We continue our series documenting our 6 month investigation into whether or not online dating does work. Three more services are in the hot seat.
Welcome to part 3 of our 6 month investigative journalism project as we test to see if online dating even works at all. Previously, in part 1, I discussed the framing and the general profile used. In part 2, I discussed my general experience with three online dating services. Those, of course, being Bumble, OKCupid, and Facebook dating. By many counts, it wasn’t the greatest experience in the world, but my investigation wasn’t limited to those three services. Today, I am going to go over what I encountered on eHarmony, Tinder, and Hinge. So, without further ado, let’s get into this!
eHarmony
One of the more well known theories with dating websites is that you need to sign up with a premium service. In other words, you need to pay money to get good results. So, in a bid to make sure we get some representation of a premium service, we decided to try a well known service called eHarmony.
eHarmony, of course, has done considerable advertising here in Canada in the last few years, so it does have the public recognition to a degree. Personally, there is a long running theme for services where the amount of advertising is inversely correlated to the quality of service. It’s not a perfect rule by any means, but it can be an indicator. Still, I wasn’t entirely confident this site was going to be any better than any other site out there.
This is another site I tried before many years ago. This is the site that ended up being the most “successful” (and I use the term very liberally here). I ended up getting a grand total of one person willing to meet me. It lasted all of one date and that was the end of it. Was it anything I did wrong? Not really. In that instance, it was the most bizarre response I have ever heard. She told me that I wasn’t a priest and, therefore, it wasn’t going to work out. Um, what? Err… OK… I guess?
Of course, that was then, this is now.
One of the big selling features is that you can get a free trial with the site. Great! So, we go to sign up and it asks a fairly long series of questions. Like the site said, it takes about 15 minutes which is a totally fair assessment for how long the questionnaire it ultimately was.
When I got to the end, I could fill out some details about myself and upload a picture of course. Then, it immediately booted me to payment plans. After clicking around, there was no free trial to be found. My guess was that filling out the questionnaire was the free trial, not that you could click around and get an idea of what the site is like first. But hey, they got an account, so that’s something for them at least.
There are, of course, payment plans, though after some clicking around, I found out that you could actually just pay by the month and cancel at any time. Since the site offers no refunds, it didn’t really make any sense to purchase a 6 month membership all in one shot (which is the minimum time window, you can go for 12 months and 24 months as well). Still, I double-checked to make sure I was reading this right and, yes, you can cancel at any time. So, I figured, whatever month you got billed would be the last bill you get. We verified this with additional pages in their FAQ. So, whats the catch? You get charged an additional 3 dollars per month whereas the bulk purchase has no additional charge. I was offered $29.06 for the first month and $54.77 for the remaining 5 months. So, I kissed those $29 (at minimum) goodbye and signed up. Hey, at least I could cancel at any time, right? (insert foreshadowing effects here)
The first profile recommended to me was from 4 provinces away. In browsing the profile, I knew we didn’t have a whole lot in common. In browsing different profiles, well, the choices got worse. People who were being recommended resided on the other side of the country. In fact, I had to scroll through numerous people in other provinces just to find a handful of people that were even in the same province at all.
Still, while I was waiting for more matches to be found, I did get some fancy personality charts to check out. It was kind of interesting to see my personality in that circular bar chart format, so I did get some interactive pretty data to look at… which was nice… even if personality tests are generally a dime a dozen online as it is.
As time went on, I grew more familiar with how eHarmony worked. One notable thing is how e-mail notifications work. Whenever you view a profile, the user behind that profile gets an e-mail notification. In that notification, they get a blurred out version of that users main profile image and a note saying that they viewed your profile, maybe you should view their profile.
The thing about these notifications is that you might view that persons profile and look at what they put up as describing themselves personally. You might see something that make you realize maybe it wouldn’t work out for you. So, for instance, let’s say you are someone out there who wants kids of your own. You view the other persons profile and you might learn that the person in question has three kids and has no interest in having any more kids. That might be a bridge too far for you, so you go back to browsing. Well, regardless of your reason to not go any further, that other person still gets that notification anyway asking that person if you want to view that person’s profile and get connected anyway.
