We are continuing our investigative journalism report into online dating. Today, we are going over some of the dating sites used and our respective experiences.
Welcome to part 2 of our 6 month investigative report into whether or not online dating even works at all. Previously, in part 1, I discussed the profile used as well as the framing of this whole investigative report. Is it lengthy? Sure. Still, it was important to establish the lengths I went to ensure that the results are as legitimate as we could possibly get with the resources afforded to me.
The Start
My investigation opened out investigation in January of 2025. One thing I didn’t take into account right away is the amount of time and effort needed to sign up with these services. Filling out profiles almost became a full time job. It’s one thing to put in the absolute basics, but making sure it was thoughtful and a well put together profile was entirely a different matter. Nevertheless, I powered through all that writing because, as any good English major can attest to, buzz sawing your way through writing assignments is just second nature. Luckily, that partially applied here as I spent weeks just filling out profiles. So, which service to star with? The answer? Bumble.
Bumble
This was recommended to me by a co-worker at my day job. The premise is actually quite interesting. Men do not make the first move. Instead, it’s women that have to initiate first contact. What’s more, signing up is free even if it requires a Facebook account to login.
In filling out the details, it was quite apparent with the bullet points and limited text boxes that it was designed to be viewed and judgment be made within all of a minute or so. Pictures go up and details are filled out.
After all the information is put up, the site does allow me to swipe through different profiles of women. I’m allowed to swipe left if I don’t like what is presented and swipe right if I like what I see. There’s also the super swipe as well.
Things, well, don’t go quite as planned. After about 5 or 6 profiles, the recommendations start getting, well, strange. People being recommended to me not only put in their profile that they are heavy pot users, but actively brag about it in their short descriptions as well. No problem, swipe left and move on, right? Well, then came the users who smoke regularly. Obviously, that’s not going to work because my eyes completely dry out in the presence of cigarette smoke. Swipe left so the algorithm will know who not to recommend.
After that, the site said I’m good for now and will recommend more people later. The next few days, it’s only coming up with one or two profiles. It became pretty apparent that the algorithm was really struggling to figure out what the heck to do with me. The reason I suspect this is is because it started recommending people that live thousands of kilometres away, clear across the country. This along with people in cities all the way across the province and saying that these people are practically a quick drive away. Yeah, I know my own geography well enough to know that it’s asking if I’m interested in any kind of long distance relationship.
Over a week into the experiment, I did get a notification suggesting that someone liked my profile. It’s a big difference between someone wanting to contact me and liking the profile. After all, I can’t initiate contact here. It’s the women that initiate that contact.
The thing is, the site even obscures who liked the profile. In order to view who liked your profile, you have to upgrade to the premium service. How much does it cost? Well, be prepared for the sticker shock:
Just to put this into perspective, the 6 month plan is triple the amount I pay for online hosting. An online hosting company that provides technical support, 24 hour support service, is able to provide a ticket system for less urgent inquiries, and it is happy to point me into the right direction for whenever I want to expand my website in different areas. What’s more, it is providing automated updating to make my life easier.
This compared to this web service charging me more just to view who liked my profile – not someone who is wanting to contact me, but someone who happened to swipe right on my profile and I can’t contact because of the way the website is set up. How in the world is this a good justification for charging this much is completely beyond me. I get that services have to make money, but come on.
At any rate, as time went on, it became quite clear absolutely no one had any interest in contacting me. In fact, on most days, I log in and this is the screenshot I get.
That is using default filtering. That is within a decade of my age and within 80KM of my location. Nothing else.
As the months progressed, it was more of the same. This includes many days where the site had no one to recommend to me, a few days where a single person shows up, and the occasional recommendation that makes absolutely no sense to me (namely a really far out location). The site was pretty much dead from my perspective and no one ever contacted me – just that singular like that I needed to spend hundreds of dollars to see.
OKCupid
This is one I tried about a decade ago. While the system, at the time, happily found some matches for me, they all seemed like dead accounts. Messaging people never worked and I never got a response.
