Communication

It seems dating site Plenty of Fish (POF) is staying true to its word of turning its image around. Known by many daters as a hook-up site, in the last couple of years the company's founder has promised that the site is cleaning up and wants to go back to its original purpose - helping singles meet people for relationships, not one-night stands.

The company recently shared on its blog exactly how they are enforcing their mission, and it seems they are doing this by deleting the accounts of members who violate site rules. According to POF, many users are in the dark about why their accounts are deleted, but they don't have the staff to respond to these requests individually. Just how many people are violating POF rules? About 5% of members, which considering the thousands of people signing up for the free site on a regular basis, amounts to more than its 75-person staff can handle. So, they decided to post the most common reasons on their blog.

Following are some of the rules that POF enforces. Be warned, if you violate their rules, the company claims that it can find out through its technology and advanced software. They can even detect if you're a scammer when you sign up.

Here are some reasons why your POF account may have been deleted:

1. You were looking for casual sex. The example the site gives is pretty cut and dry - one user was asking another user if he could pay her for having sex with him. While many lewd messages have double meaning and can be argued, if you are propositioning anyone on the site, you won't have your account for long.

2. You're married. The site is strict about this, and if POF discovers you are married, your account will be deleted.

3. You are a "scammer, a spammer, a fake, underage, or are soliciting a business." This can get a little murky, as scammers generally tend to hide beneath their online dating persona. But POF claims to catch 98% of them before they can even sign up on the website, captured through their "sophisticated spam detection system."

4. You are rude to users. If you put someone down because of how they look, or make discriminating remarks, or are blocked by other users often, you risk being deleted.

5. You post inappropriate photos. This includes the infamous "shirtless" photo that guys tend to gravitate to in online dating. If you are a woman, don't advertise your body with revealing clothing. If you question whether you should upload a particular photo, then don't.

6. You login from a country where POF doesn't exist yet. While POF is in many countries, they aren't in all and they can't support a user account in places where they aren't set up. So, check the site to see if your country is included before attempting to sign up.

For the single women reading, how many lewd messages have you received on OkCupid in the past month? How many guys have stalked you over Tinder? If you answer “too many” for either one, you might be ready for a new kind of dating app called Siren.

Siren is an alternative to the typical dating apps like Tinder, where many men swipe right to have more women in their cue - meaning, they play the numbers. They make the first move, often approaching women in a way that makes them feel pressured, uncomfortable, or just plain creeped out. It’s become a kind of risky game for some women, where they aren’t sure if they will meet someone and feel safe. If they don’t, the whole dating app experience becomes tainted.

All of us, at least once, no matter how much we profess to love dating, have wished we could just snap our fingers and magically make the perfect partner appear.

Well…I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that researchers at the University of Iowa believe they may have found the secret to online dating success. The bad news is that no magic is involved, and snapping your fingers probably won’t help.

The key, says the University of Iowa team, is for online dating sites to match users based on their past interests and actions, rather than on what they say they’re interested in. Think about your Netflix account. Netflix recommends movies based on what you’ve watched and the amount of time you spent watching it – so even if you profess to be a documentary lover, if all you watch is Gossip Girl, Netflix is probably going to suggest more CW-style teen dramedies.

Like with online dating, Tinder seems to give females the advantage over males, at least in terms of your chances for getting a date.

Many guys complain that women have it better in the dating world because women can choose who they want to date, while guys are left saying "yes" to every woman's profile they view online or on an app like Tinder, just to improve their chances of meeting someone. (Women tend to be more picky, and say "no" to most men, probably because so many men just swipe right to everyone.) While online dating does seem skewed, apparently some tech geniuses have decided to make the odds work in the guys' favor.

Instead of manually going through all the matches Tinder sends his way, one techie decided that he could automate responses. According to website ValleyWag, former Microsoft developer Yuri de Souza details "how he reverse engineered Tinder to mass-like every girl on the network." He was sitting around one Sunday afternoon mindlessly swiping right on all of his female matches, hoping that one would swipe right back, when the idea struck him.

" [I] recalled my friend telling me how he would spend hours swiping right on Tinder just to accumulate as may matches as possible," de Souza told ValleyWag. "This had me thinking, why can't I reverse engineer Tinder and automate the swipes? After all, I'm pretty darn good at taking things apart!"

He was successful, and went to share his idea with other guys, only to find he wasn't the only one or even the first to try to game the system.

While it seems counter-intuitive to accept matches that you don't even see in the hopes of having more choice in who you want to date, this is the thinking behind guys looking to game the dating app system. (An article in New York Magazine last year naming the most successful online daters included a guy who admitted to saying "yes" to all women on Tinder to improve his chances, so this might have inspired a lot of guys to follow his lead.)

