a site, of course the less likely you are to see a response.

Also avoid the sites that are completely ad supported or ones with obvious fake postings.

Three flaws come to mind

[Lanoitarus]

- Your system disincentiveizes (yeah, its not a word, deal with it) women from joining in the first place. By effectively telling women that they will be publicly graded and judged on their reply rate, you remove the ability to "just see". While this was kindof your goal, knowing that they cant "just see" will have a very negative effect on women joining the service in the first place. After all, as a woman, would you join the service that you can just watch passively and see if something great comes up, or would you join the one that makes it your job to reply to everyone or you fail?

- The system fails to address new members. What percentage is shown for women who haven't had anyone meeting their criteria reply yet? If the default is zero noone will message them in the first place. If the default is 100, see the next point. If the default is blank, how many messages do you require before it becomes a percentage (see next point).

- It provides major incentive for women to set artificially high secret criteria in order to boost their percentage. If they require someone who makes 500k a year and who is Jewish but was born in the Vatican, they can effectively expect to maintain a 100% listed response rate while only being "required" to respond to a handful of people a year, and can continue to be spectators on the sideline for everyone else.

Re:I have a better idea (for me, anyway)

[TheSpoom]

Or, y'know, seek out what you're looking for in a system specifically designed for it. I get annoyed when people say "just go out and meet someone" like it's so incredibly easy. Some of us do socialize, quite a lot, in the real world, and yet all our preferred-sex friends are either with someone already or engaged or what-have-you. Not to mention that a well-designed matching system can make the whole process much quicker and find you someone who will love you for who you are, with less risk of finding out you're incompatible later than a random meeting.

Different strokes for different folks. If meeting people through people works for you, great. It doesn't mean we're wrong for using a more scientific system for finding happiness.

Re:What do we call this service?

[_KiTA_]

I mean, if it says "MoxFulder has responded to 100% of people who contacted him who meet his criteria", presumably MoxFulder is either (a) a slut, or (b) really desperate.

Or... (c) polite enough to turn down people with an email rather than ignoring them.

I know assuming promiscuity is fun and all, but one must make room for the possibility of good manners, however rare they may be. :)

Re:What do we call this service?

[Aaricia]

Why, www.girlsfornerds.com of course!

Better way to improve personals and response rates

[xethair]

Use a pay-per-contact or credits based system.

The real problem is that almost every personals site allows people to contact others with no specific investment. That means that there's no reason for someone to actually target their messages, which has the obvious effect of giving women on the site a disproportionate pile of crap to wade through just for using the site.

Subscription-based services are just a waste of money and also a clear conflict of interest for the site operator, since they want you to subscribe rather than to actually send/receive useful messages.

I appreciate the free sites (and OKCupid.com should be your target, not crap sites like Yahoo or Match), but they have exactly the same problem. I can see a credits system that didn't need to be money based, if being free was important, but basically sites need to accept that people really only can send a few useful messages in a day, if not in a week. They need to start being more honest about the search process and helping people find good *likely* people to contact, rather than just putting a little up there and then trying to amuse people with toys and such.

If you want to improve a personals site, you need to improve the experience for women. *Then* information like how much someone replies to messages might be of some use (although pretty easy to falsify if someone wanted to...).

Re:What do we call this service?

[GospelHead821]

MoxFulder could also be very selective. His criteria could be so strict that he responded in full to a very small number of people. Hundreds of people may have sent him email, but if only two matched all of his criteria and he responded to both of those people, then his percentage would be 100%

Of course, this leads to a way to game the system. If your criteria are loose except for one criterion that has two characteristics (low probability of somebody meeting it AND low deterrence to somebody who doesn't meet it) then you'll still get lots of emails from people who technically don't meet ALL of your criteria. Your response rate will still reflect a high response rate to individuals who meet all of your criteria even though you're getting emails from many mostly-qualified people and not responding to many of them.

