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rfmcdonaldXtra!s Jeremy Feist linked to an interview with the founder of lesbian dating app Dattch, Robyn Exton, wherein she talked about how the network risked being swamped by straight men joining under false pretenses.
I agree with Jeremy Feist that this sort of thing is rather unfair to the people who will actually use the site, who--I imagine--might want to meet people who actually exist, not people who create completely false identities for their own problematic purposes. The whole thing reminded me of Ann Friedman's article in The New Yorker, "Overwhelmed and Creeped Out", wherein she complained that effective dating apps and sites for women, created from the perspective of women who might want some control, are only beginning to appear.
Exton says that gay women tend to use Internet dating a lot more than heterosexual women because it’s harder to meet other gay women, but that the experience is never quite right. “It works in the sense that you can chat to other people and maybe go on the odd date but they were all faulted quite seriously in a number of different ways,” she says. “I was interested in programming personally and I’d done the dating stuff before, I’d looked at doing other dating apps and I thought this is it, this is the one.
“When we started it, there was the problem of helping women find other women they fancy or could go on a date with, but the biggest problem was the number of guys who create profiles on lesbian sites,” Exton explained. “They are full of fake profiles and no one’s taking the time to go in and make sure it is a genuine profile. A lot of the previous lesbian sites were just add-ons”.
Exton says that many of the current lesbian dating sites are an extension of sites originally created for gay men and that this doesn’t serve the intended community.
The idea of men making fake profiles to browse a lesbian site might sound spurious but Exton has been surprised at the rate and extent to which this happens. “Daily, we have about five guys registering for an invite and it’s unsubstantiated but the emails have a guy’s name on them. We’ve seen fake Facebook accounts set up to try and get invites. You’ll see they set up an account yesterday, have no friends but they like Dattch and something like ‘Lesbian and bi girlies of London’. It’s amazing. The fact that people will go to that extent to try and check out gay women or convert them or meet up with them.”
Dattch currently verifies profiles manually, so each person is checked out at least to make sure they are female. From here, profiles will be linked to Facebook to see if applicants are women and if their profiles are well established.
I agree with Jeremy Feist that this sort of thing is rather unfair to the people who will actually use the site, who--I imagine--might want to meet people who actually exist, not people who create completely false identities for their own problematic purposes. The whole thing reminded me of Ann Friedman's article in The New Yorker, "Overwhelmed and Creeped Out", wherein she complained that effective dating apps and sites for women, created from the perspective of women who might want some control, are only beginning to appear.
From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men. This might not seem like a big deal, until you consider one read on why Grindr has been so successful: the app has a “for us by us” appeal to gay men. But when it comes to heterosexual-dating technology, all-male co-founders represent the wants and needs of only half of their target audience. Sure, they can try to focus-group their way out of the problem, but if an app for “straight” people is to get anywhere close to Grindr’s level of success, women have to not just join out of curiosity. They have to actually use it.
Men are slightly overrepresented among dating-service users, according to a 2010 Duke University study, and when it comes to apps, men tend to be more willing to use location-based dating features. On either platform, they’re far more likely to use the services aggressively. A Northwestern University study found that men viewed more than three times as many profiles as women and were about forty per cent more likely than women to send a message or chat after viewing a profile. “The most desirable partners, especially the most desirable women, are likely to find the process of sifting through so many first-contact e-mails aversive, perhaps causing them to disengage from the process altogether,” the researchers write. They call this “the deluge problem.”
Both Web entrepreneurs and armchair sociologists will tell you that women are different. Despite our commitment to baseline feminist ideals, most of us don’t like to be relationship aggressors. We prefer to meet someone in person, not just browse pics of his pecs. We respond to emotional cues and pheromones and all sorts of subtle factors. But what if that isn’t entirely true? What if women are just as open to spontaneously meeting a man for a drink—and maybe more? After all, in a survey of a hundred thousand OkCupid users, over half the women said they’ve had casual sex. Women may initiate contact less frequently, but they are comfortable reaching out first if they see a profile that appeals to them. Maybe the real failure is that no one has built an app that women want to use.
[. . .]
So what do women want? If you look at the precious few dating sites and apps with female founders, a pattern emerges: women want authenticity, privacy, a more controlled environment, and a quick path to a safe, easy offline meeting. Coffee Meets Bagel, which is both an app and a Web site founded by three sisters, sends you a match and then sets a deadline by which you have to either “like” or “pass.” If you get a mutual “like,” you’re instantly connected to your match via text message (without the other person seeing your real phone number). You can choose to be shown only friends-of-friends through Coffee Meets Bagel by connecting the service to your Facebook account, or you can choose to keep it private and anonymous.
