I don't disagree, but I think that people are nuts when dating, online or off. I'd argue that it isn't optimal to spam as many people as possible with 'sup'- most (female) profiles on the site say "don't message me just saying 'sup' or 'you are hot'" for exactly that reason.
I think online dating allows people to be slightly more obvious about judging people the way that they always do.
> "I'd argue that it isn't optimal to spam as many people as possible with 'sup'-'
Oh, it most certainly isn't. It's individually optimal to send as many people as many carefully worded, personalized, charming messages as possible.
Of course, this isn't actually possible, so people will fall back to either carefully-worded but identical copypasta messages. Or, "sup".
The behavior of people in online dating fascinates me (and I work in the field nowadays too, so I guess that sort of makes sense). It's incredible the lengths people will go to to sabotage themselves in the pursuit of success.
> "but I think that people are nuts when dating, online or off"
You're right, but we're arguing over degrees. People are pretty nutty when dealing with strangers, particularly in a sexual/romantic context, but this is magnified many fold when online. Small biases in real life become massive online. Someone who might have a back-of-the-mind thought "oh, he's short" IRL will make it a dealbreaker. Someone who might have a back-of-the-mind "oh, he's black" IRL will make that a dealbreaker also. People's preferences become polarized to the point where, IMO, it's actively harming their experience.
I think that's the polite way of saying that people innermost biases are in full play online, where they are (consciously or subconsciously) tempered IRL. People are, by a remarkable degree, more racist, more classist, and more judgmental than they behave in real life, to a degree they're not even fully aware of. A more cynical person might say that's a truer expression of the self, but I don't think it's that simplistic. In many ways the traditional online dating setup magnifies biases and makes mountains out of mole hills, and in that way works against the interests of the user.
OKCupid doesn't really help matters. They have statistical information on what signals actually matter in attraction and success of a relationship, but they will give you orders of magnitude more (irrelevant) signals on top of all of that. Blind dating may not work out, but I do think that "blinder" dating is necessary for online to work.
I don't disagree, but I think that people are nuts when dating, online or off. I'd argue that it isn't optimal to spam as many people as possible with 'sup'- most (female) profiles on the site say "don't message me just saying 'sup' or 'you are hot'" for exactly that reason.
I think online dating allows people to be slightly more obvious about judging people the way that they always do.