A Few Slow Years

17Apr06

Dave Evans, who blogs about the online dating industry, made a comment on Tuesday that I find most insightful and astute:

Not much happening in the dating world this week

humph. Indeed. It seems as though this has been the situation for the past few years. If we were to take a look at how the online dating sites have evolved since internet bulletin boards, we would see that they have made practically no strides away from the back of the newspaper. This classified-ad dating, or database dating has come to be the standard , and no one has challenged it. The only innovations that have come up recently are tagging (Consumating.com), personality testing and matching algorithms designed by Oz-like pseudo-experts (eCacophony.com and a thousand others).

Tagging is baloney at a certain point. What if I were to tag the previous paragraph with a tag for every different word that was used? And then create some tags for its topic, create some tags for its abstract meaning and relevance, create some tags for the tags maybe… Pretty soon I would have more tags than words in the paragraph. How much more impossible is it to tag a real live person or yourself in a relevant way? (Wow IceOwl, I get it, you identify with hotcider, machinery, tea_earlgrey_hot… ME TOO!)

And the matching algorithms are obviously a sham. Users spend hours filling out these insane profiles and answering ridiculous questions because they believe that they will have a better chance of interfacing with the computer that will ‘match’ them with someone. When in reality, you can fill out the answers randomly as long as you keep the same demographic data, and get the same matches (see the quote in the previous post).

It happens often that people are matched together, and they go out on a date. Great. Lets say that the date goes poorly, and that’s fine in and of itself because it happens. But the problem is that both people have been matched by ‘experts’. The internal dialogue that usually arises after such a date is, “what is wrong with me? I filled out this rigorous questionnaire, presented myself well, trusted these professionals with my heart, got up the courage to make contact… and I failed, something must be wrong with me.” And that is so far from the truth. People put so much stock in these tests and questions that they often end up relinquishing their own ability to test and question the system, and thus begin to second guess themselves. They see the face of the experts, they see the happy couples, they read the success stories, they are encouraged to trust the science of it all, and finally they are tricked into thinking that the get-to-know-you process can be replaced by a series of forms chunked by a hidden equation. Well.

Not much happening in the dating world this week

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