One recent lonely night, I stupidly signed up for a “free” membership.
So, if you’re one of the men in my area who have messaged me, liked me, checked me out, winked at me or otherwise indicated an interest, I can’t do a thing about it without shelling out some money, which I don’t want to do.
So, sorry I guess. I know most are probably fake anyway, but just in case.
note to self: ignore late night lonely urges
That doesn’t sound like much fun.
I met a woman, Judy, on OK Cupid four years ago. We were very happy, but sad to say she died (complications from diabetes) this past October.
I’m not ready to re-register, but where would you recommend I start? I did like OK Cupid, they made it reasonably simple to change your settings, but that was years ago and they’ve probably changed it by now (that is, wrecked it as often happens to anything good online).
All those sites can be a money pit if you let them. Even so called free Plenty of Fish. There’s a lot of nice people on the sites but wow, you sure have to work to find them. So many can be described as just plain flat out liars. Beware photos, they seldom represent reality. As a man, I found many of the woman are chasing their fantasy. I’m sure that works both ways.
I think most of the popular ones is operated by the same corporation.
I’d bet that I could go on a site today and find some of the same people, with the same photos (but I still look the same) as 10 years ago. For some it becomes like an addiction. Or maybe like some on Facebook, they simply crave whatever attention they can get, by whatever means.
I did meet someone. Would I do it again? No (well, maybe out of sheer desperation). Find someone in the grocery store & accidentally bump your cart into theirs.
Match still hasn’t fixed this basic, obvious critical flaw? I think it’s even worse for men, who are typically expected to make first contact in heterosexual dating; we can’t tell the female members from non-members on Match. So we waste time reading profiles and composing interesting, personalized, responses that put in effort and show we’ve read your profile and and ask fun questions and show a sense of humor, and all the while we may as well have been typing on a disconnected keyboard.
OkCupid used to be a pretty good site. I especially liked the multiple choice questions, which I think give a lot of insight into people’s character. Although as a software engineer, I generally roll my eyes when people say that something has been deliberately redesigned to be harder to use, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion with OkCupid’s changes over the past couple of years. For example, you would think it should be a basic simple operation to reply to someone who writes to you, but currently when someone writes to you, it is difficult, bordering on impossible, to even FIND the person who wrote to you. There’s no longer a simple list of people who wrote to you; you have to just look around and hope that you accidentally stumble on the person’s profile and see the icon that indicates that they have written to you.
That said, I did meet a woman on OkCupid whom I’ve been seeing for 4 months, and things are going very well for us.
I met my wife 10 years ago on Match. It worked great for us.
Kind of like in life.
If I relied on that my chances at relationships would have ended with my marriage in 2008.
Then tell them you need to exchange insurance information, in order to get their phone number.
(I heard of someone who actually did this, and it worked.)
Yes, this is very evil on the part of these companies. And I can’t imagine how hard it would be for a man to actually approach a woman in the grocery store.
How does that conversation even begin?
Congrats to you markn1.
There’s also no telling how many of those are real, and not just bots to try and get you to pay. I know this is a common practice used on men on some pay sites.
This isn’t a “flaw”, this is how they try to get people to sign up for paid memberships. They let the newbie see how many people are trying to send them messages, and the newbie gets to decide if they think it’s worth shelling out the dough to participate. In theory, the more people who write to a person, the more likely that person is to sign up for a paid membership. That seems fair to me. That’s probably how most people end up buying a paid membership. I hear the free dating sites are much more ridden with scammers than the ones with fees.
I started on Match after my divorce. The first one I went on an actual date with I wound up dating and living with her for 5 years. There were a few years of dating others after that with varying degrees of success until I met my current girlfriend 2 years ago. A very unscientific sample but it seemed to me there were a lot more scam accounts my first time around. It was very rare my second time around to see a scammer.
If a paid membership allowed non-paying members to write to you then it would be a real benefit and it would be worth it, but (10 years ago or so) it didn’t. Some control should definitely be present to prevent bots and spammers from setting up free accounts. OKCupid was also free and did a good job in that regard.
I.m in my fourth year with my OKCupid wife, she is a dream that keeps coming true.
First, be brutally honest right up front, about who you are and what you want. Nobody likes surprises.
Second, if someone interests you, go straight to something like FaceBook, Where you can see the profile they reveal to their friends and family, free, and chat comfortably.
I ignored an old OKC account for years. One day I got serious, changed my profile and parameters and waited 24 hours. Got about 15 replies, half of them “for real”, three worth following up on, and within another three days, I knew who my new life-mate would be.
It’s true, a large number of such sites are run by a small number of companies, especially a lot of the “special interest” sites. The sites for seniors; for Jews; for gay men; for lesbians; for casual hook-ups; for various kinks; the find-a-massage-buddy sites – they have the same format, same layout, same terms-of-service. If you look at some the small print, they are all the same company.
Their business model is definitely bait-and-switch. They offer “free” sign-ups. As noted, you get to see profiles (and they get to see yours) but you can’t initiate contact. The paid members can initiate contact with you. So, if you signed up for free, you aren’t the customer. You’re the merchandise. And if you want to get anywhere with the profiles you see, you have to pay. That’s the bait-and-switch!
^^ You get to see how many people want to contact you. You can decide whether it’s a high enough number to want to spend money. You can try paying for a month. It’s no secret that they charge.
Hell, no. The fact they they have to pay to play helps keep out the creeps. You can’t imagine the crap that rando men write when they don’t have to pay for an account.
I could have sworn, last time I did the online dating thing, women didn’t have to pay. Has that dynamic changed?