It had seemed like such a great idea, and I guess in a way it was. I mean, I made a boatload of cash in the funding stage, and the first few months the subscription rates were crazy!... But then all sort of fell apart. Turns out making a dating site that actually worked was simple... but not very profitable.

It all started with a few stiff drinks, as most great and horrible ideas. I was talking to some people about how all dating sites suffered from the same basic failings, failings that seemed trivial to overcome... First of all they didn't do enough to keep the scammers and spammers out. I mean in this day and age, that's really weird. Most of the sweetheart scams originate from small areas of the world, and even when they get affiliates from outside there it's a few IP addresses that's easily filtered for in the signup process.

My site doesn't just refuse them membership, of course, no it goes through as usual. Then we check for how they behave when they first get access to the site. Pattern recognition lets us know with a 99.9% surety if it's a real person or a bot, or even a real person using copy and paste, or even a real person trying to be unique yet actually aiming only to scam people. I mean it's obvious - they use mass mailing, they use grammar and language that is pretty easily detected, they use pictures found elsewhere on the internet... All these things are trivial to detect.

So that's scammers removed from the equation - at least enough of them that my site feels way way classier and more real than any other site out there.

Second I remember saying... Guys are assholes. It's not even conscious in most cases, it's not even that they are trying to be, it's that they are responding to the situation. The design of sites today, the reactions they get from girls, they all conspire to promote the kind of guy who goes for the simplest solution... Spamming messages to every girl on the site, showing off his abs and/or cat, and boom out of the thousands of messages he sends, one or two will actually be interested. He can do that in a few days. Meanwhile a nice guy, the actual kind of guy most girls on the site wants to meet, he sends out carefully crafted messages, puts the best pictures he has up, and he sends out maybe half a dozen messages in a day because all this takes time - reading her profile, crafting the message, and so on. He gets maybe one response in a hundred, or even up to one response in twenty if he's exceptionally good looking in his picture - or has a cat. It takes him between a week and a month to find a single girl interested in even responding to his message, and then from there that conversation still stands a high chance to die... why? Well because the girl gets messaged by four hundred other guys in that week, some of them more interesting, most of them outright crude. She'll be in a bad mood every time she logs on, waiting to slog through the cesspit her inbox has turned into to find that one good mail. The one good guy becomes associated with only bad feelings, and... she gives up. Or she goes on a date and gets out that way. Either way it's a loss, she's opted for the least offensive rather than the best simply because she didn't have the tools to pick the best option.

So my site put the power in the hands of the women. Guys can't write to girls without first being invited to do so. They can indicate their interest, and this gets them put on a stream the girls can peruse to pick their favorites from. The girls check the box for the guys they like the most, and these guys get personally invited to her inbox... so to say. There's still a few girls who will select almost everyone, and a few who just goes by looks, but overall the girls on the site stay longer, respond to more messages, and seem to be more open and interactive. They raved in reviews about how they not only found dates, but friends, and how they didn't have to suffer through the entire cesspool thing. Girls told their friends, word spread, the site went viral... among women.

Another feature sites lacked that I implemented was to push people to disclose, yet in a safe manner. You see there's a disconnect for a lot of people between online and real life, and that's weird since we're all still real people behind the screens. On a dating site especially this is weird. People go on there and they disclose a bunch of shallow details about looks and job and hobbies and whatnot, they show pictures, but they're still hesitant to meet face to face. I mean what if he's an axe murderer? A lot of people get stuck in that state where they like each other yet one or the other... okay lets be honest, it's usually the girl, she just doesn't actually let him in. She has no reason to distrust him, but he's from "the internet". She's put up a line between real life and online and only the perfect guy can cross it... except there is no perfect guy of course, so both parties end up disappointed.

So my site lets you give up a bunch of real world information, from casual to intimate. It's all heavily encrypted and hidden from everyone... until you've talked to them for a while. The longer you talk to someone, measured both in length of messages, time between messages and so on, the more you'll be prompted to reveal more about yourself to them. If you accept little details will be populated, letting them know more about you. There was some pushback against this, some people still compulsively click no, or just populate all the information with obviously bogus things... but it did lead to a drastic increase in people deciding to actually go on a date quicker, or shift to talking on skype, or the phone, or whatever. Relationships happened.

Yeah, it is the best site ever, really. I mean, I'm partial, but I guess also a bit inebriated again. The site was born out of a drunken idea - I can do this better - and tonight I'm going to have to turn it off because it turns out people didn't want better.

Or well, the guys didn't.

The girls raved and loved it. They came online, found a match, cancelled their account. Then after a few months the problem became apparent... most guys worth getting into a relationship with was already taken, and the rest... well they didn't get selected. Some of them got creative, used their profile better, and crossed that line into "eligible", but most... well most guys were guys. Their profiles were non-existent, their photos ridiculous. We added tips on improving, few took it. The reputation of the site suffered in guy circles, although the smart ones knew that if you managed to rise above the average level there you were guaranteed a match... But yeah, most people aren't smart, or never find out the details after just hearing their friends talking about what a waste of time the site is.

And of course, with the lack of guys... the girls started to grumble as well. Subscriptions lapsed, the site usage dwindled. People went back to the other sites. They weren't as good, they wouldn't in any way get you a good match from the start... but they would get you a match. In that cesspool of an inbox, there would be some guy who was "good enough".

Ah well, live and learn. At least I got a date out of it all. Her name is Laura, and I'm almost entirely certain that she's not an axe murderer. I didn't meet her on the site though, funny enough, she was one of the friends I had the drunken rant to in the first place. She helped me design it and work it all out, and was as disappointed as I when it started floundering. Maybe it's a pity-date she offered, but I'm okay with that. If it turns out it doesn't work out... I guess I'll just have to get a cat.