Online Dating Blog

If you’re new to online dating or just wondering if the service you’re using is worth it, here are some signs that it’s time to retire your current dating site and find another.

1. There are advertisements for other dating services

If you walked into a car dealership looking to buy a car, wouldn’t it be strange if the salesman tried to convince you to buy a car from his competition? If Coca-Cola sold their bottles with advertisements for Pepsi on them, wouldn’t that be strange? In the same way, if you sign up for a dating service and are bombarded by advertisements for other dating services, such as “Thousands of Hot Russian Woman Looking for Marriage”, then there’s a big problem.

Why does this matter? The fact that a business would advertise for its competition means they don’t want you to find success using their service. They want to make money by convincing you to use their competition. It would be self-defeating to actually provide you with a means to find success. The best thing that this business could do to benefit itself would be to frustrate you to the point that you try another service (obviously they’ll hope you click a link on their site to do so!). I’ve even seen several services create advertisements that look like profiles in an attempt to trick the user into clicking them.

This is listed number one for a reason: if you are using a dating site that has a significant number of advertisements for other dating sites find another service. I promise you this type of dating site doesn’t have your best interests in mind. Even free services shouldn’t be breaking this rule. OkCupid is free with advertisements but I’ve never seen an ad for a competing dating site when using the service.

2. The website looks like it came out of the 1990s

It appears that some dating sites have missed the memo that how easy your site is to view and use matters. That doesn’t mean it needs to be the sharpest design around, but it should have good usability. For example, Craigslist might be considered to have a 1990s style but it’s actually a fine design: it solves the problem at hand and has a high usability for its users. Common traits of sites that put no effort into usability would include items such as crazy background images, generally hard to read, wild animated images, flashing links, way too many images or advertisements, scrolling text, all content presented in tables…basically anything that makes using the site difficult to view. If you find using your dating site difficult, it’s time to find a better service. Take a look at this site for a very extreme example of bad web design. You won’t find a site this bad (I hope!) but you’ll find plenty using bad practices shown here.

Why does this matter? It matters because it shows a lack of care from the operators of the web site. If the website doesn’t care about the user experience, then they don’t care about the user.

3. No last login date

Make sure that before you ever sign-up that you can see the last time someone has logged into the dating site. This should be on the search results pages, in the user profiles and the search system should allow you use this setting when specifying your searches.

Why does this matter? Some dating sites take advantage of the fact that people forget about their profiles and other people don’t know how to delete or hide their profiles. If a dating site shows a large number of users, it can help convince other people to sign-up. Some dating sites will attempt to deceive visitors in regards to the number of active users by leaving inactive accounts showing. They will also not reveal to their users when the last time that person actually used the service. At a site where the last login date is not display, you could easily be emailing an account that hasn’t been used for years. Sites that display the last login date allow users to exclude people no longer using the service and it prevents services from inflating their active user numbers.

4. All the women are half naked or men immediately ask for sex

This is a bad sign, unless of course you’ve signed up for a service geared towards sex. Guys, you’ll be able to pick up on this problem pretty quickly by browsing the profiles (although I suspect you may wonder why this is a bad thing at the moment). Ladies, it will probably take a week or two before you realize things are bad, as the email comes in over time. Of course, at the really bad sites, you’ll know within a day.

Why does this matter? It’s really an issue of quality. The best sites will ensure that this kind of activity does not happen through a flagging system. The fact that you can see this going on suggests finding that special someone is going to be very difficult.

• Ladies: Do not assume that all dating services are like this if it is your first time trying online dating. I’ve talked to a few women who have only tried services I know to be extremely bad in this area talk about how bad online dating is.
• Guys: I know, I know, half naked women seem like a great thing. Here’s the thing: the normal woman serious about dating isn’t going to strip down for the entire world to see. She may intentionally appear sexy (which is obviously fine) but there is a line that should not be crossed. When the line is crossed, you’ll know it when you see it. Many of these half naked women (probably most) have secondary motives and some aren’t women at all. And if you don’t believe me at the very least take things slow (and never give away money!) when speaking to one of these women.

5. They spam you or sell your email

When you sign up for a dating service you’ll need to provide your email address. This is frequently used for your login but it is also used by the dating service to send you emails. Most of the time this is fine and acceptable but occasionally you’ll find a service that takes it to another level and emails you constantly. The other case (and I believe this is very rare today) is when the service sells your email to other parties who then spam you. I think these issues occur less often today than in the past but it can still be a problem. The biggest difficulty here is that you don’t know it’s a problem until it’s too late. This is one reason I recommend using a second email account for your online dating, as I discussed in Tools For Identifying Online Dating Scams And Liars.

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Finally, if you are using an online dating site and it seems like it sucks then chances are it does (at least for you). There are tons of of other services out there. Yes, for you that dating service may be worthless but that doesn’t mean that all online dating is horrible. I used my fair share of worthless services but I kept trying and ended up meeting the woman who would become my wife. Just because you find yourself having used one bad dating site doesn’t make the whole system bad.

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