Online dating

Billy86

Foxtrol wrote: »

Obviously the likes of POF is different, I wouldn’t expect someone to respond to every attempt at conversation from random people.

Should add that my comment above was for the likes of POF, not say Tinder or whatever where you have to match before messaging (though a little bit extra effort never hurt there either).

Tell me how

Tell me how wrote: »

Maybe because what he is saying is "Hi". He's not declaring the search is over or proposing to someone.

I could understand your take on this more so in a speed dating scenario but where it's online I just don't think it's enough reason to call "Next".

I'm not suggesting it is solely down to the girl to provoke conversation either.

If someone's profile was just "Hi" then I would back off.

Of course not and I wouldn't expect a grand gesture along the lines of his search being over.
I do take your point but it's just the type of woman I am. Give me something more.

coffee_cake

Why would someone feel entitled to someone else's time and attention having given no indication of spending either in the first place?

kfallon

Billy86 wrote: »

Have you ever seen an attractive woman's POF inbox?

http://www.electricteacher.com/images/ooh-matron-with-text.gif

Billy86

kfallon wrote: »

http://www.electricteacher.com/images/ooh-matron-with-text.gif

Has someone been hanging out in the You Laugh You Lose thread lately?

J Mysterio

maudgonner wrote: »

Of course you're not going to get a response to every mail. But as I said, I'm not talking about an essay. A one-liner message is perfectly acceptable, if it's a one-liner that has even a tiny bit of thought put into it. I can only speak for myself, but there's far more likelihood of that getting a response from me than just 'Hi'.

I guess it depends what you're looking for from it - if you spot someone you really like the look & sound of, why wouldn't you put in a little bit of effort to stand out from the crowd? If they're not willing to do that much, then I doubt we're looking for the same thing. Which is fair enough - it may depend on your age/stage of life/goals etc.

Yes but here's the thing. Women such as yourself seem to be waiting for a guy to look at your profile, out of all them, and be like - 'there she is, we will have a family' and start disecting all the interesting things in your profile whereas the reality is that because women are recalcitrant - and guys have no idea who will find them attractive - its more likely that guys spam generic 'hello's' and 'like' a lot of profiles to see what bounces.

First a signal you are attracted to each other, then you can see are you compatible.

Dravokivich

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Why can't the guy write more than just "hi"?

Its not just guys that do this. Also, it doesn't help when someone has very little of anything listed about their interests in their profile. Not gonna start things off with a q and a. The sooner people realise it's simply a means of communication, the less finicky they'll be about the content they receive from someone attempting to communicate with them.

J Mysterio

bluewolf wrote: »

Why would someone feel entitled to someone else's time and attention having given no indication of spending either in the first place?

lol. Someone makes the effort to indicate to you that they are attracted to you and you're upset.

Dravokivich

Dravokivich wrote: »

Its not just guys that do this. Also, it doesn't help when someone has very little of anything listed about their interests in their profile. Not gonna start things off with a q and a. The sooner people realise it's simply a means of communication, the less finicky they'll be about the content they receive from someone attempting to communicate with them.

Yes but why can't the communication be a little more?

riffmongous

Billy86 wrote: »

The massive problem with this: Have you ever seen an attractive woman's POF inbox?

A girl I know got 580 messages in one day. You try finding the time to answer 580 'hi' messages and trying to figure out who is interesting and who is not from them!

If she is getting 580 messages a day chances are she is not going to notice an earnest message either unless she has a secretary or you got lucky to be within the first couple on the list.

Just give me something of who you are. It only has to be a sentence. I want to know if your insides match my insides. Be brave and fearless with what you write. Ask me something. Anything.

maudgonner

J Mysterio wrote: »

Yes but here's the thing. Women such as yourself seem to be waiting for a guy to look at your profile, out of all them, and be like - 'there she is, we will have a family' and start disecting all the interesting things in your profile whereas the reality is that because women are recalcitrant - and guys have no idea who will find them attractive - its more likely that guys spam generic 'hello's' and 'like' a lot of profiles to see what bounces.

First a signal you are attracted to each other, then you can see are you compatible.

You seem to be assuming that attraction is based purely on looks?

Again, I can only speak for myself, but that's certainly not the case for me.

Chain Smoker

If you only send hi and haven't made an effort to give the person something to grasp onto in your profile (either photos chosen to provoke questions/comments/etc or some information about yourself), I really don't get how you'd expect them to be at all interested.

...and if all you can come up with is something negative, you've got some kind of issues.



So, I feel like this might be a bad idea, but here's my current tinder profile:

"Hi, I'm ****** and Space Jam is not a good film.

Irish, currently full of free snacks and half-baked theories about the Donald Trump presidential campaign (this is a few months out of date).

