From an Atlantic magazine article on an analysis of the database of an online dating site:
Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”
In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”
“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.” Yikes.
The last part is what seems to suggest an opportunity for software. Wouldn’t that young lady be a lot better off if she had a robot to screen out and/or reply to these 1504 monthly messages? Or at least highlight the ones to which she should consider replying?
Related:
- “For 13 Days, I Believed Him” (nytimes); author discovers that new boyfriend has no job, savngs, or apartment (result: “You ain’t got no money, you just ain’t no good”, just as in the Percy Mayfield song “Hit the Road Jack”, made famous by Ray Charles)
- Whitney Cummings: I’m Your Girlfriend (HBO streaming), in which the comedienne says that, were she to become pregnant by a lower-income man, her lawyer would come over to her house and do the abortion himself
- “Is it possible to build an app whose job is to use another app?”
25 years of online dating without any responses & counting. They should entirely automate the picking of matches & meetups instead of providing the same service they have for 25 years: a blank email client & a list of all the members.
Funny, I was going to send you the article when I came across it a few days ago but you managed to find a mention of it already. I found it accidentally through the physicist professor’s website, Mark Newman, one of the authors on the paper.
Here is the link to the full journal article:
Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815
” We find that both men and women pursue partners who are on average about 25% more desirable than themselves by our measures and that they use different messaging strategies with partners of different desirability. ”
They used PageRank to measure desirability:
“It is important to emphasize that, while we use PageRank as an operational measure of desirability, we do not assume that users of the website themselves use PageRank, or anything like it, to identify attractive mates. In reality, a person might choose to message another based on an attractive profile picture, an interesting description, a good demographic match, an impressive income, or any of many other qualities. PageRank scores simply give us, a posteriori, a glimpse of who is desirable on aggregate, by identifying those people who receive the largest number of messages from desirable others.”
Figure 2 plots the desirability of different demographics:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap9815/F2.large.jpg
notice that women with postgrad education drop in desirability.
I believe that a person who is getting 1504 messages per month does not need any dating website. They can just walk into a bar and pick pretty much anyone they want.
I guess such individuals open dating profiles yo titillate their ego or for whatever other reasons, directly related to dating.
“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,”
All female profiles of attractive women on dating websites are fake, as surely is this overly-popular one.