Match Group

If you’ve been anywhere near a news source lately, you probably heard about Facebook’s big news feed experiment. The social network manipulated the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users to see if the emotion they absorbed through reading content on their news feeds impacted the emotion they later displayed in their own posts. People were, unsurprisingly, not too psyched at the revelation that Facebook had toyed with their emotions.

Shortly afterwards OkCupid revealed that it, too, has experimented on users, and the furor started again. In their most recent experiment, OkCupid told users — falsely — that they’re compatible in order to spark more conversations. As a result, OkCupid found that perceived compatibility is just as effective as real compatibility.

Reactions to both experiments have been mixed. Some have said that OkCupid’s testing is less controversial than Facebook’s. Others have called the OkCupid experiment worse than Facebook’s. What everyone seems to agree on is that they’re not quite sure if they should be upset or not. On one hand, lying to customers seems like an obvious faux-pas. But on the other hand, isn’t that just how the Internet works?

As Josh Constine noted in a TechCrunch post, by using services like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and yes, Facebook, we agree to be part of experiments that change the way we experience the sites. The experiments are called A/B tests, and companies use them to figure how to encourage users to visit a site longer or click more things. This is nothing new.

However, there may be some room for concern. In academia, research involving human subjects is severely limited and carefully monitored by review boards to ensure that it is not deceptive and harm is minimized. Where companies are concerned, there’s no such thing as a review board. It’s up to the companies themselves to abide by the core principles of ethical research.

So how should you feel about Facebook’s and OkCupid’s experiments?

Any way you want. Unlike those two companies, I’m not here to manipulate into doing or feeling anything.

But if asked to take a stand, I’d have to put myself pro-OkCupid and less-than-convinced about Facebook. Facebook deliberately tried to change users’ emotions for the worse by manipulating content in their feeds, all without their consent. It’s hard to get behind that, no matter how much you enjoy psychological studies. For OkCupid, I’m willing to give a pass. At the end of the day, those kinds of experiments are just OkCupid doing its job. Without testing, OkCupid would never improve its ability to match users – and that’s the whole reason we’re there in the first place.

Dating is a numbers game, but what happens when you’re not 23 any longer – do the numbers start working against you?

No! The truth is, people are looking for partners of all ages. More than half the U.S. adult population is single, and many are baby boomers and Gen Xers looking to find love after a break-up or divorce, or want to get married for the first time. You are not alone.

The media would like us to think that young daters are the only ones out there who are actively dating and forming relationships, but that is far from the truth. Older daters are higher in number, but are slowly adapting to the technology available to them – specifically online and mobile dating. The stigma is gone for the most part, thanks to the ease, accessibility and popularity of mobile dating apps. How many 40-somethings do you know using Tinder? Probably more than you’d expect.

If you are over 40 and wondering how to approach this whole dating thing, here are some tips:

Try different sites and apps. Not everyone over age 40 should be on eHarmony. Not every guy should be on Tinder. Before you join, ask yourself what your goals are. Do you want to test the dating waters without getting serious? Do you want to get married? Or would you like to find a girlfriend/ boyfriend for companionship? Different sites and apps offer different experiences, so be sure to research first.

Be honest in your approach. So many women lie about their ages, and so many men lie about their height. They want to attract more people, but in the end when you are meeting dates in real life, they will be upset by the lie. Don’t start any relationship this way. The people who are right for you won’t let age or height be a factor, so don’t you either.

Let go of your baggage. There’s nothing more important than examining past relationships and seeing where we can get rid of old beliefs and thought patterns that aren’t serving us. Anger and fear are the two worst things to hang on to – for anyone. Go to counseling, talk with a friend, start a practice in yoga – do what it takes to help lift you beyond your current fear and anger, and into a place of greater peace before you date. It will be worth it.

Think about what you want in a relationship. It’s more important to understand how you want to feel in a relationship, rather than looking for a guy or girl who checks off those “boxes” – like being hot, or educated, or successful. These don’t matter nearly as much when you are in the relationship. Instead, think about the kind of person you’d like to spend time with.

Cultivate your own happiness and personal life. Do you enjoy travel, riding your bike, or cooking? Don’t wait for a partner to plan your next trip, or a cycling buddy before you research new biking trails, or a boyfriend before you start cooking elaborate 4-course meals. Do it for you! When you do things that make you happy, it puts you in a great headspace to attract others who are happy in their lives, too.

