In addition to TransGenderDate.com and OK Cupid (OKC), I also set up an account with Plenty of Fish (POF), which tends to make rather lofty claims about itself. Compared to OKC, the condos with community club house and swimming pool (maybe even a fitness room) of the online dating world, Plenty of Fish is "manufactured home" park. I see a few of the same people on both sites, but for the most part, my matches on POF seem a bit more like Walmart shoppers who regularly eat at McDonalds, whereas the OKC ladies are shopping at Whole Foods.
These are probably bullshit analogies, and as such, could use some work. Never mind them for now.
Let's talk about how badly POF fucks up when it comes to matching people. Specifically, their "new matching algorithm" emails, and their "Meet Me" feature.
In the case of the former, every so often POF sends me an email from as sender called "Customer Care" similar to the following:
Hi Prem,
We're trying out a new matching algorithm that lets guys know when a woman who's highly compatible joins the site. Yvette recently joined POF and we think you two might just be great together. Check out her profile and send her a message.
Markus
I've gotten five of these things by now and they all have a few things in common.
- No photo of the person. In the one instance with any photo at all, it was a plate of cookies
- Profile details sparsely filled out--sometimes with the "default" info only, but usually with "joke" answers
- Profile text is non-sensical, or promoting some iPad app.
- "Needs Test" and "Chemistry" (the two tests that POF administers--though they are both optional) were not done
Basically--all those profiles looked like fakes. In fact, one had a user name like: q1w2e3r4t5y6u7i8o9
If this is what POF considers to be "highly compatible," they are fucking idiots! It makes me wonder about all the other "matches" they suggest for me.
The second thing, Meet Me, demonstrates how slipshot POF is, and how willing they are to mislead people.
Meet Me is a quick rating system where you are presented with a series of photos for the type of user you're interested in dating, so for me this would be women. Above each photo are the words "Want to Meet Her?" with three buttons below, labeled: Yes, Maybe, and No. The photo takes up most of the screen, interestingly. But if you scroll down a little you can see the person's POF username, where they (claim to) live, and a link to their profile. But if you didn't think to look for this additional info, you might think that all you're rating are the photos. This make sense because the first time you do this, POF asks you to rate 50. There's no countdown, so once you reach 50 it just keeps going. I may have rated nearly 200 photos.
The cute thing that POF does is that it starts sending emails to the "Yes" people that claim that you want to meet them. This isn't strictly false in that, based on appearance alone, I did indeed say "Yes" to the question of meeting them. But I hadn't read most of the accompanying profiles, nor did I notice that POF was having me rate women far outside my then 10 miles away dating range limit.
I got my first couple messages on POF shortly thereafter--but they were vague enough that I hadn't immediately clued in on what had happened. The were both from people I recognized, as I had seen their pictures before. In fact, in those two instances I had even read their profiles. One gal, whom I might actually pursue for a meeting, complimented my on my stated spiritual goals and path. The other gal simply said that I looked better with my hair cut (as I had posted a photo taken a couple months before I started wearing it short). I had no clue that these two messages were in any way related to the "Meet Me" procedure I had recently gone through.
But a few days later I got a really nice email, with multiple paragraphs from a lovely woman who lives on Whidbey Island--which is kind of far from me (given the "quick" route involves a ferry ride, etc.) When I read her profile I realized she was someone I would have never contacted--mostly because she explicitly states that she's interested in guys that are stable and career-driven, i.e. who have decent jobs. That was clearly not me at the time she sent the message--and I have been very open about that in my profile. She recognized that, but said there was something about me that made her want to give me a chance--and that she really liked my unconventional outlook on life. To top it off, she included her phone number.
Fuck.
I felt really bad--because she was really lovely. She was very nice looking, she had a great job, a cool set of kids who still lived at home, and a fabulously life there on the island. Furthermore, she wrote well--both in her profile and in that message. The message alone was magnitudes better than the first two I received, which were both one liners with no greeting, or other niceties. This island girl had really exposed herself--in making a huge compromise in deference to a positive feeling she had about me, along with sharing her number with someone she couldn't know wouldn't turn into a stalker.
I wrote her back right away, trying to explain the situation--that some combination of my not understanding how the "Meet Me" results were going to be used, and POF's (apparently) deliberate effort to create more "Yes" answers by focusing on the photos, and placing location and profile link info out of view, further down the page, had communicated a false positive match to her. First of all, she lived too far away. And second, had I read her profile, I would have respected her preferences that a guy have a certain level of "financial security" if he wants to meet her. Aside from those two things, she would have been a contender. Along with my profuse apology for wasting her time, I sent her my mobile number so we would both be in the same position--given how I feel she mistakenly over-exposed herself.
I never heard from her again.
I added some lines to my profile warning people that might visit based on POF emails claiming that I "wanted to meet" them, explaining that if we didn't seem likely match candidates--like they explicitly mentioned wanting a man who "loves the Lord," and I didn't fit that bill, at all--this was probably why. I made a mistake in that survey, with some help from POF (in my cynical opinion, at any rate). I left that message up for about five days, during which I've gotten no messages from any new people. I felt safe to remove it yesterday.
But since doing the "Meet Me" thing, I've gotten a new email each day from POF telling me that so-and-so "wants to meet" me. From my experience thus far, I have to wonder whether these ladies were in the same boat--just rating guys on their appearance? There is some evidence for this. Out of the eight women that POF has notified me about thus far, all but one has an explicit "Must not do drugs" stipulation at the bottom of their profile. This seems weird because POF (unlike OKC) has a specific drug-related question on its edit profile page, "Do you do drugs?" with answers "No," "Socially," and "Often (>3 times a week)." I selected "Socially" and I have yet to find ANY woman with an answer to that question other than "No." Why would POF even suggest profiles like mine to women who specifically state "Must not do drugs"?? (Not all my POF profile matches have that stipulation, by the way--it just so happens that seven out of eight of the "Wants to meet you" people do, and the one who doesn't happens to be the least interesting--for other reasons. Bizarre!)
By the way, I answered "Socially" to the drug question because I consider certain drugs to be sacraments--and it's very likely that I'm going to run into cannabis at some point in the future, at the very least, even though I haven't gotten high since January of 2013 (as of the time I write this--early November the same year). I may yet write some of these women and discover that they wouldn't have a problem with the manner in which I'm "involved" with "drugs." We shall see.
When I removed the blurb from my profile about screwing up the "Meet Me" evaluations (by not including profiles while rating whether I wanted to meet people), I replaced it with a mention of the "drug" issue--to give people a heads up about it. That may be a mistake, so who knows how long I'll leave that in my profile. I also need to be careful about how much I dump on POF, because some people may not see the problems I see, and by my criticizing the site, some might experience some transference and feel like I'm criticizing them for using it.
There's just a lot of murky shit going on with Plenty of Fish, that seems to be lacking on OK Cupid. But in terms of successful matches, or even dating--I cannot really say whether one site is better than another as I have gone on zero dates thus far. What I can say is that more and more I feel more comfortable relying on OK Cupid for evidence-based matching. But this assumes that their testing actually has some relationship to successful outcomes. It may well be that it's all a crap shoot, where success or failure ultimately boils down to interpersonal chemistry. If this is the case, POF might well be the superior site, even if it sort of "tricks" people into meeting.
Interesting times, in any case.
