So I just read about the changes to messaging and I gotta say I really think this kills the site if they don't revert it. I understand that some people get too many messages and that that is annoying, but the new changes are simply not the way to go about fixing that. In addition to initiating communication, messaging someone was a way to draw their attention to my profile so that they can take a look and decide if they are interested. I had good success doing this over the years, and I had a good message response rate. With the new changes, I feel like I might just be sending messages into the abyss and people may never even see them. The general sentiment towards these changes seems overwhelmingly negative but so far they don't seem to be responding to it.
I'm still on OkC for the moment, but I'm looking for a backup plan as I seriously think this could kill the site for me. OkC used to be great. Are there any currently popular sites that are more similar to the old model and filling the niche that OkC is creating by making themselves more like Tinder?
At this point I just want to give up. With old OkCupid at least there was a possibility of making new friends via messaging/having a solid profile/question matching. All these changes are destroying that. There’s no really usable alternative now.
I know I shouldn’t be taking this so badly but I’ve got that gut-shot, just lie-down-and-die hopeless feeling after disabling. At least before I could lie to myself and say there was a possibility of something planning out.
I'm not active on any sites but my first thought is PoF and Match. On those platforms you can openly peruse profiles and send messages without constraint. They just don't have the question and answer surveys which is pretty cool with OKC.
In my city PoF seemed to have a general lower quality of profiles but I did find some pretty great women there a few times. My gf actually messaged me there a couple of years ago even though she was also on OKC and Match.
In my experience (and probably in my age group) Match had the best quality of profiles of the dating sites I used. If I were to return to dating I would make a beeline for Match and pay their subscription fee.
You know the company that runs Match.com also owns OKCupid, right? So if you go to Match and pay their fees, you're still supporting OKC as a business.
So you're saying they are purposely crippling everything so people will give up and use match.com
Nah, I think they're just misguided about what people genuinely want out of a dating site and are out to make $$.
Match owns OKC, POF and Tinder. The truth is OKC is not making these changes, Match is.
Holy shit. Of course I know that. Look at my post from 10 minutes ago where I linked someone to IAC's annual report.
WTF does paying a subscription fee have to do with OPs question or my response????
He didn't ask what site he can go on to ensure OKC no longer has access to his revenue stream. Go get a cup of coffee.
You might be aware of this, but a lot of other users might not be. This is extremely important, IMO, for choosing an alternative.
No need to freak out, bud. Not everyone knows that Match bought OKC in 2011. If OP is looking for alternatives because they don't agree with OKC's current business practice, they might not want to continue to support those practices by moving to a paid site operated by the same company.
Of course OP might not care for the granular stuff like that and might just be looking out for a good dating site, in which case they can just ignore my comment and move on, as you should probably have done.
He sounds like a Match shill with that attitude and name... Sadly, you probably know all the ones we do (Tinderella, Pof, etc).
You're the one shrieking and calling people stupid, mate. I bet that charming attitude gets you tons of dates.
The days where someone I messaged forever ago finally replies and takes an interest in me will be missed.
I think I'm just going to delete all of my dating profiles and rely exclusively on irl. I just have to leave my house more I guess.
Church. Note: I am an atheist and an antitheist, but that doesn't negate the fact that churches are about the best community social setting post-college.
Social fitness. Not "the gym", I mean running clubs, CrossFit, Tough Mudders. Things that feed into larger social fitness events and that lead to friendships outside of the gym.
Meetup.com. Many social events for extroverts, not quite as many for introverts (no surprise), but many, many options.
Bottom line, find something and do it. Who the F cares what, just pick something. Eventually you'll find some thing/people you enjoy, then keep doing that.
