So the summary is that a longer message has a higher chance for a response, but it's more efficient to just spew out a lot of shorter messages and spam everyone.
Long, rambling messages inspire feelings of pity and guilt. The longer the message, the more likely the recipient will feel obligated to send a polite response. Also, when a woman sends a polite negative response to a man, he's likely to respond with, "Thanks for responding, good luck in your search!" That shouldn't count as "starting a conversation," but according to this blog post it does.
Overcommitting to any one person based upon an OkCupid profile without even having messaged them seems like a fallacy too. It's probably best to narrow down a reasonably sized bucket of people to message, without too many hopes or priorities about which one you end up with.
Depending on the opportunity cost of your time, yes.
Short introductory messages are, however, useful for screening out people. After that you can go long. Even with a narrowed down pool, you're wide enough that being able to message the entire pool rather than a subset should be the more effective option.
It is assumed that longer messages take longer to compose. But that's only true if you're starting from scratch every time. You should instead write one good generic message and send it out to many people, only inserting one sentence to reflect on something specific to the particular profile.
The reaction you'll get is, "He's really slick at promoting himself." Most women will speak this sentence with a curled lip and a tone of disdain, but if you're looking for women who like a guy with an elevator pitch, this just might work.
Yes, this was my first thought. If I was seriously stressed for time, then I'd agree with idea of optimizing for overall percentages. But if you really want to optimize the chances that a specific person will reply to you, then it seems as if longer is better. Still, I'd like to compare a short, witty, well-crafted, personally tailored message to a longer, more-generic one. (Not that that could be measured statistically...)
On that note, it'd be interesting to somehow mix this data in with (self reported) happiness of people who end up together. Not sure how... maybe happiness (1 - 10) vs length of original message.
That may be true, but many people like to start off a little slower. If you write a lengthy essay about yourself, the other person might feel like it's too much too soon and they may feel pressured to reveal more about themselves than they're comfortable doing on first contact. It's got nothing to do with their reading ability.
It's true that "many people" may indeed like to start off slower but those data show clearly that for male initiated communication longer messages have increased probability of reply. The recommendation for short messages is intended to maximize replies per unit time not the reply of any given message.
I don't think there is a problem with either approach. Each strategy probably appeals to a different type of recipient. So the chosen strategy can be thought to partition the potential recipients into the different types. (If you send 'A' a long message and A replies A is of the type who likes long messages. 'A' very well might ignore all short messages. B might have the exact opposite preferences of A.)
At this level of abstraction there's not a wrong answer to the question. By that I mean that the details and content of a message whether long or short are probably more important than the length for any given case. But if you're someone who prefers to act in an open, earnest manner it's probably best to go with that and partition out people who are mistrustful, cynical or otherwise turned-off by open, earnest action and communication styles. An analogous statement holds for those who prefer to act more closeted, subtle and aloof.
In everything in life, a little seduction goes a long way. You start slow, and work your way into the meaningful interactions.
The principle applies in everything from scientific talks to marketing. You've gotta have a brief hook -- only after you've earned the privilege of your target's interest can you ease into deeper subjects.
It's probably heresy here, but a lot of people still consider email a terrible way to get to know someone and online means in general to be extremely limited. An online dating site should be like Google: give me a bunch of options, and I'll make a quick low-bandwidth decision whether to invest in a face-to-face encounter. Engaging in an email conversation with someone isn't going to result in a better decision than making a snap judgment based on their picture and profile. I think it's more likely to result in a worse decision, actually. When I meet a potential date online, I just want to get face-to-face over drinks (coffee or alcohol) as quickly as possible so I can decide whether to have a real date with her.
For me, the only role of the initial contact is to say, "I would like to meet you. Would you like to meet me?" Of course, you also have to communicate that you're human and that you've actually read her profile, and you have to avoid communicating any desperation, narcissism, or other creepiness. So it's good to keep it short and make a little bit of conversation about something in her profile just to prove you read it.
Email is a good way to get to know someone on a technical level where you're kicking around programming problems or mathematical theorems. That's probably one reason why international open source collaboration works so well - people are (1) focused on the technical and (2) often share a common internationalized hacker/geek culture
On the other hand, to get to know someone in a romantic/sexual chemistry way, email is atrocious unless the people involved already share a lot of cultural reference points.
It's a lot like sending out a resume - you're not trying to pack everything about yourself into the written text, you're just trying to be interesting enough to get a phone call. With the phone call, you're trying to be interesting enough to get the low-risk face to face meeting. And so on...
If someone writing to me can't be bothered to say something interesting in the first 100 words I'm fairly certain he won't get to anything interesting in the first 1000. You can be concise and intelligent.
I think you're interpreting the situation incorrectly. People probably aren't rejecting to reading a lot of text. They're probably using message length as a signal - people who share too much information with strangers put people off. It implies desperation at worst, and at best, an imbalance of interest.
If anything, the opposite of true. Long messages --> higher reply rate. Its the reply rate per message that is improved with shorter messages.
Edit: Of course this doesn't factor in the guilt mentioned by someone else, but with all these other variables I don't think this data is very useful as is.
to each his own, but what okcupid might be aiming at is something similar to comments-->leading to blog posts (if I strike a chord with your concise comment at HN, I would be more inclined to check your profile and follow links to say your blog etc and read more.. similarly for dating sites). this is like the trailer->movie effect which is an effect of short attention span and saves time.
Does that page commit the fallacy of "making a lot out of what we can measure, because we can measure it" or what?
How about whether the message says something interesting? Something funny? Something that shows that you actually read the profile you're responding to?
You could call these things "subjective", but that would be fruitless and asinine.
#1) Make sure the recipient is not a fake
#2) Leave as much to the imagination as possible (actually that is probably why shorter messages work better)
Am I reading the graph wrong or is the author confused? To me, the first graph seems to say that the longer the message, the more likely you get a response.
But the text of the article says that the graph indicates that shorter messages are better.
> The graph clearly shows that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to type a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. conversations generated, shorter is actually better.
This assumes that message length is an important factor ... which I bet it isn't (excluding ultra-short and ultra-long messages). How about you correlate reply with more relevant things like canned message/attractive photo/cool profile/etc. -- or at least separate the length of reply vs response based on attractiveness or something.
You can get away with short messages as long as you show a genuine interest and not put out a canned message. And make some effort with a nice pic/interesting profile. This is the strategy that I use and it works out pretty well ...
This advice is all wrong. The real key to success is to show a photo of yourself in front of your uber-expensive sports car, which is parked in front of your grand mansion, and somehow mention your net worth is more than seven, preferably eight figures. The rest is merely the inevitable.
I just want to add, if you write less words, every word counts more. So you must be more careful, too, if you write shorter messages. I wonder how the stats would look, if you take this in consideration, too.
I find OKCupid to be a very interesting business. The guys who run it are also definitely hackers; they've written about the science behind their matching algorithms, their in-house web framework (which is Open Source, though I'd never touch the stuff, as it is a C++ web app framework, which is just weird and masochistic), and quite a bit about their user data (as in this post). It's very often interesting. At least one of them used to comment here at HN occasionally, but I don't recall his nick so I don't know if he's still a regular. Nonetheless, as a community, I think this is definitely relevant to our interests.
On that note, everyone here should read the Frequently Asked-For Answers About Questions (http://okcupid.com/faaaq). I had to re-implement the algorithm, and along the way decided it's not nearly as BS'y math as you would assume for a generic dating site.
I thought this article was about a web app provider discussing their research into user behavior, and using that research as a marketing tool to help their users use the app better.
The fact that it's about picking up hotties is almost beside the point.
