This is a sort of continuation of the differences between different dating sites post I made a while ago. I was reading the latest OkCupid blog post and I wanted to comment on it.
It claims that basically subscription based dating sites aren't worth your money and then goes about why it's bad... I'm not necessarily going to refute those claims b/c some are valid, as according to their math, a lot of people on eharmony and match aren't paid users and can't respond. I'm only going to state what I know about the services.
The OkCupid blog states that when you're on eharmony, 93% of the profiles are not subscribers and therefore they won't be able to respond. This is probably true. When I was on, there were a lot of guys who never wrote back, they didn't even bother just closing the match. At least you'd hope people would have the courtesy to close the match just so your inbox can be cleaner. :P This is probably true with match as well. There are probably lots of non-paid for subscriptions which means you're messaging into the void.
On the other hand, eharmony only gives you a specific number of matches per day. So if you messaged all of the people who sounded promising, hopefully some are paid subscribers, so it's not like shooting into the ocean, you're shooting into a barrel. Match however is like shooting into the ocean and I just don't like the free for all/meat market mentality of it.
Secondly, it seems that a lot of their math is not that accurate. By no means am I a math expert but they're making some crazy broad assumptions. For example, "Now, according to the U.S. Census, there are 89.9 million single Americans. Let's assume they're all 'single and looking.'" (emphasis added but not the quotations.) Holy crap dude, that's a gigantic assumption!!
I'm not trying to defend eharmony and match but still! Also, I notice that OkCupid did not put up their user statistics and how many marriages or engagements come from their website, not that their website is necessarily geared towards the long term relationship market.
Which brings me to my next point. Maybe I'm going to be an elitist snob here, but I'm going to say it, "you get what you pay for." OkCupid is free. I love free sh#t. But I also know that free tends to be crappy too. So yeah, OkCupid is free b/c you're going to end up with a lot of skeezy cheapass people who may or may not be looking for serious relationships. Maybe not everyone is out there looking for a serious relationship, but I don't know how to give advice on playing the field.
Technically eharmony has it's free communication weekends (generally holidays) where there is a mad rush of people messaging each other and hoping that the other person responds before the weekend is over. I mean while this is a nice service and a trap (it's a trap!) to try and get people to pay if they meet someone cool, overall I didn't find it very useful unless you want to spend the weekend glued to the internet b/c you have to jump through a lot of hoops on eharmony where you have to wait for the other person to respond before you move to the next step. So basically in a normal free communication weekend, you can probably only move two more steps before you're blocked again. Ok, so the free communication weekends are more of a trap than of a real benefit to a user esp since they tend to only roll around once every couple of months.
My conclusion is, most of these companies are going to use misleading information to try to an entice someone into joining their website so they can profit. OkCupid although free is not some non-profit organization designed to help people find their soulmates. I think if you understand that someone is trying to profit off your single-ness then ultimately it becomes less about the service and how it fits what you're looking for in an online dating site. I feel that they cater to very different groups of online daters, you can tell by the way they've even designed their websites that they have different target audiences.
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