stupid match OLD trix

[nospam99]

Yes another 'consumer report' about OLD. Folks familiar with my OLD adventures can ignore. Also TL/DR - details of a particular feature on an OLD site.

So, in spite of OLD having become a long-term failure, I'm continuing to 'hang in there' and use OLD as a now secondary 'component' in my 'search' for a relationship.

I think match.com is the best of the OLD sites for where I live. One of their 'features' is a list of what they now call 'recommendations' (used to be called 'matches') that is updated daily. I do go through that list every day 'just in case' the 'needle in the haystack' should appear.

The list of recommendations is presented with a subset of the information from the people's (women for me) profiles. The options are Skip, Super Like, and Like. I don't use Super Like and Like because I think they are bullsheet choices. I either Skip or view the full profile to make a better assessment of the woman as a possible match and then send a Message if I think the match has potential. The most important reason to view her full profile is to find out if I might be what SHE's looking for.

The first things I check in the 'recommendations' are location and primary photo. MOST are way too far away for me to date her. Only by viewing her full profile can I learn if I am too far away for her to be willing to date me. Even if her location is a fail but she's 'cute' in her primary photo, I'll look at her other photos - have to keep up the certification on my 'guy card'. Sometimes I'm rewarded with a LBD, sundress, or bikini picture - have to keep up my 'pig' certification, too. Then I either move on to the next check or SKIP!

Next, do I recognize her? Match will send me recommendations for women I've already sent messages to. That is almost always a SKIP.

Next check her activity. Match uses a little icon to indicate if the person has been on the site. But the indicator only covers the last three days. If, like MOST of the recommendations, she hasn't been 'on' in those three days, SKIP.

Next check her age. Unless she's 'old enough' that there's a chance she'd be interested in dating me, SKIP. It's very rare that she's not 'young enough' that I'd be interested in dating her.

Next check her 'search percentage'. This is some number calculated by Match. They don't reveal the algorithm. I have often been frustrated to view the full profiles of percentages as high as 95% only to find that I fail BOTH HER age search range AND her height search range. 95%? bullsheet! If the percentage is lower than 80 or in the low 80s without some other advantage (like she's my age, hot, and lives 10 minutes away), SKIP.

Next check her height. If she's taller than I am, a 'yellow flag' goes up. There'd have to be a lot of other good reasons to decide to read her full profile. Otherwise, SKIP.

Next read her essay. Many of these women haven't written one or it's a stupid one-liner. In either case, I almost always SKIP.

If she's gotten 'this far', I'll continue by reading her full profile.

The annoying thing is Match COULD do a better job filtering the list. Stuff like 'too far away', 'not actively using the site', 'nospam has already contacted her', and 'she says she wouldn't date a man as old or as short or living as far away as nospam' can be automated and save me (and any other idiot customer who actually checks their recommendations) a waste of their time.

Edited January 24, 2020 by a LoveShack.org Moderator

[CAPSLOCK CROOK]

If you are into Match.com, you should try out OkCupid, in my opinion its a little bit better and the population on it is very high.

If you make decent money, put in your profile you are looking for a travel partner

[Happy Lemming]

@nospam99

Have you seen a substantial increase in "recommendations/matches" since the new year started?? An influx of new participants??

 

[Shining One]

2 hours ago, nospam99 said:

Next, do I recognize her? Match will send me recommendations for women I've already sent messages to. That is almost always a SKIP.

You should use the Block from Search Results option for these women. I had over a thousand women on it by the time I found my last relationship. I blame Match's pathetic history tracking for this. If you last messaged a woman over thirty days ago, all history information with her is lost, so Match considers her as "new" to you.

[nospam99]

@HL. I have not noticed a change nor an influx since the new year. For the most part, my recommendations are familiar (i.e. they have been 'recommendations' before), geographically undesirable to me, good-looking women from the Connecticut Gold Coast. This topic is my rant about a particular feature at a particular OLD site that could be much more valuable if it worked differently. The sense of it I get is that some designer at Match decided that it 'looked good' to send several dozen recommendations every day - quantity over quality.

[nospam99]

@Shining. The problem I have with Block from Search Results is I can't identify them by name if I ever want to unblock them. Also I'm not sure Block from Search Results works on Recommendations since 'Search' is a different feature. Finally, for the moment, Match is keeping contact history for 180 days. PoF is currently keeping it for 30 days.

[nospam99]

Believe it or not, I really don't enjoy posting about frustrating features of OLD sites. But this one is so bad that I'm not resisting. Hopefully at least some of y'all appreciate knowing.

Until last week, match.com displayed certain information in profiles that could be used to assess whether the person owning the profile would filter someone contacting them i.e. would it be likely that 'she' would 'next' 'me' for some reason without even reading my message. The information included the age, location, height, body type, and about a dozen other factors that SHE IS LOOKING FOR. Last week match took that information out of the display of everyone's profiles. You can still set it in your own profile but other people can't see it.