Regardless, there wasn’t anyone even close to my geographical area. I’m not saying that there wasn’t someone I thought looked great. I’m saying there was literally no one at all in my geographical location. This, of course, did cause me to think about online dating in general and population densities. If you are located somewhere that is a major geographical location with a high population, chances are, you are finding more people in that location. Here’s the problem with that: chances are, there are clubs and places to hang out in the larger population centres. So, there is opportunity to meet people in the physical environment. If, however, you are in even a medium population centre, there might not be clubs to hang out in or places to meet new people. As a result, you might be more inclined to check out such a site only to find out that there isn’t the population necessary to find people in the first place. So, in a way, it’s a geography catch-22. If you are in a location with lots of people, maybe there isn’t a need for online dating in the first place. If you are in a smaller location, chances are, there aren’t as many people you could potentially meet in the first place, therefore going on to these sites might seem like a great idea until you realize no one else is there.
Regardless, since I was seemingly going to be wasting my money on a site where there is no one to date, I might as well make the most of it and at least talk to people in similar fields as me or people who have similar interests. Maybe I can meet a friend over the internet? I don’t know. Either way, I sent out a number of messages – well over a dozen in the first few weeks, but got nothing in return. In this case, I don’t blame anyone for not responding. They are probably of the same mindset as me where the idea of a long distance relationship is very off putting. So, why bother responding to someone when your goal is to meet someone to create a long term relationship?
Generally speaking, yes, eHarmony might have a bazillion metrics to match you up with someone. In fact, they boast about this in their non-stop television advertising. The problem is, if there is no one even remotely close to your physical location, those metrics really don’t matter a whole lot in the end. That’s generally what I found here where it was very obvious that the site was struggling hard to find anyone even close to where I live. If anything, it felt like the service was begging me to date someone thousands of kilometres away because that was the only people who were on the site in the first place. If you live in Ontario, it might be a viable option. Otherwise, you are, like me, probably out of luck. Alberta also has a few people on the site, but not as many.
Now, I will give credit where credit is due. When I got half off the first month, I actually thought it was because I was going part way through the month and they would charge me at the beginning of each calendar month moving forward. That wasn’t the case for me. Instead, I got billed on the 20th of the next month because I started on the 20th of the previous month. So, that is entirely fair in terms of when they bill.
Another positive that I will give is that they sound like they are good at policing fake profiles. I had one profile get recommended to me. Before I had a chance to like the profile, that person was liking my profile. So, as I started going through the profile, a message popped up saying that the profile was removed because it was scamming users. So, good on the site for acting on reported suspicious activity.
While all that is well and good, it became quickly apparent that there simply wasn’t anyone on there that was even remotely close to my physical location. Only one woman ever popped up in my recommendations that was even in the general vicinity of where I was located. So, I messages her to give her the heads up that I don’t know how many men in my city are on the site, but she was literally the only woman I saw on the entire site in my city. Naturally, I got no response at all. I’m guessing that being nice is frowned upon these days for some people.
Towards the end of the month I planned on stopping, one other person from the other side of the province contacted me. The conversation was going seemingly well, talking about the economics of the world we live in these days. I knew my planned exit was happening soon, so I told her, as a heads up, that I’m happy to continue the conversation, but my time on the site was becoming limited (or so I thought). I had about 10 days left, but I can be contacted through this site, via e-mail, or through my Mastodon account. We happily conversed over e-mail for a while. Meanwhile, back on the site, with no one left to talk to, I cancelled the subscription after nearly two months. What’s the point paying $50 per month to a site that doesn’t really deliver on its promises? I’d stay longer in that dating desert, but the price tag was, well, excessive.
In order to cancel, you had to do so “in writing”. Whether that is through snail mail (of all things) or e-mail. Naturally, I opted for the e-mail option. They requested the e-mail associated with the account as well as a password to verify that it was me. I sent that off on the 15th of March. I received an automated response from their support e-mail saying that it may take up to 24 hours to respond (good thing I did this 5 days in advance of the subscription auto-renewing). Hours after I sent the e-mail notification, my only contact suddenly said that it was great talking to me, she didn’t deserve someone as nice as me, but said in her e-mail that this was goodbye. It was… quite coincidental that within hours of me sending that cancellation that she suddenly politely decided to no longer be in contact with me.
