In this day and age, it is pretty much certain that the likelihood of meeting someone compatible and nice by hanging out in the philosophy section of Borders at any given time is essentially nil. So for all the wonderful women out there who feel it completely beneath them to sink to the level of attempting to creating meaningful social interaction through a website, I’m going to take one for the team and join every dating site out there. Yeah, you heard me. Every one. And I’ll even let you know how it is.
I’m sure this will get more interesting with time, as I move past the basics like OKCupid and Match, and on to more lol-provoking entities such as gothscene.com, interracialsingles.com and whatever that sugar daddy site that Allison and Tracy found earlier in the year was.
But we’ll start with OK Cupid, because I was taking one of their quizzes. My profile(and a truthful one, at that) is here.
Quality of Site: A-
I was pretty surprised at the easy navigability and user interface of the site – it made sense, really – which I think is somewhat rare nowadays. The quizzes are distracting enough to take away a chunk of my evening, but I am perturbed at the fact that my results were generally none too flattering. My Dating Persona is The Priss, by the way, in case you were wondering. Sounds flattering to you? No, not really.
The search is a “fuzzy” search, which is awesome, not because the word “fuzzy” in this context implies a cuteness on the level of attentionwhore cats, but because it means that you’ll probably find what you’re looking for, if it exists.
I didn’t bother trying to figure exactly what their metrics used for their match percentages were, but after clicking around some profiles that I shared a high percentage of commonality with, I could pretty much agree that these were people that I would at least have a reasonably pleasant online conversation with.
Quality of Users: B
For every intelligent, well composed message, there was another that would fall firmly under the category of “meh.” However, as the former is harder to write, I am still rather impressed at the ratio. I find that the majority of people actually attempt to pick up on a particular interest you may have listed(wow, they read the profile) and come off as intelligent and funny. Not bad at all.
Good Subject Lines:
“Comic Sans killed my mother”
“You hate the Eames Lounge chair”
Bad Subject Lines:
“hey”
“Ok now”
“no subject”
Points for the guy that said he disliked Comic Sans.
Points off for following it up with “If I see one more inappropriate use of that damned font (meaning outside a comic book. A retro comic book) I’m gonna lose it.” This clearly points to not knowing type OR retro comic books(I’ll even venture that NO comic book has used this font) OR Wikipedia, which will tell you that the font was released in 1994.
Hi, I’m a bitch. But a correct one.
But he was cute, so whatever.
Overall…
In under 24 hours(the n00b rush, I’m sure), I’ve been contacted by:
- a ton of people who write grammatically correct sentences(and employ commas with ease and elegance) .
- one with a Beowulf reference in his name.
- one that sent me funny Wikipedia articles.
- one who holds an opinion about the Eames chair(the opposite of mine).
- one who picked up the throwaway Plato reference in the “three adjectives” section.
- about five that were actually quite good looking.
All of which were within 20 miles of me. That is actually pretty amazing, if I were inclined to pursue anything at all.
Okay, that’s it for this one – I swear, they’ll probably get more interesting. I’m pretty sure there’s a Juggalo dating site out there somewhere. Ugh.
More updates soon.
OKCupid.com (my username is notadinosaur)
Filed under: online dating
