I’ve said this before but my wife, who I met through Match.com, is very different from me in many, many ways and very different from what I thought I was looking for and we couldn’t be more compatible and more happy. Keeping your mind open is exceptional advice.
From POF today.
My name is Markus and I created POF/Plentyoffish. When I created POF, I wanted it to be all about finding relationships with the right person. For the first 7 years this worked really well, I got the site to 10 million users without any employees people and POF was generating a ton of relationships. Around 3 years ago, everyone started using the website via mobile phones. Today about 70% of POF use is via a mobile phone and unfortunately about 2% of men started to use POF as more of a hookup site mostly due the the casual nature of cell phone use.
In sticking with my vision that POF is all about Relationships, I’m going to make a bunch of changes to ensure it stays a relationship-focused site.
Any first contact between users that contains sexual references will not be sent. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will be deleted without warning. This rule has actually been in effect since last month and it’s made the site so much better.
You can only contact people +/- 14 years of your age. There is no reason for a 50 year old man to contact a 18 year old women. The majority of messages sent outside those age ranges are all about hookups. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will get deleted.
Intimate Encounters will go away in the next few months. There are 3.3 Million people who use the site every day, of those there are only 6,041 single women looking for Intimate Encounters. Of those 6,041 women, the ones with hot pictures are mostly men pretending to be women. Intimate Encounters on POF can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women.
In short the vast majority of people will not be impacted. This is because the vast majority of people are not going around spamming women saying “let’s have sex tonight”. I can’t change POF alone, I need your help to get the word out there that POF is all about relationships!
Markus
Anyone else here adversely affected by the changes in highlighted above??
Doesn’t affect me, since I’m married. It still strikes me that he’s being overly rigid. Under his new rules, a 65 year old can’t contact a 50 year old, because he/she is “too old.” He lays down the line as 14 years, and then gives an example where the gap is 32 years. There’s a vast gray area between the two in age gap relationships, and the age of the younger half has a huge bearing on whether it’s appropriate.
So PoF changes to SMLAoF (Somewhat More Limited Amount of Fish). I can totally see the sense in removing “Intimate Encounters” or whatever, as that seems like it was never in the spirit of “dating” anyway and probably is prety much exactly as he describes. The other two changes seem a little draconian.
First of all, who determines what is sexual in nature and what isn’t? Sure, messages like “nice profile, let’s fuck tonight” are obvious enough, but there is plenty of flirting and banter (not just from men to women either) that could run afoul of this rule. Does he mean that only the first message between people will be scanned for this content? Or will this be ongoing until some definition of “beyond first contact” has been reached? I think the biggest thing that could hurt PoF in this situation is that many people, women especially, will not be thrilled to learn that their dating website is scanning the communications they send through it. That’s going to make people pretty uncomfortable, even if it is obstensively to protect them.
Secondly, the 14 year age gap is kind of limiting. While it’s true that a 20-year-old is most likely not going to want to date 34 year olds, there is a much greater chance (as pointed out above) that a woman in her early 50’s might be interested in a guy in his mid 60’s. I suppose there is always OurTime.com for that. Still, a 20-year split would seem to make more sense. Even at 55 it’s doubtful a woman would be interested in a 75 year old guy, and certainly very few 30 year olds are interested in 50+ year olds for serious dating. I understand his reasoning with the age limitations, I just think they should be broader.
(X / 2)+7 has worked for everyone else so far.
Yeah, 14 years is a stupid way to do it. Hasn’t he heard of The Rule of 7? (You shouldn’t date anyone younger than half your age + 7 years.)
A couple of weeks ago, after a long hiatus from online dating, OkCupid sent me one of those emails about a woman rating my (pretty much untouched and unmaintained) profile highly. Being a fairly normal boring middle of the week night I had nothing better to do and decided to click on the link to see her profile. It turns out we share a number of interests and her profile is fairly well written compared to most so I decided to send her a message. It was the first message I’d written on a dating site in probably close to a year. Combine that with the fact that my average response rate back when I was doing this more frequently was only 1 in 8 during the best of times meant that I didn’t really think much of my odds of ever hearing anything back.
Well, I was wrong. What follows has been one of the most socially unusual exchanges I’ve encountered in online dating. She replied to my message within about 30 minutes which is the quickest I’ve ever gotten a response, but this is the 21st century… The problem with the response was not the quick turnaround, but the fact that my nicely formatted 2 paragraph 7-8 sentence message asking a few profile-related questions got only a single sentence reply. No questions of her own and nothing to go on from there. I didn’t read her message until the next day and was a bit turned off by the terse response. However, I remembered that, especially in online dating where talk is incredibly cheap, actions speak louder than words and that any reply that’s not obviously hostile is generally a thumbs up. With that in mind I replied to her single sentence with a few sentences of my own this time only asking a single question. At this point I figured that since she was barely able to write a reply last time that this time around she’d be too bored to write anything and that would be the end of it.
