Some of the sites worked that way.
I liked Tinder because you could message back and forth if you chose each other as a match. Still had a lot of bots, I started playing “bot or idiot” mentally on some of the interactions
It’s a pointless waste of time to sign up for the free memberships on these sites unless you just like looking at pictures. If you are serious about using the site then shell out the money. Whether it’s a waste of time and money is subjective.
One thing that sometimes works, is to sign up for the free membership, then cancel. They often will ask you why, if you answer not worth the money, sometimes you will get a special offer. Also check your email, they do run special offers.
Hey, I have exactly the same story.
You should ask your wife about me.
So what would you propose? Cost money to put up your profile, free to contact someone? Somebody’s gotta be spending money here at some point. Keep in mind I don’t know how any of these sites work since I’m married. But it seems to me from everything I’ve heard that the woman puts up their profile and gets bombarded by men, while the man’s experience is completely the opposite. I would much rather separate the wheat from the chaff than put my profile up there, get nothing, message, get rejected or outright ignored over and over.
How does twitter make money. They don’t charge me. Facebook and other places too.
I don’t know. It just feels like this offer of a free membership has absolutely no real value to me and just gives them a lot of my information for them to use.
I just end up feeling stupid.
And contagious?
Through ads.
There are basically 2 models online for making money. Ads, or charging for a service. I do not believe anyone would use facebook or twitter if they were behind a paywall. I believe forming romantic connections with relative anonymity is likely is a more valuable service to most people than blathering about politics or your last vacation.
Yes, the free membership is more like a preview than anything useful, but it does show you the reception you are about to get. As a man, I would be pissed to pay money with zero response (a likely scenario). I would be tempted to pay however if I got bites from attractive women. I wouldn’t feel stupid or ripped off or whatever. I paid for something, and I got something in return.
Not yet!
I have used both OK Cupid, Plenty of Fish, and a few paid sites. I will say that paid sites are better, but not by much.
One thing that all of them have in common is the over abundance of scammers. Once you figure out how to spot those and start to block them out so they can’t contact you, you still don’t know who is real. There are profiles that have been on the sites forEVER. And the algorithm with send you messages to get you to pay for the service.
Once you get past all of that, you still deal with the fact that there are a lot of trolls, etc. Finding a real person who is worth the time and effort is a crap shoot. The only reason I keep trying is that I know it does work. I know people who have found their partners online.
A Denial!
Being married, I can’t really say how I’d react to that kind of experience. I typically do a fair amount of online “timewasters” with much less reward than potentially finding the love of my life, I I think separating the crap from the gold might be something of a treasure hunt. Might not though, especially after time.
My sister-in-law found her now-husband on e-harmony, and they have been together for some time now, so I thought that might be a good service. Then I found out they have basically a sexless marriage. I guess it’s working for them though, somehow. Maybe there was a “Are you okay almost never having sex?” question on the compatibility check and they both clicked yes.
Well, at 64 years of age, I’m not really looking for the love of my love, if there is such a thing. I’d probably be ok with just a companion type thing.
Every so often I get up the nerve to sign up for one of these darn sites and then I always regret it.
I should really just make my peace with being alone. It’s been almost 4 years, you’d think I’d be better at it by now. I guess I’m a slow learner. sigh
Oh well, there are a lot of folks with bigger problems than mine.
For me, back when I was using Match and the like (back in 2006), the fact that it was a paid site and not free was a feature, not a bug. It meant (for the most part) the people on the site were willing to shell out a couple bucks, which – to me – seemed to weed much of the people who were just casually on a dating site. I wanted to go out on dates, dammit! On OKCupid, I got something like one bite in four months on there. It seemed a lot of people were passive. On Match, it was easy for me to get dates and they were all quality dates (including one that became my wife.)
Maybe things have really gotten different now – it certainly is a different landscape out there with Tinder and all that – but if I needed to return, I’d definitely continue with the paid sites.
They keep moving stuff around but I have an “intros” section that shows women who wrote me intro messages. There’s a trick to seeing all of them without paying. You see the first one, so just keep moving them one by one until you see them all. Then under the messages/matches section it shows if you matched and if it’s “your turn” to message. And you can always just say yes to everyone in Doubletake and find all your matches there.
If you can’t reply, what’s the point?
I’m a little less removed from using it and I found Match the same. The “free” sites were a vast wasteland of undatable people. Pay sites seem to be better because everyone has skin in the game.
Isn’t skin kind of the point?
Asking for a friend…
I’m not even getting messages from scammers. I’m either doing something very right, or very wrong.
The problem with that is that people might want to have evidence the people are real before they’d want to pay. I know I would be suspicious if multiple people wanted to contact me the night I started the trial. I remember other sites where they had spammers, and I remember my uncle who got scammed on match.com. (Granted said scam was obvious, as she didn’t speak English well.)
In the Internet age, I’m very used to products actually letting you try the whole service for free for a limited time.
That said, I have nothing to compare it to, as I haven’t tried online dating for a long time. The idea of my post is providing a perspective from those not used to these sites.