What I really miss is the way the original OkCupid was built around questions and answers and your match percentage, and the question system was crowdsourced. They greatly weakened that system after some years, by almost eliminating the adjustment for uncertainty (so now you can have a 95% match with someone you only have like 40 questions in common with!), and they also ruined the crowdsourcing question database. They also stopped improving the mechanics of the question system (I made some suggestions I'd have loved to see implemented...) and later on they added other features that affect your match percentage so it's no longer entirely question based. Match scores have become less and less trustworthy. In the early years, it was pretty much a sure bet that if someone matched >90% we would like each other and enjoy meeting and would most likely at least become friends even if we didn't date, but now it doesn't work that way anymore.
Are you considering doing something based on a question system like the original OkCupid?
Hmm, I can't remember all, but a few I do remember:
For the crowdsourced system they used to have, allow the question submitter to moderate/approve/deny suggested changes to the wording of the question and answers before it goes into the database. I stopped submitting questions after a couple of mine were accepted into the system, but OkCupid staff made minor edits to the text after they were voted and and accepted, that they probably thought made them worded a little better, but that actually fundamentally undermined important points in both questions. Both of my own questions turned into ones I had to skip answering, which made me bitter about the process so I stopped submitting questions.
Give each question its own URL, and allow me to bookmark questions. Some of the things this would let me do:
Easily go back to a question to re-answer it.
Send a question to someone else, if I want them to answer it (obviously no way to force that, but if they want to answer questions I care about, they could ask for the links and I could give them).
Keep a list of the questions I want to go back to if I ever want to wipe my history and start over, or move to a new account.
This one would have made the biggest difference, and was the one I wanted most. On a very large proportion of questions, the importance I actually wanted to express couldn't be expressed using their system, because I wanted to express some variation of:
Oooh, if the person chose answer X, then that's a huge point in their favor!! But if they chose any of the other answers, then this question makes little difference to me.
Anyone who picks answer X is almost certainly a bad match for me! But if they pick one of the other answers, then this question makes little difference to me.
People who pick answer A are awesome! People who pick answer B suck! People who pick answer C, that seems good to me, but it shouldn't affect our match score too much. Answer D, meh, probably a point against us being a good match, but no biggie.
So that's what I wanted, a way to say what I want for others' answers just like that. Instead of picking a set of answers I like, and then an overall importance for the question, I wanted to rate each individual answer on a scale from awesome to awful. What the other person answers to that question, would affect both whether it was positive or negative in our match calculation, and the weighting for that question in our match calculation.
This would have probably more than doubled the number of questions I could've gotten good value from, in the match calculation.
P.S. This isn't exactly the question system itself, but the way they chose or disallowed certain kinds of questions. For example, they had a number of questions about whether you'd be interested in, say, dating someone much older than you, or someone much younger than you. Those have some use, but personally I don't care whether someone would be into dating someone much older or younger than they are, I care about how they feel about dating someone my age, regardless of theirs. So I tried suggestion a series of questions with similar wording, but instead of relative ages, they were about absolute age ranges (like, would you like to date someone in their mid to late 20s, etc.). OkCupid rejected those submissions by telling me they were duplicates of questions they already had, pointing to the ones about relative ages. There were several other examples of questions they had about relative things, where I tried to submit the absolute parallels, and they denied it and said they were duplicates. Pretty stupid, IMO.
I agree with most of that. I'd add that the questions really suffered from a founder effect. Basically, the questions that showed up early on got the most traction and just stayed in place forever.
Many of those questions were really poorly constructed and failed to have any nuance or subtlety. E.g.: there's one question that asked "What would disturb you more to see in a house, a religious shrine or a bunch of porn". There was a simple A/B answer to that. No ability to say both or neither.
There should be some sort of guideline for writing the questions that requires that they allow a broad range of responses. Ones that are too black and white should get rewritten by the staff.
OKcupid grew back in the mid 2000's with virtually zero ad spending. It was basically a take-silly-quizzes site and oh hey look at that there's some date-y things. And then they slowly pivoted it to be more dating.
One of the reasons OKC was able to survive as long as it did was a focus on the nerdier users that were more into kinky and poly lifestyles while still being a regular dating site. Any dating site that's going to survive these days is going to need to have some niche appeal.
