Feedback on "Internet Dating: A Personal Review"

This post answers some of the feedback and comments I received in response to my Internet Dating: A Personal Review post yesterday. First of all I should reiterate: my experience of Internet dating was, overall, positive. However all is not well in the state of Internet dating. The market is awash with near-clone-sites, operating nearly identical business models, and with pricing so closely matched I struggle to keep the word “cartel” out of my mind. Despite what are quite high costs for a small email inbox and the hosting of one templated web-page and some images (e.g. £10.88 per month), there seems to have been little to no innovation in the field of Internet dating in the last decade. Where is the equivalent of the Netflix Prize for paring down the thousands of dating profiles to ones that actually “match”?

Now on to the feedback I received. The first that I noticed was a Tweet:

This is great! Well not really!! RT @maznu: offers his thought based on the experiences of 2 years on/off Internet dating: http://andyarthur.org/fodder/human/schizophrenia.html

— @MrMatchmaker on Twitter

As I said at the start of this post, my experience of Internet dating was, overall, positive: I made some friends, and one of those has become a very person important in my life. I’m not here to bash Internet dating because I didn’t “fall in love” or “meet The One” et cetera. While I have received some feedback from friends and acquaintances expressing this sentiment in their correspondence I’d like to turn the focus to the way the sites operate now, rather than individual “success/failure” stories.

A friend commented via Facebook:

Interesting, and I can see how a lot of that could be true. I’ve only ever really used OK Cupid, and I must say I would recommend them: they are quite relaxed about what you can have on profiles, there’s lots of poly/kinky/bi people on there, the test and match scores seem to be a good indication of who you’d get on with and it’s free :-) And occasionally, I think women even send messages to men on there (or maybe that’s just me!)

While I raise the “chasing” aspect at the start of my essay, my conclusion is more that the way Internet dating sites work seems broken. I worry that the way the “power” is structured on these sites reinforces some unhelpful “societal norms”: that in the seeking of relationships men are active and women are passive somehow might translate to how we then go about the relationships later on. This sentiment is echoed by another friend who chatted to me:

i dont think its the site
women get pummelled with messages
and i dont think its the site
its the users

And again by several female friends who, in conversations over the last year, have said that they’ve been in too many relationships where for them to express their desires was frowned upon (at best!); that they’ve been in too many relationships where they’ve been treated like porcelain (I believe one actually used the phrase, “Why can’t he just give me a good, hard fucking like I ask? I don’t break that easily!”). I could do a literature search to back this point up and find this rather fascinating article about negotiating personal and social boundaries in Indonesian society (along with countless others); I could show examples on the Internet this one being the “two extremes” of pornography and “chick flicks”; I could cite the supporting views of sex-positive authors such as Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy; or I could just direct the reader to Wikipedia’s introduction to sex-positive feminism.

I also say that the Internet dating model is broken. Here’s the model in simple terms:

• everyone is a product
• you put your product-self into a bunch of categories and get listed somewhere
• if you’re lucky you get to search for people matching the criteria you desire
• wink, progress to email (but you often have to pay for this, or are treated to revenue-supporting advertisements), and maybe progress to meet up

I didn’t go into using the dating sites purely to find a partner. I was quite happy to meet people — people I didn’t think I would find attractive — and become friends. Thankfully I met one or two people who were similarly-minded, but these were far and away in the minority.

I say “if you’re lucky, you get to search for people matching the criteria you desire”. Several sites allow you to categorise yourself (as if putting a person in a box is a good approach) but don’t subsequently allow you to eliminate people who match certain criteria (often called “turn-offs”). I took matters into my own hands:

I have actually searched dating sites for keywords and anyone whose profile was brought back immediately got added to “don’t show me them again”. (of course, writing programs to scrape people’s write-ups for me, ensure that these appear in the context of [turn-offs] and automatically block them from appearing… yeah, I’m not sure this is what dating is meant to be about… or what my skills are meant to be used for…)

No wonder I felt cheated: I paid money for a website, and I had to write my own code to make its database work for me! To Hell with the terms and conditions of service. This already feels like a process of unnatural selection, so I decided to make better use of my time by eliminating profiles that met some “hard limit” of mine.

One friend wrote in a comment about my review:

I’d say Internet dating is broken because it’s based on the Internet.

I don’t think it’s entirely the fault of the Internet — though there are reasons why it might, such as increased anonymity making it easier for people to be jerks and not feel as responsible for the consequence — but the medium must shoulder some of the blame. Personals columns in newspapers have existed for a very long time, but these only ever served as an introduction to a much slower process of communicating by letters via mailboxes or recorded messages on voicemail accounts. The Internet comes copy/paste-enabled, and with the cost of sending a message being almost zero it means the scammers and spammers will soon follow. On one site, it was only a few hours after signing up before I received my first scam attempt characterised by the obviously copy/paste-profile. Similarly I’m told that guys will approach girls on these sites with copy/paste emails. This is a waste of everyone’s time.

The other problem with the medium of the Internet is that it’s all too easy to stop treating each other like people. Flame wars erupt on the Internet very easily compared with a real-life meeting. How many of us have sent an email which was worded in a way that we wouldn’t have used to someone’s face? Internet communication is very impersonal, almost anonymous. It is difficult to communicate with someone if you’re reduced to a few hundred pixels and a few paragraphs of written words. Internet dating sites need to work to break down these kinds of barriers, but innovation seems to have stopped at including a link to a YouTube video. Most sites would be hesitant to even permit this, as this would facilitate off-site contact which is the major revenue stream for these operations.

I’m exceedingly interested to see that I’m not the only one with a beef against the accepted way of doing Internet dating, and indeed Internet-based relationships in general. I just love the way that Sam Lawrence has expressed it in this visual:

I spend over half my time working with technology and all of my waking time maintaining interpersonal relationships: I’m very excited by the prospect of some innovation at the intersection of these two spheres of my life!