I've a whole load of characters left so here's a list:

Don't want to talk on here too long, let's talk over expensive coffee or cheap vodka!"

The Space Jam bit is what everyone goes for, fortunately I can endlessly hate on that film and people seem to think it's amusing (I'm actually being deadly serious)

Definitely not looking for a critique, but I'd like to see others peoples and quietly judge them!

J Mysterio

maudgonner wrote: »

You seem to be assuming that attraction is based purely on looks?

No. I said 'first signal you are attracted to eqch other'. Of course it's not only looks.

Billy86

riffmongous wrote: »

If she is getting 580 messages a day chances are she is not going to notice an earnest message either unless she has a secretary or you got lucky to be within the first couple on the list.

More a case of flicks through as many as she can when she gets the chance usually on the way to/from work, and 'hi' messages pretty much get automatically deleted, though I'm sure an exception would be made if Ryan Reynolds identical twin happened to send her one. She described it as "it's kind of like 'swipe right until you come across an actual sentence' ".

riffmongous

J Mysterio wrote: »

Yes but here's the thing. Women such as yourself seem to be waiting for a guy to look at your profile, out of all them, and be like - 'there she is, we will have a family' and start disecting all the interesting things in your profile whereas the reality is that because women are recalcitrant - and guys have no idea who will find them attractive - its more likely that guys spam generic 'hello's' and 'like' a lot of profiles to see what bounces.

First a signal you are attracted to each other, then you can see are you compatible.

I gave up on these apps pretty quickly, but I never got a response from a thoughtful message to an interesting girl, only from hi's sent out to pretty faces.

Tell me how

Deleted User wrote:

Just give me something of who you are. It only has to be a sentence. I want to know if your insides match my insides. Be brave and fearless with what you write. Ask me something. Anything.

I know what you're looking for ultimately Persepoly. I don't fault you for that one bit but I wonder I are you looking for a lot of depth very early on.
I'm just wondering if you rule out potential candidates unnecessarily early.
There could be a slow burner waiting to ignite.

J Mysterio

Tell me how wrote: »

There could be a slow burner waiting to ignite.

Meow

Foxtrol

Billy86 wrote: »

Tried that before just to see how it would go, almost always something like this:

Them: Hi
Me: Hi
Them: How are you?
Me: Good, and you?
Them: OK thanks.

If they want to initiate a conversation, then they can make the effort to come up with something. Sure if it were someone I found very attractive I probably would reply, but then that would be because I also want to initiate conversation with them. If they can't get something interesting or exciting going, I'm going to take that as a red flag that they might not be the most interesting person going.

It sounds harsh, but when there are thousands of potential people to see immediately in front of you you need to be discriminatory for that kind of stuff. I'm not asking for the greatest thing I've ever read, just something -anything- to work with and get the conversation in flow.

You know in that example you show just as limited an ability to hold an interesting conversation as the person you were judging.

You would have made a great couple.

pq0n1ct4ve8zf5

riffmongous wrote: »

If she is getting 580 messages a day chances are she is not going to notice an earnest message either unless she has a secretary or you got lucky to be within the first couple on the list.

Nothing close to 580 but back when I was on POF or OKCupid I'd get quite a lot of messages. I didn't have time to respond to everyone, and you know which ones were first on the chopping block? Go on, guess. And the odd time if there was a 'Hi' message from someone really good looking, I'd respond with a 'so how are you, do anything for the weekend, what are your interests, seen any good films lately' or whatever and 9 times out of 10 what I'd get back was 'fine how are you'.

It's like submitting a CV for a job and having loads of spelling errors or something, maybe you're perfect for the job, maybe you really deserve a chance, but you're not doing yourself any favours. It must be pretty frustrating and I can understand why people wish it was different but sure complain into one hand and shít into the other and see which one fills up first.

Hombre Lobo

I've sent out thoughtful messages based on a woman's profile and I've never once received a reply.
I can only conclude I am fugly

Billy86

Foxtrol wrote: »

You know in that example you show just as limited an ability to hold an interesting conversation as the person you were judging.

You would have made a great couple.

I wasn't necessarily attracted to them to begin with, so they offered neither physical attraction nor intellectual/emotional engagement. Where's the incentive?

This sounds way more self important than it should, but if I am the one that they want to talk with, the onus is on them to incentivise me. The cold truth is, if I were attracted to someone physically or off their profile, that would be the incentive that would case me to attempt to engage with them.

thattequilagirl

J Mysterio wrote: »

But he did take the time to say hello? So you would ignore that message even if you liked the look of someone? You could always say 'hi' back.