Some ideas:
Geographic specificity. Have it set up so that there's some social aspect to each large metropolitan center it focuses on. E.g.: have an LA page that covers local date-y social events with ticket purchase links to act as social lubrication.
Non-standard dating models. Don't make it a completely niche site (like swinger dating sites, etc) but still have options for things like non-monogamous couples, poly arrangements, LBGTQ daters etc. Provide things like multiple-person shared accounts, the ability to search for those, the ability to share kink interests that only come up if someone is specifically searching for them, not from a casual look at a profile. Try to provide as many options as possible for people to share deeply personal dating and sexual preferences that is kept semi-private so as to not out them to someone who is not specifically searching for those things.
Allow some level of anonymity. Especially important for LBGTQ and women on the site. E.g.: don't force people to use a face shot.
But one of the most important parts of getting a dating site to work is to attract women and other users who are generally in short supply. Women face a really hostile environment on dating sites and tend to avoid them due to bad experiences. Every woman I've ever met in online dating (and there have been quite a few) has a ton of stories of 1) dealing with creepy/angry/scary men and 2) dealing with dozens of messages a day that they simply can't properly respond to - especially guys that send "hi" and copy/paste messages. The hostility and low SNR chases women away. Even the ones who stay on the site tend to simply ignore most messages because there are too many to deal with.
The solution to mostly fixing this problem is to throttle/charge for sending messages. I can speak with experience that this does work. The Stranger is the Seattle alt newspaper. Until about a year ago, they had a personals site. It charged money to send a message to another user. ($20 a pop for 10 message tickets or $10 for a week of unlimited messaging, $30 for a month, etc)
The difference between that site and any other one like OKC was night and day. On OKC, I generally have roughly a 5-10% response rate to cold messages. Of those maybe half end up turning into an in-person meeting. On the Lovelab/Lustlab, the response rate was about 25-30% and again half or so of those led to meeting in person. Lust/Lovelab were my bread and butter for dating/hookups for years. Also, The Stranger personals has a far better male to female active user ratio.
The reason was partly due to a focus on Seattle/Portland as well as catering a lot to kinky folks. But the biggest reason was that women weren't constantly inundated by low effort/troll messages. By making someone pay even a token amount of money to send a message, you eliminate virtually all of the men who spam copypasta messages. You're also going to cut down on dudes who send messages just to be mean or out of anger. You've got to be pretty pissed off to spend money to insult someone.
My suggestion would be to implement some sort of system that charges some small, nominal fee for sending a message to someone. Perhaps waive that fee for women and other users who tend to not message very often. While some guys will feel butthurt about that, they are the one who ultimately benefit from that the most. When the female users on the site aren't feeling attacked and overwhelmed, they are far, far more likely to respond to a well-written message and will feel safer in initiating contact themselves. The end result is that most of the men on the site will have much better luck. As someone who used a system like this, the difference between it and sites like OKC is night and day. The Stranger personals were fun and productive to use. OKC (which is the best standard dating site I've found) is an exercise in frustration.
Want a hand with the development? I've been eyeing doing something similar but don't have the free cycles to take something like that on singlehandedly, especially dealing with the legalities of user-uploaded pictures, etc.
No prob! Best of luck with this. I may yet get off my ass and resurrect my own effort as well.
A successful, popular kickstarter campaign might even help you solve the initial user base issue. If you get enough people excited, you can get enough people on the site for it to be useful without millions of dollars in ads.
Kickstarter might be a bad choice at the point, but maybe Patreon? Like you said, a couple of bucks from here and there, they build up into a nice sum if you're doing something people want. You'll probably have to be very open with your development, though - post regular updates, etc (but you may do without a working product to show for a while).
I'd be down for a distributed dating site, mastodon for dating
I don't think niche dating sites are a good idea. It just splits your userbase. There's already at least one company that does it this way, and their userbases are miniscule.
