A Data-Backed Argument For Putting Less Effort Into Your Online Dating Messages

Is this the most unconventional dating advice ever?

While most experts encourage you to put more effort into your online dating messages, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder suggests doing exactly the opposite. And he has the research to back it up.

“OkCupid has records from the pre-smartphone, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram days — hell, it was online when Myspace was still a file storage service,” he wrote in an article for New York magazine. “Judging by messaging over all those years, the broad writing culture is indeed changing, and the change is driven by phones.”

When Apple’s app store opened in mid-2008, OkCupid quickly launched an app. The company noticed an immediate change in how users communicated. Once they were faced with typing on miniscule smartphone keyboards instead of desktop computers or laptops, message length dropped by over two-thirds.

The average length of a message is now comparable to Twitter - just over 100 characters. The best messages are even shorter. Those that are only 40 to 60 characters long have the greatest chance of getting a reply.

Rudder’s next step was to analyze what that means for the writers. “By considering only messages of a certain length, and then asking how many seconds the message took to compose,” he continued, “we can get a sense of how much revision and effort translates into better results.”

It turns out that taking your time does help, but only to a point. After too many minutes go by, the percentage of messages that receive a reply decreases. Put simply, don’t overthink it.

Rudder’s third investigation takes that premise to the extreme. If thinking less is a better strategy for messaging, what about not thinking at all?

We’re talking about the notorious copy-and-paste messages, which Rudder discovered are used profusely by online daters. By comparing the number of characters typed in messages against the number of characters actually sent, Rudder determined that there’s “a natural limit to how much effort a person is willing to put into a message.” Specifically, it’s “3 characters typed for every 1 in the finished product.”

Across OkCupid, the copy-and-paste strategy underperformed from-scratch messaging by about 25%. However, looked at in terms of effort-in to results-out, copy-and-paste always wins. “Measuring by replies received per unit effort,” Rudder wrote, “it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.” A template isn’t always bad, as long as the template is something interesting to begin with.

To view an example of a boilerplate message that worked, and Rudder’s detailed data charts, visit the original article.