So, fast forward these years later, we tried again. Well, suffice to say, the site is even more broken than previously. We tried creating a profile and the site failed to allow me to upload a photo. I tried JPG, PNG, scaling down, converting in GIMP, converting in MS Paint, and more. No dice.
What’s worse is that without being even able to upload a picture, the site wouldn’t let me continue even making my profile, let alone using the sites features. So, with a broken site altogether, we moved on.
Facebook Dating
Facebook dating requires the app. The dating app simply isn’t available on desktop despite it being free. Honestly, that is surprising, but we go ahead and download and install the app anyway.
Once we log in with Facebook, we are able to find the tab no problem. Probably the biggest surprise is the fact that it doesn’t require facial recognition to use. It’s surprising because, as you’ll see soon, many apps do require facial recognition for verification. Given the kind of reputation for Facebook collecting insane amounts of information about you, you would think it would be heavy into collecting facial recognition information as well. Pleasantly surprising, but I also happen to know that it is tied to a regular Facebook account, thus, they probably have all the information they want to pull out of you anyway.
At any rate, we get in and set up a profile. While you can set up a profile with one picture, the app pushes you to use three pictures. After that, we put in general information. We then start looking at profiles and they all end up being nearly double my age or located in random parts of the country not even close to where I’m at. Not the start I was expecting.
Luckily, we get a prompt suggesting that we set the filters to better find people. So, we set some basic filters. We say we want someone who doesn’t smoke and isn’t a raging alcoholic (I was even setting it to allow occasional drinking. According to the app, non-drinkers simply don’t exist). After that, I started sifting through the different profiles.
After a few days, the deck was basically exhausted. Numerous likes were sent out, messages were delivered, but only got one contact after all of my efforts. How did I know the deck was exhausted? People in other provinces were getting recommended with no one even close to being local.
As time went on, I started defaulting to, well, default filtering. To be fair, there was a lot of people on there. A lot of them in a different province to my own, but a lot of people nevertheless. It felt like I was being picky with people, to be sure, but I doubt others are willing to do long distance relationships either. There were a lot of profiles of women in wild parties openly showcasing them drinking beer. There were some profiles with pictures that contain bizarre meme’s and random wallpaper pictures. A few contain profile pictures of the wings of planes. Numerous profiles were practically blank. Some were anti-vaxxers which gets a “heck no” for me. I know a number of profiles where women were describing themselves as “thicc” or “chunky” (they weren’t morbidly obese, so I was fine with those. I do, after all, have a low bar for women in general).
In all, Facebook dating was probably technically one of the more “successful” ones… if you can call any of them “successful”. I got a grand total of four people willing to contact me in the 6 months I was on there. While that sounds great, they, one by one, ghosted me after a few seemingly fine messages. Unless you consider talking about liking to decorate Christmas trees during the holidays or how the weather was warming up and flowers are starting to bloom as Spring was upon us as terrible conversation topics, I really don’t get why I was personally ghosted by all of them because we ended up talking about stuff like that.
What was funny was the fact that on the last few days of the experiment, Facebook decided that my location didn’t match my phone location. I set it to the town I resided in, didn’t use a VPN for that, and never travelled. Why it started freaking out about that, well, I have no clue. Since no one was willing to talk to me at that point, it was probably a sign that the experiment on that site was over.
General Thoughts
I have to say, when I started this project, I didn’t have insane business practices and broken web services as the things I would be looking for. Yet, as I started experimenting and working with these different services, it became clear that this is also an area I should cover along the way as well. After all, the website and app experience too was part of determining if these sites work or not. A broken website, for instance, definitely counts as part of what it’s really like to use these sites.
Coming Up
We are only just scratching the surface. Our investigation goes far beyond just three services after all. The world of online dating is a pretty big one. So, we are going to be talking about other services we tried during this experiment. As you can tell already, while I had low hopes from the beginning, I didn’t expect things to be as bad as they really were.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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