Judgment and dating go hand in hand. Even before online dating became so popular, singles would assess their dates based on a few traits they deemed important – like sense of humor, work ethic, kindness, or how hot they looked in a pair of jeans - to see whether or not they were worth a second date. But at least you could go on a first date knowing essentially nothing, hoping for the best. You had to deal with the element of surprise before you were allowed to judge.

Now, all of the mystery has been removed from dating. Dating websites like OkCupid allow you not only to see the profiles of potential dates and pick them apart, but you can also see ratings given by other people (that is, if you pay $10 for the premium service). If one of your matches gets two stars out of five, you’d be less likely to ask him/ her out. After all, aren’t we influenced by the opinions of others?

The more important question is: should we be so influenced, especially when it comes to meeting someone for the first time?

Dating apps like Lulu are focused solely on reviews. The app was intended to be a place where women could get feedback about potential dates before they decided to go out with them, kind of a girlfriend safety mechanism. But it is actually more like a Yelp for dating – where women rate guys according to their looks, how they behaved on a date, sense of humor, and other qualities. So if a guy receives a low score, women who check him out on Lulu would probably avoid dating him.

The problem with this rating system is two-fold. First, the numbers can be skewed. Sure, maybe the guy is a jerk and has twenty women who will agree with that assessment. Then his low rating makes sense, and other women would want to know before going out with him. However, if a guy only has a couple of reviews, and one of them is from a jilted ex, then it brings his overall score down. In fact, what’s to stop any woman from retaliation through Lulu’s rating system?

The second problem with Lulu’s system is that it disqualifies too many potential dates based on factors that might not be important to every woman. For instance, maybe a man’s sense of humor rates low because the women he’s been out with didn’t understand his quirky style. Does that mean you – his next potential date – shouldn’t go out with him? What if his sense of humor is exactly your type?

Rating systems serve a good purpose in dating as far as warning women of potentially bad dates. But if you base whether or not to take a chance on someone solely on a rating system, you are severely limiting your options. Because you never know who the right guy for you is until you actually meet him.

Are you an eHarmony or OkCupid user? Chances are, you wouldn’t join both sites, because they cater to two different types of users. eHarmony attracts daters who are more serious and committed to finding a partner, whereas OkCupid skews a bit younger and takes itself a lot less seriously.

But regardless of which online dating site you choose – wouldn’t you want to understand how to use it most effectively, so you could obtain better results? Would you want to know how other people are using the site, and potentially how they are matched and communicate with you?

Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj “Misiek” Piskorski is the author of the newly released book A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media. In conducting research for his book, he obtained data sets from both OkCupid and eHarmony to determine how different demographics communicate, flirt, and connect over the websites. He set out to see the differences in communication styles between men and women as well as older and younger users.

In the course of writing his book, which is designed for businesses with social media presences, Piskorski studied the online dating habits of millions of users. After personal information was made anonymous so it wouldn’t be compromised, he started his search: specifically, how online daters send messages to each other, how they flirt online, and how they use the sites.

In a recent interview with Fast Company magazine, Piskorski said, “Where eHarmony varies dramatically is communication. People reach out to each other more on eHarmony, and get more responses on there. The people you traditionally would think have the hardest time reaching out to people do very well on eHarmony.”

What does this mean in terms of day to day use of the site? Generally speaking, because each person's pool of matches is smaller on a site like eHarmony where the matches are qualified, they tend to have an easier time reaching out. For timid users, it’s an empowering thing – they will message more on a site like eHarmony than on OkCupid when they know they are competing with thousands of other members.

Another reason for the increased communication on eHarmony is due to the fact that older women and men who are older, more overweight, or shorter than average daters are also more likely to reach out on eHarmony without feeling intimidated. Again, the limited number of matches he feels is a primary reason. Because eHarmony users have fewer choices than okCupid users, they are more likely to reach out, especially women, to people they are matched with.

So does less mean more? Perhaps. OkCupid users tended to gravitate towards specific matching services that offered more bite-sized options, too. For women, it was Quiver, which showed them matches that OkCupid thought would be good based on their likes and communication patterns. For men, it was a service called Quickmatch, where they could look at photos and basic profile information and rate the users according to what they find attractive.

Perhaps a study of dating app communication will be next on Pikorski’s list.