Re:Halfway decent idea

[MadDogTannen]

I've done a lot of online dating in my day, and I agree with your diagnosis of the major problems with it. The mass mailings problem is the most serious in my opinion because I think the mass mailings lead to the second problem you list, because if tons of guys are doing mass mailings, then most of the decent girls are getting way too many emails to be able to realistically respond to them all, so they just start ignoring the vast majority of them.

That's why I prefer eHarmony for online dating. Since you can only communicate with people you're matched to, and you have to go through their predetermined stages of communication, it tends to raise the signal to noise ratio. Guys can't send out emails to 100 random girls per day because they only get 3-5 matches per day. Girls will typically also only get 3-5 matches per day, meaning that they're receiving communication from 3-5 guys per day, which is a manageable enough number for them to actually read everything they get sent.

As for the lying, I think there is a percentage of people who lie on their profiles, but I think the bigger problem is that people inadvertently misrepresent themselves because they see themselves differently than they actually are. In fact, I've found that the girls who say that they're not into drama and game playing are often the worst girls to date when it comes to drama and game playing. I've also found that the girls who say that they're not looking to just hook up are the easiest to get into bed. People have a really hard time evaluating themselves honestly because they're often describing how they wish they were rather than how they really are.

I've tried most of the mainstream sites, but eHarmony has always worked best for me. I've had one night stands, short term exclusive relationships, short term open relationships, etc. from all of the sites, but the highest success rate has always been with eHarmony. Also, I met my fiancee on eHarmony, so it works for the long term stuff too.

Re:Little real-life experience here..

[jollyreaper]

Then I started getting calls from my younger sisters. Mom's an internet addict. Quite the shocker, as this was the same woman who used to dream about throwing the computer out the window when my dad was alive. So now she's flying off around the country meeting men and having dirty phone conversations with them and she bought a webcam. So I decided maybe I should talk to mom and let her know that people on the Internet are RARELY who they seem to be, especially the trolls you find on yahoo chat. Of course it didn't faze her. These guys were way too smooth to be cock-blocked by some punk college freshman.

You screwed up. Now here's what you should have done. Find out her screen profile, chat her up for a month or two, get her really looking forward to meeting you for the first time, then show up for the date and ask her if she finally realizes that you never can tell who you're talking to online, shock her out of her complacency. If she's still interested in continuing the date, stand up slowly, head for the door, and never speak to her again.

Re:OKCupid

[Prien715]

May I humbly submit you're a tech geek and she's an art geek, but you're both nerds;)

Re:Three flaws come to mind

[billyt007]

Your system disincentiveizes (yeah, its not a word, deal with it) women from joining in the first place. By effectively telling women that they will be publicly graded and judged on their reply rate, you remove the ability to "just see". While this was kindof your goal, knowing that they cant "just see" will have a very negative effect on women joining the service in the first place. After all, as a woman, would you join the service that you can just watch passively and see if something great comes up, or would you join the one that makes it your job to reply to everyone or you fail?

Having people just lurking on the site is something to be discouraged, not encouraged. And yes, women joining to just to see what comes up is the problem he attempts to fix. It's not your job to reply, if you're hot you'll get too many messages to reply to, if you're not hot you'll get less messages to reply to, it evens out.

- The system fails to address new members. What percentage is shown for women who haven't had anyone meeting their criteria reply yet? If the default is zero noone will message them in the first place. If the default is 100, see the next point. If the default is blank, how many messages do you require before it becomes a percentage (see next point).

Trival solutions exist, during the initial week (or other time period) no reply percentage displayed. Or live updating based on how many message have been sent. IE, if over the course of an hour (or other time period) they get bombarded, lower the percent displayed since they've already recieved dozens of messages, and if they don't get much increase the percent to encourage. Or just decrease the percent everytime they recieve a message till they log back in and have a chance to read and response.

- It provides major incentive for women to set artificially high secret criteria in order to boost their percentage. If they require someone who makes 500k a year and who is Jewish but was born in the Vatican, they can effectively expect to maintain a 100% listed response rate while only being "required" to respond to a handful of people a year, and can continue to be spectators on the sideline for everyone else.