Other tech-savvy users have created shortcuts and automation to help them (and other guys) avoid the challenging task of looking through so many women's profiles. It turns out, people aren't even willing to spend the time to look at photos anymore, let alone read words in a profile.

What does this mean for dating? While it's understandable that guys are frustrated with their lack of choice (and womens' general avoidance of swiping right unless a man really intrigues her), is reverse-engineering the best way to meet a woman? Maybe apps like Tinder, fun and game-like as they are, are not the best avenue for many people. Instead of casting a large net and hoping to catch someone - anyone - why not try to focus on what you want? If you're putting it out there that you can't seem to meet a woman, then likely creating an automated way to say yes to everyone on Tinder isn't going to improve your game.

Maybe it's time to try another site or app that is more conducive to your search. Better yet, try something more old-fashioned. How about you approach a woman in person and ask her out? That will make you stand out from the Tinder crowd.

For more on this dating app please read our Tinder review.

The Internet has been afire recently with the news that both Facebook and OkCupid have experimented on their users. Both companies have apologized or pseudo-apologized for their actions, while being careful to note that such online experimentation isn’t uncommon.

OkCupid took it one step further in their non-apology, candidly declaring that “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site” and revealing two more experiments they’ve conducted on users.

The first was born out of OkCupid’s short-lived blind date app. To celebrate the app’s release, OkCupid removed all the photos from the site on launch day. During those seven photo-less hours, OkCupid noticed some interesting things:

• Users responded to first messages 44% more often
• Conversations were deeper
• Contact info was exchanged more quickly

In short, OkCupid functioned better without pictures. When the photos were restored, the conversations that had started blind melted away. “The goodness was gone,” notes the blog post, “in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.” The blind date app revealed a similar phenomenon. When users got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how physically attractive their partner was. “Basically,” the post reads, “people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.”

In a related experiment, OkCupid decided to test its original rating system that allowed users to judge each other on two separate scales: Personality and Looks. “Our thinking was that a person might not be classically gorgeous or handsome but could still be cool,” the blog explains, “and we wanted to recognize that, which just goes to show that when OkCupid started out, the only thing with more bugs than our HTML was our understanding of human nature.”

After gathering the data, OkCupid found that “looks” and “personality” were essentially the same thing to users. They ran a second, direct experiment to confirm their hunch that people just look and pictures and ignore profiles. A small sample of users were shown profiles that did not contain text, resulting in two sets of scores for each profile: one score for the picture and text together, and one for the picture alone.

The results were predictably disheartening: text is less than 10% of what people think of you. The blog says it best: “your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.” Ouch.

Dr. Neil Clarke Warren left eHarmony a few years back, only to take control of the company he founded once again in 2012 to implement a turnaround strategy for its drastically sinking subscriber base. As it turns out, this new strategy has been key to eHarmony’s unprecedented recent success. This past week, the company announced that it has the highest number of subscribers in the company’s history, and has grown its base of users 54%.

This is quite an accomplishment, considering the growing popularity of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. The market is crowded these days, so you have to effectively differentiate yourself in order to compete. Traditional online dating sites have struggled to make their offerings more competitive and accessible.

eHarmony is an especially interesting contender in the online dating industry. Going against the grain of its competitors who offer an easy sign-up process and a high number of matches, eHarmony has a rather lengthy and grueling sign-up process that can take up to 90 minutes to complete before you receive your matches. And you only receive a few matches at a time, ones that are selected by eHarmony, not you. On top of that, there is another “guided communication” process to complete with each match before you can just send them an email to meet for a date.

It seems to be working.

All of these steps are important to eHarmony’s goal: compatibility matching. This was the original intention behind the launch of the site, and founder Dr. Warren has remained firm in this vision, which numbers show is paying off. He brought in a new management team to improve the website and mobile design, the technology, and implement a new marketing program.

As a result, the company has gained subscribers who are also more willing to stay longer and pay more than in years past.

“eHarmony was created as a way for individuals to begin a relationship already a step ahead – with someone who is truly compatible,” said Dr. Warren in a statement. “We are proud of what we have achieved over the past two years, securing the largest subscriber base in our history. We are confident in our ability to continue to grow eHarmony in the future.”

With so many dating sites and apps competing for sheer numbers, it’s interesting that eHarmony’s more serious approach to dating and its focus on the goal - helping people find long-term relationships – is paying off. There is indeed a market, and a need, for people to find and make real-life lasting connections, and the continually growing numbers prove it.