According to online security firm Symantec, everybody’s favorite mobile dating app is suffering from an “influx of spam bots and fake profiles.”

The presence of spammers and scammers isn't new to online dating sites, but so far it hasn't been a major concern for Tinder users. There are three kinds of spam campaigns currently targeting Tinder users. The first is adult webcam spam, in which bots engage real users in conversation and then try to persuade them to click on links to adult webcam websites.

A second common spam campaign promotes mobile apps, especially games, to Tinder users. Instead of directing people to adult webcam sites, this kind of spam tries to entice them into downloading and playing games like Castle Clash.

The third, and most common according to Symantec, kind of spam campaign involves fake prostitution profiles. These are typically identifiable by photos of women overlaid with text that details services, rates, and contact info. By including the info in photos rather than text, spammers can evade detection from spam filters searching for undesirable keywords in Tinder’s profiles.

What all three kinds of spam have in common is affiliate programs. In each case, the promoted destinations offer spammers money in exchange for converting leads. Spammers stand to make something like $6.00 per lead for a successful sign-up, and up to $60.00 for leads that become premium members. It may sound easy to avoid spammers, but plenty of people are falling for it. Symantec found that some spam links can get hundreds of thousands of clicks.

"For instance,” writes Satnam Narang for Symantec, “from the end of January 2014 until mid-April 2014, a campaign associated with a site called blamcams resulted in nearly half a million clicks across seven URLs. Depending on the offers given by the affiliate program and the number of successful conversions of leads, this particular spammer likely earned quite a bit of money."

So what can you do about it?

Report fake profiles to Tinder. Beneath every profile image there are three red dots. Click that icon to find the option to report the user. From there, a dialog window will open with three options. Select “Feels like SPAM”. It’s up to users themselves to police the Tinder community, so stay alert for fake profiles and spam bots and alert the app’s team so they are detected and eliminated as quickly as possible.

For more on this dating app you can check out our review of Tinder.

The online dating platform took several years for singles to embrace, undergoing much skepticism from the public. Does it really work? many would ask. It seems kind of desperate to join an online dating site, others might remark. There was a lot of judgment and confusion around the process, who joined, and what results it would yield.

Now all that’s changed because of our phones. According to a 2013 report from Pew Research, one in ten Americans have used an online dating site or app. And among singles looking for partners, that number is even higher, with 38% having used dating sites or apps.

It seems that dating apps have become a popular way to meet other singles, especially for people under 30. Gone is the stigma of looking desperate, or worrying about whether you’ll find “the one.” It seems instead people are opting for something that is simple to set up, simple to use, and completely accessible – scrolling through profiles and photos while you are in line at the drugstore, waiting for your friends at the bar, or bored with nothing better to do on Sunday afternoon.

Are people flocking to dating apps because we have become addicted to mobile technology? Or is it because online dating is much easier when you can access it over your phone? Perhaps it’s that meeting people through dating apps feels more like a game than something to take seriously, so it takes all the pressure off of participants?

According to a recent article in Business Insider, it could be all of these things. Regardless of the reasons, we’re starting to see a trend towards using technology for dating – with both online dating and mobile dating apps.

There does seem to be a generational divide. Younger singles under 30 prefer to use dating apps rather than online dating sites, and app developers are going after this market. There are an endless amount of new dating apps popping up every day, each offering something different, but all still relying on a hefty user base. Baby boomers and older daters however, still opt for the more traditional online dating options, which means Match.com and others share a good percentage of the market.

Most dating apps steer clear of the traditional online model of a monthly subscription service. Instead, they are offered for free, as this model tends to attract most users (and let’s face it – the value of any app or online dating site is in the numbers). In order to make money, several app developers have started offering a “freemium” model which gives users the option to pay for added features, like being able to search through more matches at a time, filtering their searches according to specific preferences, or chatting with someone they previously passed on.

Some are making money through advertising, though this can be distracting for users. Wyldfire, a new dating app, has made their advertising model a little more enticing by offering ads as incentives. When members get a certain percentage of likes, they get a discount on a service like Uber as a reward.

Some dating app developers speculate that the market will trim down over the next few years, and only two or three apps will be real contenders. Considering IAC owns most of the market – Match.com, OkCupid and Tinder are part of their roster – they may be right. In the meantime, we’ll have to see how it evolves.