PoF is owned by the same company that owns OKC. They also on Match.com and Tinder
POF gets me with 0 matches, O in the search, 0 everywhere. Go figure... lol
It's looking like there's an open space in the market now. Who wants to start writing the website?
The only thing I don't like about POF for the most part is that they don't give users the ability to hide profiles that they've visited like OKC and Match do. I don't want to keep seeing the same people in the search results and sometimes accidentally message someone twice. I don't know why they haven't implemented that yet after being around for a while.
Maybe it's just me but I swear I used to get the same people over and over again on OkCupid even though I had previously messaged them.
In addition to OKC I have used Match and POF. I am a little hesitant to use Match again because it did not seem like the out lay of money made the experience any better. I was happy to see some new faces but honestly most of them, like me, were somewhere (or everywhere) else.
Yes POF has some sketchy people, but at least in my area functional people use it too. It has many more users than OKC. You can see people's interest right up front, and usually people write a profile too...more than on OKC. No questions though, which stinks.
Yes the questions are key. Does Match have that? I’m considering eharmony.
I recall when you set your profile up on Match they ask a few questions but you never see them again nor the responses of others. There some boiler plate parts of the text profile like OKC. And you get very asinine prompts like "Chad likes wine too, why don't you send him a message?!" I don't know about eHarmony. I heard it draws religious types which is not for me. Outside of that I have seen scathing reviews. To my knowledge POF is the only other free service (non swipe centric) similar to OKC. I did just get back from an epically awful POF date-I activated after I read this thread this morning-so I am a bit down on it.
When Match originally bought OKC, they said they were going to incorporate the latter's matching algorithm. Guess what? Never happened.
eHarmony is run by religious bigots and is geared explicitly for marriage. That makes for a target group of potentials that I consider repulsive. Not that I don't envision getting married someday, but I am not looking to meet people who are explicitly sizing me up for marriage from Day 1.
I agree. Because women are attracted to words, it is very important that men be able to message them, otherwise, if you don't look like James Bond, then you aren't going to get a "like". Yeah, Cupid will fail. It sucks because I have met literally hundreds of women on Cupid in the last eight years. I'm not a hot guy either, but I knew how to message them and get replies. Not anymore. Cupid is like a good bar that you went to for many years, but then the owner sold the bar to someone else. The new owner changed everything, and then everyone leaves. Maybe they'll find another bar just as good, but probably not. There are only a handful of good bars out there.
wow. Thank you. This is exactly how I feel. Somehow you were able to say it without kicking the okcupid hornets nest
I have had some minor success with the App Hinge. It has some major faults such as lack of a good search feature though.
CMB has quickly turned into an utter waste of time for me. A clear majority of my matches are the same unattractive, if not morbidly obese, women day after day. Haven't had as much as a single conversation there in months.
Not a good option. It requires a Facebook account to sign up.
This is a shame. The site used to be a great way to meet people. I don't think there's anything out there like what it used to be: easy to use, easy to search, free, and with a great userbase.
I don't think anyone will start a new one either - the sites are almost all losing money.
I'm in Spain and I'm using a site called AdoptaUnTio; the French site is called AdopteUnMec, and they apparently have a German version. I'm not sure what happened to the US version of the site but I'd read that they'd launched one. Anyway, I've had good luck with it and it has a number of features OkC used to have like seeing who visited your profile and receiving messages. I recommend it if it's available where you are.
IRL dating, i've found some really helpful sources and have learned a lot none of the PUA crap. it's helped me find inner strength. I'm probably gonna try more IRL dating.
Rules of the game was helpful and not necessarily all PUAisty if you don't want it to be
haven't heard of rules of the game. here's what i've found so far.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/7lhibb/alternatives_similar_to_old_okc/drnvhmh/
yes. some may not agree with some of it. this udemy course seems to have worked the best so far for me.
https://www.udemy.com/make-her-want-you/learn/v4/overview
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_W0oE_ock8bWKjALiGs8Q
i hear this one has some good info, i skimmed a few decent tid bits skimming through.