May 12, 2014

Why You Should Date Black Women

I've had a lot of success in online dating. Shit, I even wrote a book about it. But recently I've had even more success. How? By dating black women. Now, before you get all worked up, this wasn't a conscious decision I made one day. It's just something I noticed. I sort of though something was going on, but I didn't really pay attention until one of my friends whispered to me that he'd noticed that black women seemed to love him. When I started to keep track, I realized that I was having a lot more success with black women than any other race. But why? It turns out there are two factors at play here:

May 5, 2014

Why Tinder Sucks

If you haven't heard of Tinder, you haven't been paying attention. It's the hottest thing in online dating. It's worth billions. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of how it works. You can learn that anywhere, but here are the main reasons Tinder is different, and why it's getting so much buzz:

  1. It's not "really" online dating. Tinder has an organic feel. It uses your facebook contacts to link you with friends of friends.
  2. It's entirely smartphone based, so is very comfortable and intuitive to people who are familiar with social apps. It doesn't feel like normal online dating.
  3. It empowers women. Because you can't communicate with anyone until there's a mutual match, women feel empowered to control who gets to write them.

Yes all these things are true, but there's one fundamental flaw with Tinder that makes it almost entirely useless, completely inferior to virtually any other online dating site: It sucks. Here's how Tinder destroys online dating:

April 28, 2014

Online Dating Links

  1. Online dating tips from our old friends at The Onion.
  2. Looks like this guy has experience the "photo from above" deception in my book's list of profile photo red flags.
  3. A great video on the economics of sex. Bottom line, it's good to be a man.
  4. Guess what? Online dating saves you money.
  5. Hey did I mention my book? Check it out here.

November 24, 2013

What’s the average online dating email response rate?

Match.com, like many other sites, has something called “winks” that you can send to other users. It’s basically a quick way to let someone know that you’re interested in them. Now, when you receive a wink, a screen pops up asking if you’d like to email and stating that:

She’s 15X more likely to respond to an email.
(At least that’s what happened for a male match.com member at the time of this writing.)

Think about what this implies.

November 17, 2013

The Online Dating Email: Personalized vs Generic

The following is an excerpt from my new book, A Hacker's Guide to Online Dating: How to Train Your Computer to Get You Dates. In it I discuss all my tips and tricks learned over years of online dating, how to optimize your online dating strategy, and how to automate the whole process.

So you want to know if your online dating emails need to be personalized? You want to know whether you need to read her profile to craft an eloquent essay about all the things you have in common, or if you can get away with sending a generic, cut-and-paste email to everyone. It’s an important question. Crafting that perfect personalized email takes a lot of time. And if you consider the fact that even with a perfect email, the likelihood of a response is fairly low, you’re going to have to send somewhere between 5 and 20 emails to get one response. All that time writing emails adds up fast.

If you do some research online, you’ll probably see a lot of articles written by women whining about how generic emails are such a turn off, how unromantic they are, and how no one wants to respond to them, yada, yada, yada. Some articles are less emotional, but also conclude that generic emails are less likely to get a response, usually using a mixture of opinion an anecdote. But those people are missing the point. They’re answering the wrong question. The question isn't, Do people prefer personalized emails to generic ones? The question isn't even, Are people more likely to respond to personalized emails than generic ones? No, the relevant question is much more specific: Is the increase in response likelihood gained by a personalized email over a generic email worth the time it takes to write it? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no. Here’s how I know.