They would need one HELL of an algorithm to pull this off.
I tried OKC. A few good dates, but also several women who were 20-30 pounds heavier than their profile pictures.
I've talked to women who use OKC. In the first week, any reasonably attractive woman gets 30-150 message, 95% of them creepy/lame/from old men.
You can still find good things on OKC, but you need to learn how to filter. Women set up harsh filters against the flood of spam, and men have to learn i. How to get past those filters ii. How to tell if a woman is really herself
Women face more risks than men. Most men aren't crazy. But all it takes is one crazy man to really mess up your life. And crazy men are more likely to use something that lets them bypass traditional filters.
Meanwhile, this lets women that won't get hit on in real life bypass the filter of physical appearance.
If this could be made to work, it would be incredibly popular. But it has a ton of hurdles. You'd have to evaluate safety and attractiveness algorithmically, or you'd end up with a ton of lame/scary dates.
I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that commenters on an Internet forum know little about dating. What's next, people posting pictures of cats with captions?
> "You'd have to evaluate safety and attractiveness algorithmically"
OKCupid already does this (the attractiveness part), and I have to say, they do it startlingly well. Attractiveness is crowdsourced, and this is present even in the default (non-blind) experience. Ever wonder what that "Special Blend" default search results sort option is all about? It's actually weighted by the user and your own attractiveness.
That's very interesting. I had been wondering whether they were hiding matches from me for the 'attractiveness' matching; empirically it seemed unlikely.
Are you saying that, if I never use 'Special Blend', I am unaffected by the attractiveness-matching system?
People have done this, and one guy actually documented the experience. I forgot the reference, but the idea was to appear more picky and popular by getting lots of messages and not responding, in order to get the "responds very selectively" red light. The effect turned out to be a lot more views and messages.
This doesn't consider the algorithmic effect of doing this, though. Although it is probably very achievable.
I imagine this will be very popular with people who just want to have casual sex and aren't too fussy about who it is with.
Not that this isn't necessarily a good a market, but IIRC something similar was tried with a straight version of the gay app "grindrr" and didn't go down so well.
If a woman takes the standard safety procedures--meeting in a public place, not divulging too much info, exchanging a few messages to see if the dude is a weirdo--the average woman faces the same risk that a man faces. That risk is that the date will be a waste of time, usually in the order of about 3 hours if you include transportation time and an inability to schedule anything else during that time. In the end it can amount to almost an entire evening used up. That's an investment that both sexes make.
Do you say this as a man or a woman? Because while this describes my male worst case scenario, I think a female worst case scenario could go much worse.
The blind date idea makes it seem like there won't be messages exchanged. Which is why it's riskier.
I tried OKC. A few good dates, but also several women who were 20-30 pounds heavier than their profile pictures.
I've talked to women who use OKC. In the first week, any reasonably attractive woman gets 30-150 message, 95% of them creepy/lame/from old men.
You can still find good things on OKC, but you need to learn how to filter. Women set up harsh filters against the flood of spam, and men have to learn i. How to get past those filters ii. How to tell if a woman is really herself
Women face more risks than men. Most men aren't crazy. But all it takes is one crazy man to really mess up your life. And crazy men are more likely to use something that lets them bypass traditional filters.
Meanwhile, this lets women that won't get hit on in real life bypass the filter of physical appearance.
If this could be made to work, it would be incredibly popular. But it has a ton of hurdles. You'd have to evaluate safety and attractiveness algorithmically, or you'd end up with a ton of lame/scary dates.