Again, I was wrong. At this point to shorten the story all you really need to know is that she kept replying. Each time the reply came within an hour and each time it was usually a single sentence (I did get two sentences from her once, considering this a great achievement I soldiered onward for curiosity more than anything.). After about 3 more messages exchanged in the space of 48 hours I figured that we might as well be on instant messenger. After all, if she’s going to keep things short it might as well through the proper medium. She agrees to IM and all of a sudden she’s writing as much as I do (if you can’t tell by now, I am not afraid of writing). For some reason changing the means of communication from email/messages to IM changed everything in the level of communication. After a few long-ish successful IM conversations over the course of another couple of days things are going well enough that we manage to exchange phone numbers which leads to a nice phone conversation a couple of days later at the end of which I ask her if she would like to meet. “Uhhh… No thanks, I’m pretty busy and I think we should chat some more first.” was the response. I’ve heard that one before and it has always been a non-starter. Every time I have ever heard a woman use a line like that has meant that exactly no more communication will be had. Zero. None. Game Over. At this time, again, I figure easy come easy go and decided not to call/text/IM her again.
You can probably guess a pattern here. Yes, I was wrong. The very next day I am walking out of work and my phone buzzes. It’s a text message from her. It simply says: “Hey, how’s your day going?”. In a somewhat perplexed state, because this goes against the norm established by every other social interaction I’ve ever had, I reply with the very suave: “It’s going well. How’s yours?”. Things progress from there in a fairly normal way with a couple of entertaining phone conversations and more texts than I usually send in an entire month. Now about a week after I originally asked if she wanted to meet and just over 2 weeks since that first email I get a text from her. It simply says: “I’m free Friday evening. Do you want to meet?”. At this point I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been making the classic mistake of over-thinking and decide to go for it. What do I have to lose? Worst case scenario is that I’m already in the “friend zone”. So we’re going to meet on Friday and even though it hasn’t happened like any of my other online dating experiences so far and there is still monumental potential for things to go wrong, I’m in a very good mood about the entire thing.
tl;dr
- First off-the-cuff message on OkCupid in a long time results in an interesting exchange and a (hopefully) successful first meeting/date.
- Sometimes people are just bad at writing emails.
- Sometimes when people say they’re busy maybe they’re actually busy or they’re shy or maybe they’re playing the long con and trying to steal your kidneys… who knows?
- Hopefully it’s not the kidneys.
- I need to think less. Evidently when I stop giving a shit, things tend to go better.
Prediction: She’ll show up an hour late, then have to leave 15 minutes later.
That takes zen masters a lifetime to comprehend, and you just achieved understanding over a few email conversations with a woman you’ve never met. Let me know if you ever start a church, I’m there.
If I were a bettin’ man I would give you even odds on that.
PM me your email address. I would love nothing more than to add you to my newsletter!
All jokes aside. Thanks for the vote of confidence guys.
Just to be safe, wear a chain link t-shirt that locks in place under your crotch.
To protect your kidneys, I mean.
That’s easily explained. Let’s say she’s uses the OKCupid mobile app and doesn’t like to type on a touchscreen. When you suggested IM she switched to her PC and could type on a keyboard.
So all that emo shit I posted before? Yeah. Scratch that. Funny how much better OkCupid works when you start figuring out how to read between the lines on people’s profiles.
This. A million times this. (Though keep a hand over your kidney, just in case.)
My wife is extremely intelligent and highly successful but terrible at written communication. If I had read too much into our early conversations, I never would have gotten to know her which would have been a tragedy of epic proportions.
It’s amazing how many people in the world simply are not good at written communication, be it through letters, emails, texts or IM. It’s almost as if a significant portion of the population doesn’t spend any time on internet gaming forums honing their written communication skills. Mind boggling! ;-)
Also, mostlytigerproof nailed it. She was likely originally responding via phone texts, and only later when you switched to IM was she able to actually sit down and type out thoughtful responses. She sounds like she’s simply being cautious, which is a good thing, and that she likes you, also a good thing (kidney issue notwithstanding). Good luck Dr. Killinger!
I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who come across as complete imbeciles when they write. Even if you replace the lazy text replacements, such as “u” for “you,” and fix the grammar, they still come across as idiots. I’ve been assuming that they can’t be as bad in person, but I haven’t exactly conducted a study.
Personally, being unable to communicate in writing would rule out a potential mate for me, since I value women with an intellectual mindset. It’s difficult to imagine someone who routinely reads for pleasure who would find the written word a handicap.
You couldn’t be more wrong. My step-daughter has a learning disability known as non-verbal learning disorder which is characterized by extremely high intelligence but sensory and motor skill issues that lead to extreme difficulty with written communication and neatness (among other things) resulting in a performance gap.
I’d say more on the subject but I have to run.
You would love my older daughter then. She will respond to texts or e-mails with corrections to your grammar. Doesn’t mean she communicates her thoughts any better though.
PS…Now that she has a “useless” college degree we (and she) are thinking she was born to be an English teacher. Kids would love what she would do to their papers.
Then, were she ever to create an online dating profile, she should mention this prominently. It’s hardly fair to expect the entire world to spontaneously give someone the benefit of the doubt when they express themselves poorly. There are a lot of actual idiots out there, after all.
True enough and this generally becomes apparent within the first five minutes of a date. My main point is that folks should keep an open mind when online dating and don’t be so quick to prejudge based on rigid prejudices. In my wife’s case, everything about her profile intrigued me to the extent that I over looked any grammatical errors. When we started communicating in email I was slightly concerned because she did not express herself well in writing but I withheld judgement until we met and my concerns were immediately laid to rest.