What, no ChristianMingle?

(I first typed in "ChristianMinge," which could be intriguing indeed.)

They all suck.

OkCupid does seem to skew a tad younger; Match seems a little better for my age range (40s). None of them have good search engines; the results routinely ignore the age range parameters I've entered.

Sweetongeeks isn't bad, if you like nerdy types.

They all suck.

I know people who met on Plenty of Fish. I glanced at it once with a friend and the layout terrified me.

(I first typed in "ChristianMinge," which could be intriguing indeed.)

bwah!

I met my husband before online dating was so ubiquitous, but most of my friends who are dating/looking etc. (late 30s-early 40s) use OK Cupid with varying success. They probably fall broadly into the demographics you are seeing, yeah.

No good news from me. My online dating experience has become decidedly worse over the past years. Hanging out at coffee shops works best for me.

I was on OkCupid when I was single and I liked it, but I hear now it is not as great. Prob still worth a try? It is free after all.

Friends my age (early 30s) are joining Hinge and Tinder.

From some articles I've read, it seems like the more specific interest dating sites (religion, hobby etc) have better success rates, maybe because people aren't wading through as many "definite no"s. Is there some interest you have that maybe has its own dating site?

Oh- forgot one: Coffee meets bagel

I've met some great people via CL in the past and the near present... seems to have ?regulars? that troll through it out of wonderment; and after sifting through a bit of chattel and debris it seems to work out ok for both parties.

Sans clues about much of anything IRL, me and my worthless 1950's skillset have always depended on social media for meeting new people... and for every decent person I've met in a bar; I've met dozens+ online. Most bars/clubs, ummm; disaster zones by and large, and the alcohol away from home can bring its own negating factors to the environment too.

I'm still mixed about the 'swingers' thing; and after many years; I don't see much diff between how (often) drunk or influenced bar folk meet and hop into bed together as compared to exchanging emails/photos/cam time and getting to know one another before meeting except that the 'swinger' (whatever that really is anymore) crowd actually knows who and what they are meeting and communicating with. I think it is another noun that has a lot of definitions, most of which are not some long past 70's disco reference; which in itself loops back to ... the singles bar, alcohol, mindlessness; and random sex. Which I've never really seen in a 'swingers' context.

OKCupid has done some really, really far out 'matches'; I would imagine given an area, the algorithm is going to more or less dump out about anything that matches the m-f mm ff ffmff (ha) etc sexual preference. Never used it but just heard from others, and the same for match.com.

Bizarre in a good way how plain CL and a spam-ready email addy still work so well years later.

Put ads everywhere; and I would not pay too much for any of it. The pay site time I have had has seemed as if the usual bots or idiots are there, except the diff is a person has to PAY to waste their own time and emails...

I mostly ignore females IRL. Too many potential problems from 'he looked at me weird' to gossip- gossip+ gossip- to OMG I just moved three blocks from where she works and didn't realize it until four months later and OMGWTF only damn cool flat part of the entire city anyway go figure a cyclist would look at a map and move there... wayyy too much random crap involved in non-planned IRL meetings. Unless y'all are on fire or being assaulted; for the most part you do not even exist as just as a matter of male self-preservation. .

What's CL? Craig's List?

I haven't done this since I met my husband (answered his newspaper ad) so very out of date.

CL ( craigslist ) continues to surprise me, but yeah, one out of every 10 seems to be an outlier that makes it worth the sorting through the rest.
I'm sure it differs from region to region; i.e. an ad in NYC might gather 9,897,337 spam responses as compared to an ad in ?Denver? or Tuscon getting a dozen or so spams.
/rant.

One day I'm going to start a dating site called It'llAllEndInTears.com.

Janetland: What about WeAllDieAloneAnyway.com?

Sigh. I found that I got a lot of correspondence on OKCupid, but it was all sort of 'out there,' and most of it not truly serious. "Oh you're awesome, I'm in the UK/Minnesota and just fucking around."

Match was useless.

What happened to Nerve.com? That yielded my best matches, most interesting people, and one longer-term dating thing. Of course this was circa 2005-6 so that may have changed. A lot.

But really, if I were on the dating market again, I think I'd avoid all these and work on meeting people in real life. Even through travel, whatever.

My one piece of advice would be

≡ Click to see image ≡

(The Space Pope agrees)

Monkeying with my age on OKCupid seems to have helped. I dropped 5 years (which puts me at 42--I cop to it in the essay portion). Very strange how that closed the age gap--instead of under 35s and over 55s, I'm getting many more 35-50s, which is about right.

I really want to get DieAlone.net now, but I already want to do a white power satire site. I can picture it, though, like an inspirational tool.

Seriously, if people are desperately trying to hook up because they are afraid of dying alone, they need a headcheck, not a date.

I'm fairly sure almost all the guys are lying about their height/age. I think I read that somewhere. At least you cop to it, which is good on at least three counts.

Picture's fairly important because not having one just makes you look suspicious, but then I guess guys suspect women of using other people's pictures? I'm not sure if it's because that happens often, they do it, or the way a lot of guys seem really hung up on pictures while not seeming to care much how they look themselves, unless they are using suspect pictures. You'd think all the guys using straight up the nostrils/mugshots wouldn't consciously pick those if they knew better.

It never really occurs to me to think how commonly people lie until they point it out in some way or it's unavoidably obvious. Mostly it's the latter, but the former is always surprising because it's always framed as how a cohort of people all do it. Pause. But not them.

If you are in a fairly urban area, I'm sure it will be fine. Just be interesting. If you write something that is not the expected, boring thing, it will stand out. Show your sense of humor and personality. Hopefully people who don't get it will leave you alone. I'm pretty sure incidents of females randomly harassing guys is much lower, but more obviously wacky.

It's different if you are in a place where more people are similar to you, but if nothing else, the stories other users have of the site are interesting. I haven't been to OKC in ages. It sounds like the women are way more interesting, or maybe the guys are just sorting through so many they find the stand outs.

I accidentally clicked a link once and got a flood of, let's call them unwanted messages, so I've been avoiding it. There have been a handful of interesting people but it hasn't been worth the crazy wave of crap it brings to check.

This area seems to have a high percentage of drunken, frustrated types that habituate strip clubs.

I don't think I need to tell you the painfully obvious things, like don't introduce yourself by your issues, ask to fuck, try to be insulting when you get no/negative response-- I mentioned the nostril shots? Few people look good when you are checking out their sinuses.

I think their blog goes into detail about what works well. I remember a snippet about guys not staring directly into the camera, but unless something is off-putting about the photo or lack thereof, just write something interesting. Start off well.

It's really interesting that we now live in a world where you get to check out someone's written language right away.
I'm not a huge snob, but there are some definite deal breakers that you find out fast. For a populous that loves texting, they know maybe a few thousand words and they are all crazy misspelled. Anyone who thinks cum is an acceptable spelling for come really needs to be sterilized. Everything auto-checks and auto-fills. You have to be using an entirely different alphabet to get to some of these.

Once I get past the want to weep for humanity, it's really pretty funny.