Category: Q & A

In the "real world", dating is largely about taking chances, and exposing vulnerabilities in order to attract and comfort a potential mate.

Online, it's precisely the opposite: trying to attract and bond with someone without going out on a limb, or revealing one's negative traits as much as possible.

Whereas all sorts of unspoken signals (body language, hygiene, fashion) are immediately related when bumping into someone promising in a bar, their corresponding online proxies (spelling, grammar, writing style, and photoshopped pictures) do not actually provide an insight into the "real world" experience of meeting a particular person.

In fact, the online information more accurately conveys a combination of how this person behaves AFTER they are comfortable with someone, or just as likely how they aspire to be, rather than how they actually are. This can lead to all kinds of unmeetable expectations being set, with corresponding heartbreaks when the real world finally disturbs the perfection of online relating.

More recently, the particular phenomenon of group dating/looser coupling has grown in popularity. But this, as well as other "tactical" real world dating structures (speed dating, for example) HAVE been transitioned with much greater positive effect than the "catalog match" format, which is a closer analog to newspaper classified ads.

Without giving too much away about NaviDate's intents, I could suggest that a few things online could be better at are:

• putting two people together when they are "both at their best"
• getting people to go on more dates
• making the dates people go on more fun, and less stressful
• helping people to "fix" their most glaring in-person dating issues
• helping people focus on matching their short, medium, and longterm relationship goals with the right partner – even when that means matching them to multiple people for different purposes
• Making dating an individual, non-competitive process

Nailing any one of these should produce a profitable business. Nailing them all could easily upset the current leaderboard of dating companies.

How does dating work in the real world?

From whose perspective?

For daters: 

"Advanced Search Engine" might have the edge, as the perception that they can easily filter/target their search across the thousands or even millions of daters in a given site's database may increase their likelihood to join and/or pay a premium to use the site.

For the dating company: 

A "Superior Matching Algorithm", which demonstrably and verifiably resulted in more successful dates/hookups/relationships/marriages (depending on the site's niche/vision) would be a critical technical victory over a field of competitors who do not currently release detailed statistics.

Either way, at least in the near term, it is unlikely that EITHER would produce a significant upheaval in the online dating industry, where advertising dollars spent seems more correlative with marketshare and revenue.

My own opinion is that both are still great goals for a new/smaller online dating company to pursue, as both types of technology could potentially be re-used/licensed outside the dating sphere… But it's likely that some other factor (mobile app, new site niche, security event) will result in greater overall changes to the dating landscape.

Which option is more important for a dating site: an advanced search engine or a superior matching algorithm?

The best way to get around this issue is to have an extremely well written profile that does the following:

1. At the TOP of the profile, clearly indicate that you ONLY reply if interested, due not to your jerky personality but your high-volume inbox.
2. At the BOTTOM of the profile, clearly indicate WHAT you would like in an introductory message – you'd like them to give you specific information that shows that they read your whole ad.
3. For the MIDDLE of the profile, try to put forth the best possible you, in an UNREPENTANT fashion, that hopefully helps filter out at least some of the "one way good matches".

Then, you have a clear sequence of "good etiquette" actions based on what comes into your inbox:

• Offensive/insulting/otherwise terrible messages – IGNORE.
• Messages from interesting guys you want to know more about – WRITE.
• Messages from anyone who doesn't follow rule #2 – IGNORE.
• Messages from really nice "not a match" guys who followed the rules but deserve a break – Follow your heart.

I tend to advise people to only reply to those they'd actually be willing to have a terrible first date with solely based on the initial email interaction. Still, the kind of person who asks a question like this usually has some pretty strong feelings about what it's like to "put yourself out there and hear nothing back", and I think the world would be a better place if everyone knew how to write a good rejection letter, and those who received them knew how best to react upon receiving one.

Still, as others have mentioned, responding to anyone you don't want to go out with has the potential to open a Pandora's Box of bad experiences. Wish it weren't so, but online dating is unlicensed and unregulated, much like offline dating – there are no guarantees that your prospects will have the same experience, background, and general etiquette as you these days. Which, again, is why it's nice to state your defaults in your profile.

What is the etiquette when you are not interested in a person who has messaged you on a dating site?

Dishonesty requires intent… So the best way to identify or predict it is to determine:

1. whether or not a particular profile item (height, salary, eye color) is inaccurate, and
2. whether this inaccuracy can be proven intentional on the part of the profile's author, or simply the result of miscommunication, or faulty perception on the part of the author.

Proving either or both points, on a traditional online dating site, would be incredibly difficult for a large number of parameters, without some form of dedicated profile verification or background checking service.

That said, if one is clever, it's possible to imagine a variety of self-correcting systems that could be created to ensure that profiles are accurate within a degree of variance, or at the very least generated by a well-meaning, if sometimes self-misreporting, human being.

I wish I could be more helpful in terms of actual methodologies, but we're currently looking at patents for these very processes over at navidate.com, so…

How can dishonesty be identified or predicted based on online profiles?

Per Brandon's point – It might be fairer to say that "no site would allow users to implement this kind of tracking on their own" – even then, I could imagine a site constructed EXACTLY around the principal of a user-side free for all, though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to visit the resulting site.

That said, I can easily imagine a dating site partnering with optimizely to help provide tracking and metrics to their membership in a convenient manner, without having to build that whole freatureset out in-house. Still, it would most likely need to be a white label agreement of some sort, as running the site dating through a third party like optimizely would break most TOSes for existing dating sites.

Can I use optimizely on my dating site profile?