I could, but I wouldn't want to. To me, it screams "I can't be bothered to make an effort" so he just sends me the same message he's sent 50 other girls in the last few hours.

thattequilagirl

"Hi, how are you? Good weekend? Like the pic on the jet ski/mountain/beach"

It doesn't take a genius to write a message that starts an actual conversation.

Evening adding just "How are you?" makes it a lot easier to message back.

Foxtrol

Billy86 wrote: »

I wasn't necessarily attracted to them to begin with, so they offered neither physical attraction nor intellectual/emotional engagement. Where's the incentive?

This sounds way more self important than it should, but if I am the one that they want to talk with, the onus is on them to incentivise me. The cold truth is, if I were attracted to someone physically or off their profile, that would be the incentive that would case me to attempt to engage with them.

The other person could have come out of that conversation with the very same opinion about your conversational skills as you had of them.

Yes, that did sound very self important but somewhat understandable.

The problem is there’s a risk/reward issue with messaging on the likes of POF. You could look in detail at every profile you come across and then craft a detailed message which could be missed or ignored by the person you write to or in the same amount of time you could message a generic mail to dozens of profiles that you like the look of from a quick glance. The risk in the latter is that your message is ignored but I’d say it’s not that worse than the chance the former will be ignored. Many will send those out just to test the waters and then will have a proper conversation if they get a response.

That sense of self-importance makes people want to feel instantly special, that the other person went out of their way to contact them rather than anyone else. I’m sure there are examples of this (and I’m sure plenty of people lie to their otherhalf about this) but it’s a rarity that a person who is actively looking isn’t in touch with several people on these apps. By wanting to be engaged instantly you’d be ignoring a massive population of people you could be perfect for (95% of people I’ve matched with in my case).

Chain Smoker

I dunno why you'd waste your time sending a hello to a stranger when you can send whatever kind of rambling ****e comes into your head while taking a dump instead (i.e. where I am when I send about 90% of my first tinder messages). You're practically guaranteed to not get a response from hello so what have you to lose from being more creative, at the very least you'll learn what are things you should never ever say to a person immediately after meeting them!

Hombre Lobo wrote: »

I've sent out thoughtful messages based on a woman's profile and I've never once received a reply.
I can only conclude I am fugly

OKCupid's "special blend" sorting algorithm sorts on the basis of who is most likely to respond to you, which is heavily looks based. So set yourself up an account there, write yourself a nice enough profile and you'll get a pretty good idea of where you rank!




Also, maybe I'm wrong, but POF when I was on it seemed like an awful site? Has a UX that seems to promote the most tedious profiles possible. No clue how anyone endures it.
I mean, they're all flawed, but it's some web 1.0 horrific nightmare of a thing.

Foxtrol

thattequilagirl wrote: »

"Hi, how are you? Good weekend? Like the pic on the jet ski/mountain/beach"

It doesn't take a genius to write a message that starts an actual conversation.

Do you struggle so hard with conversation that you need someone to point to a picture or topic to start discussing?

I hate one word responses to messages as much as the next person but it sounds like people want to be spoon fed on topics or made feel special.

tomwaterford

Foxtrol wrote: »

Do you struggle so hard with conversation that you need someone to point to a picture or topic to start discussing?

I hate one word responses to messages as much as the next person but it sounds like people want to be spoon fed on topics or made feel special.

Bit harsh??

Though I always figured folks included the most random pics so as people would have somewhere to start

Or else people seem to think pics of them cycling/sweating after a marathon etc is attractive and are misguided if so



Without such pics like that people would end up down the pure rabbit hole of talking about the weather (who wants that!!)

maudgonner

Foxtrol wrote: »

The problem is there’s a risk/reward issue with messaging on the likes of POF. You could look in detail at every profile you come across and then craft a detailed message which could be missed or ignored by the person you write to or in the same amount of time you could message a generic mail to dozens of profiles that you like the look of from a quick glance. The risk in the latter is that your message is ignored but I’d say it’s not that worse than the chance the former will be ignored. Many will send those out just to test the waters and then will have a proper conversation if they get a response.

You've had multiple women on here say that 'Hi' messages get automatically ignored. While I'm not suggesting that we speak for all women who do OD, surely that would indicate that the risk related to one-word messages is very high.

That sense of self-importance makes people want to feel instantly special, that the other person went out of their way to contact them rather than anyone else. I’m sure there are examples of this (and I’m sure plenty of people lie to their otherhalf about this) but it’s a rarity that a person who is actively looking isn’t in touch with several people on these apps. By wanting to be engaged instantly you’d be ignoring a massive population of people you could be perfect for (95% of people I’ve matched with in my case).

Again, I don't think anybody is suggesting that you need to compose poetry individually tailored to each woman. There's a middle ground that you seem to be discounting completely.

J Mysterio

So you're saying I need to put effort in?