> For most people, looks ARE part of the equation. It's like removing Pi from an equation.
Did you read that OKCupid piece on when they turned off profile pictures for a day? Supposedly the result was better for their users - people who went on these "truly blind dates" had significantly better odds of a successful relationship coming out of it than the site average. Looks do matter, but the way we encounter each other via technology is artificial and superficial. I wonder if there would be a market for a text-only matching app.
When I met my fiancee on OKCupid, she had really grainy profile pics. She'd initially refused to give me her number (she had trouble with stalkers in the past) and was like "Oh, you know what I look like, you can find me on the Caltrain platform." I was like, "No, actually I don't. Here's mine." I wouldn't have been able to find her just going off the profile pics.
That said, there's probably no market for a text-only dating service. The problem is that people who end up in successful relationships drop out of the dating pool entirely, and are no longer in the customer base. We shut down our OKCupid accounts a few weeks after meeting, for example. The online dating industry is really fueled by hookups; if it weren't for casual encounters, dating sites would have no repeat customers. Tinder is the one company that really gets this - they're like "Yeah, we won't even make a pretense about this being about personality, realistically you just want to have sex with somebody hot and then come back to the app tomorrow. If you end up in a relationship, well, good for you! (And not for us. :-/)"
Didn't OKC try a new service called "Crazy Blind Date"? I remember signing up for it. It used geo proximity to match up people. The system wouldn't show you pics of each other until you both agreed on a date at a nearby place. Had a little chat with some woman nearby. When the system finally showed pics to us, she mysteriously had some "emergency" and couldn't make it.... :-D
Did you read that OKCupid piece on when they turned off profile pictures for a day? Supposedly the result was better for their users - people who went on these "truly blind dates" had significantly better odds of a successful relationship coming out of it than the site average. Looks do matter, but the way we encounter each other via technology is artificial and superficial. I wonder if there would be a market for a text-only matching app.