No because with the secret criteria listed you simply wouldn't be able to message that person unless it's matched. So yes, while those that had hard to match secret criteria would have a high percentage of replies, what's the point if they're not able to messaged by most people.

Dating websites

[cyberfunkr]

IANAL, but I *AM* an owner of a dating website (PolyMatchMaker.com [polymatchmaker.com]), so I have an almost qualified opinion (which means I probably shouldn't be allowed to reply).

Note: The current software is showing it's age, so go easy on it. There is a new version coming in near future. But I doubt I'll get much of a slashdotting as it's very much a niche market dating site.

Whether you go mathematically or go with simple searches, it boils down to members wanting a magical "Find me a hook up now" button. Everyone has their own perception and experiences of dating sites and how they should work.

Here is the life cycle of typical members when they are left to their own devices with search features:

• You sign up with hopes and dreams of finding the perfect person.
• You use the advanced search, find the top 4 people you match and write each of them a personal, multi-paragraph email explaining life, love, and why they are perfect together.
• You get no replies and feel dejected.
• So you try sending shorter emails to the next 10 in line.
• Of the 10, only 1 or 2 reply and those fizzle out in a few emails. No meat-space dates.
• Finally, in desperation you send out 50 emails to random people saying "You're totally hot. We should get together. Email me."
• Of those 50, 7 reply back calling you pathetic, 4 don't bother replying and just report you as a troll, and 3 reply back to start a conversation.
• Of those three, only one can even hold a conversation and that one turns into an awkward one-night stand.
• You gives up, and blame the website for not finding you true love.
• You sign up to a different dating site with hopes and dreams of finding the perfect person.

So even on non-mathematically-based sites you end up using a type of math; the more emails I send out, the better my chances of getting a reply.

On the other hand, for sites using mathematics to work, there needs to be a huge amount of questions. And when all is said and done, it's still just a guess as to compatibility. My idea and your idea of "well read" can be completely different (Star Wars fan-fics don't count in my opinion in case you're wondering). There are questions that are yes/no on the quiz, but is a huge shade of grey in reality. There are questions people will lie about because it 'sounds better' or they think will give them a better chance at matching. So it's very possible you're more compatible with someone you only match 29% as opposed to the 75% person.

There is no perfect way to do build a dating site. I have my own ideas and have moderate success. On my site, despite the name, there is no matchmaker feature. There is only a basic search and a quick profile form. Instead, members are encouraged to use the forum software and express their true self so other members can learn about the real person.

Re:Every woman's criteria are the same

[Wiseleo]

I would wager that Slashdot actually has a lot more people who would be desired by any woman.

Intelligence: higher than most
Financial stability: most of us have a decent income and some own businesses and/or investments
Violent tendencies: unlikely
Interests: more in tune with theirs than you realize
Liar tendencies: we are likely to be more honest

Confidence and smoothness is actually easy to learn. Take sales training and go to Toastmasters for a few months, and you'll be irresistible to most women.

Physical appearance can be adjusted if it has been neglected.

I have a website http://www.hotprofiletips.com/ [hotprofiletips.com] where I show how to write effective profiles.

They like us a lot, but there is a communications barrier in most cases. This barrier dissipates with time.

Most of my friends are married with kids. :)

Re:Every woman's criteria are the same

[palegray.net]

Financial stability

Speaking as a married guy, that characteristic may be reduced after marriage...

Re:OKCupid

[syousef]

If you're out to meet a geek quit with the dating sites and find a couple of male dominated interests (e.g. chess, remote control aircraft, electronics, a sporting club). Don't go out there advertising that you're there just to pick up. Find an actual hobby you'd be interested in. If you meet someone, great. If you don't you'll probably still make friends, pick up a hobby, and grow as a person.

Re:who is this guy?

[sootman]

He wrote a story. He submitted it. Someone approved it. End of mystery.

PS: I found this interesting. The third of it I skimmed, anyway. :-)