I've been chatting with match support (it is a plus relative to most OLD sites that their support is accessible at all). Support told me that the system was recently changed to automatically do that checking. They gave me some mumbo jumbo about being able to tell if the check was done based on the color of certain text. I 'call bullshyt' because I can see specific color indicators that don't accurately represent the result of the check. Plus they have always failed to correctly recognized MUTUAL filters e.g. she is in my age/height/location/body range AND I am in hers.

Net result for me is that the value of match, which even though it is a pay site WAS my preferred OLD site, has plummeted. I even told match support that I'd pay extra to be able to see that now missing information about women's filters. LOL because that may be what they were trying to achieve in the first place - more money for something that used to be a base feature.

[Cookiesandough]

Wait. Sorry, I am a little confused. They told you that they changed the settings to only show you profiles of women that are looking for men that match your description, or they told you that they would show you mismatched profiles but that information would have colored indicators? 

[nospam99]

They told me that the information would have colored indicators. They made no assertions about whether the profiles would be matched. And in my testing the colored indicators weren't accurate anyway. There is an old problem with any web service that I suspect is occuring here. The Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are given scripts by their management directing them what to tell the customers. There may or may not be a 'connection' between what the CSRs are told to tell the customers and what the programmers on the technical teams have actually deployed. In this case with match.com I see two problems. One, what the CSRs have been told to tell me is not matching what I see the 'improved' system doing. Two, and much more important to me, I can no longer see the actual values of the filter criteria that the women I might want to meet have specified. This is drifting into the terrible way that eharmony and elite work where the system picks the matches instead of providing information and letting the customers pick their matches based on that information.

[Happy Lemming]

16 minutes ago, nospam99 said:

 In this case with match.com I see two problems.

Ultimately, the customer is king.  If the service has become something difficult or impossible to utilize, don't renew your membership. Vote "NO" for this change with your dollars.  This isn't like when the electric company raises rates and you have to pay it, you can choose to leave match.com and use other "on-line" services or none at all.

I was thinking about you the other day... About 12 years ago, I was refurbishing a house in a retirement/pre-retirement area and there was this one little bar/restaurant that advertised a "Steak and Coors" special one night a week. So I went (after work) and stopped in, the place was full of retirees.  Mainly couples and older single woman, very few single older men.  I stood out a bit, as I was the "young-in" in the crowd.  I got to talking to various couples and "this" was the place to be for that older crowd.  Everyone was friendly, having a good time.

Do you have anything like that in your area??  A place/area/pub where retirees gather??

 

[nospam99]

@HL (off topic but wth) I doubt it because the area I live in is not a 'retirement/pre-retirement' area. It's more of a bedroom community for people who work in NYC. The guys and gals who do that spend about 5 hours every day riding a rather disgusting train back and forth to NYC. Big bucks but not for me because I don't need that money enough to commit 70 hr/week of my life (5 hr/day commute + 9 hours/day work schedule x 5 days/week) pretty much all of it sitting on my ass. Outside NYC, New York state is economic poison and has been for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYTg4GY9SA4 Fun fact: I went to high school in Niskayuna (see leaky watertower in vid) and I still have family in the area. I expect the census to be ugly in terms of what the state will be expecting from the federal government for the next decade.

The place/events that I thought of as you described the 'older' crowd are the dance events I've started to get into. As I've posted, the ratio is bad - mostly singles with more men than women. I also skipped the last dance because I'm concerned about being in crowds until the coronavirus thing settles enough for me to get a sense of the risks.

Back on topic, I complained pretty hard to the CSR about the change to the User Interface. I hope they get enough complaints from other people to encourage them to roll it back (can you say 'New Coke'?). OLD is what it is. Match still has the useful feature of a list of 'interests' e.g. hiking, dancing, and skiing for me, which helps to filter women for fun things to do on a date.

Looking to the near term future for dating 'prospects', the weather is getting warmer. When I feel more comfortable going on groups hikes in 5 or 6 weeks, I'll hopefully have opportunities to meet active women. The ongoing catch-22 is whether or not they will be 'single, searching, and open to interest in an older gentleman'.

Edited March 6, 2020 by nospam99

[Happy Lemming]

5 minutes ago, nospam99 said:

When I feel more comfortable going on groups hikes in 5 or 6 weeks, I'll hopefully have opportunities to meet active women.

My girlfriend and I went on a hike last weekend (it is already warm enough here to hike).  We saw quite a few women hiking (by themselves).  I think this is a good idea.

Oddly, my gf and I always seem to chit-chat with someone on the trail or at the rest benches on the trail.