A month after I had “cancelled”, I got charged again. As it turns out, yes, you can cancel at any time, but you are stuck with eHarmony for the duration of the subscription (in my case, 6 months). So, if you cancel three months into your subscription, you will get charged the remaining three months anyway. I’ve looked into the settings and once you “cancel” your subscription, you have no additional options to get a refund for the remaining unused months. So, if you subscribe for 6 months, you’re stuck paying for all 6 months no matter what.
That was when I figured out how they rope people in for cash. When they say that you can ‘cancel’ at any time, they mean cancel auto-renewal after the duration of those six months. It’s extremely deceptive because a normal person would look at ‘cancel any time’ and assume that you won’t be charged after cancelling. In my personal opinion, it’s basically deceptive marketing practices.
So, after the site, in my personal opinion, scammed me out of roughly $300, I got angry and vowed never to use their service ever again. Almost no one to meet on the site and being misleading on what they mean by ‘cancel any time’ are both issues that strike a sour note for me. Based on my personal experience, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Tinder
This is a site that was one of a couple of recommendations I got. Naturally, since I want to give this experiment the best chance to succeed, I added this to the list of sites to try. Going into this one, I knew this site had a reputation of being a hookup site. Their marketing says otherwise and this was about finding out exactly what it’s like to use online dating services. So, I plugged my nose and started the signing up process.
This also happens to be one of those sites that requires a smartphone for two factor authentication. So, I ended up buying a cell phone because I was out of sites that I could use that didn’t require it (this is also a requirement for Facebook dating).
The process for signing up ended up being a much more complex process. I had to have the site send me a text message to verify who I was. OK, not too big of a problem so far. Unfortunately, the process got a bit more technical from there. First of all, it required a computer with a webcam for what appears to be their facial recognition software. I’m assuming it is there to keep minors out, but who knows what that photo is used for outside of that.
Well, the webcam system that is in place is a bit of a buggy mess. I scrolled through the options (I use various pieces of software to record YouTube video’s) and picked the webcam. So, once I gave the site the permission to use it, it kicked out an error message saying that it failed to encrypt. OK, no worries, I tried again. Same error messages. I noticed the web cam wasn’t turning on, so I opened one of the pieces of software that would activate the webcam. Nope, no dice. Either it failed to encrypt or it complained that the software was already in use. After some Googling around, I wasn’t necessarily able to find anything that cleared up what the problem was.
I was, of course, getting frustrated, but I decided to also tick the box for the site to remember my selection. I didn’t think that was necessary since it was a one time thing, but figured it was worth a shot. As it turns out, that was the problem. I’m thinking that the site uses multiple pages (possibly sites) for this process. If you don’t allow it to permanently remember, then it’s web software fails to launch. Well, at least I got that far.
The website then required I have my face visible for a shot. It takes a picture, then asks me for a second picture. This time, it brings up an oval frame, requiring me to have my face fill the whole frame. After getting surprisingly up close and personal with my own webcam, it finally detects my face and asks me to hold still for 2 seconds. It was awkward because the messages were on the screen and I needed to look at the camera at the same time. A little tricky to do both at the same time, I can tell you that much.
After all of that, I was finally able to fill out a profile. The user interface wasn’t exactly intuitive, but I did eventually figure out that I could click on a small up arrow to view details about other people. Once I figured that out, I was also able to fill out my own profile and add pictures. As it turns out, the site requires two pictures of me instead of one. Ah well, up goes two pictures of me.
From there, I filled out everything else, putting in various details about myself and just being open and honest.
After that, I started doing the endless swiping left and right through what the site calls the “deck”. So, why do this instead of contacting people? Simply put, you have to like someone else. If they like you back, then you can message that person. Otherwise, there is no way to talk to people on this site.
I did run into some problems from time to time. Sometimes, the deck would freeze and I am unable to click on, well, anything. Sometimes, refreshing the page helps, but other times, I just have to close out of the site and come back the next day to continue.
At first, I was actually optimistic about the site. There were a number of women in my area and a few matches just outside of town. A lot of the profiles say they were active recently on top of it all.
Well, after liking dozens upon dozens of profiles, the profiles that started cropping up were profiles I had already either liked or didn’t like. Either way, after a few days of trying the site out, I was seeing more and more profiles being repeated. Even worse, the match column remained empty. This raised two possibilities here. Either I was browsing through a bunch of dead/fake profiles or women find men who are building a small business, chasing their dreams, reads a lot, highly educated, does investing on the side, and supports good causes to be horrible monsters to run far far away from. I mean, hey, I’m not an expert on what women consider red flags, how am I supposed to know these things? Honestly, though, it’s very likely the former and not the latter.
At any rate, a thought did pop up in my head while swiping left and right. If I like a profile, get shown the same profile, and like that profile a second time, does that mean that person gets two notifications? Am I somehow unknowingly spamming these accounts? The problem is, you have to either like or not like a profile to move on. There is no option to skip a profile you probably already liked or disliked. To be on the safe side, I started using the filter feature to try and get a few more profiles out of the system, but even that started repeating the same profiles after a while.
At any rate, after a while, it became clear I wasn’t even going to attract a single like. While I was going to give this more than a month, about a month into the experiment with the site, I suddenly got logged out. When I logged back in, it suddenly asked for my facial recognition scan again. Confused, I tried to go through the process again. On the first day, the site hanged on uploading my facial scans. On the second day, the uploading worked and it started asking me to fill out my profile again using the same e-mail.
What had been made clear was that Tinder deleted my account without warning, reason, or explanation. After seeing all the profile fields blank again, I closed the window and decided to end the experiment with that site. Not only did I never get any interactivity with others, despite giving out lots of likes and messages, but it also randomly deleted my account. It became clear that it was not worth my time or effort.
Hinge
This is an app that I hadn’t heard of until I was researching and asking around. I was told that unlike some of the other apps and online sites out there, people on this app were serious about finding a relationship. Unlike the other services I have used, this is exclusive to cell phones. There is a website talking about the app, but it’s an app only service otherwise.
Much like Tinder, this app requires facial recognition in order to use it. After submitting to that, the app requires you to fill out a lot of details in order to use the services. Up to this point, this one requires the most photo’s – specifically, requiring a whopping 6 photo’s. So, up they went. After filling out a bunch of information and answering a pretty sizable list of questions (to be fair, a number of which are actually optional), the app then allowed me to like people’s profiles.
This app also happens to be the most restrictive. You can only give out 4 to 6 likes per day which compels you to conserve your likes unless you fork over the $30 per month they demand for the services. Nevertheless, I was able to gradually use the app over time.
The ironic thing about the site asking for so much is that I ended up seeing a lot of profiles that had scant information about who I was talking to. Even worse is the fact that unless I give the subscription money, then I can’t even filter the kinds of people I’d be interested in dating. Want someone who doesn’t smoke? Sorry, that’s a premium service. Don’t like getting matched with people on the other side of the country? Premium subscribers only. Premium, premium, premium.
Still, I was able to get minimal functionality on the site and I was able to send out likes all over the place. In return, I got a grand total of one like from a woman who would probably break me in two if I upset her even a little bit. Apparently, the algorithm matched someone like me who is into deep intellectual pursuits with someone who is probably lifting at least twice or three times as much as my body weight. Just slightly intimidating to say the least.
Eventually, I got to the end of the recommendation deck and only occasionally got a few new profiles popping up. At that point, I was happy to hand out plenty of likes everywhere. Some of the recommendations got repeated. In one instance, I had an antivaxxer get recommended 3 times to me (yes, the same person). I believe in science and reality, so I knew it wasn’t going to work out. Each time I said “no”, I got more and more annoyed. Luckily, after their “algorithm” saw that I rejected that profile a third time, it finally stopped wasting my time with that person.
As time progressed, the app would occasionally suggest someone new, but it was usually, at most, 3 accounts before telling me that you’re all caught up. At least the app was easy to check up on so it can remind me that I was going to be alone forever.
I did try to contact that person that liked my profile, but got no response. Eventually, I got one other person to talk to me, but she ghosted me pretty quickly after the conversation got started.
Eventually, the site refused to let me have any free likes at all, which meant it was all but impossible for me to meet people. Since almost no one was willing to talk to me towards the end anyway, it was time to just move on to the next dating site that probably will work about as well as all the other ones.
Coming Up
No, I didn’t stop at 6 sites/apps. When I said this was a big journalistic investigation, I meant it. In the next part, I talk about my experience on even more services that I used. Don’t worry, there is plenty more drama coming up in the next part. Stay tuned for more!
