Why are there no dating sites started by women?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Women like to date people. And yet every single dating web site has been started by men? Is that true? Are there any dating sites that were started by women? You’d think maybe 50% of the dating sites out there might have been started by women, but I think its actually 0%. I find that surprising.

When I go looking for blogs about dating, the majority are written by women. Women clearly enjoy writing about dating, either their own experiences, or sharing general advice, or talking to others and sharing ideas in an interview format. Some of these women gather large audiences and are ready by tens of thousands of people every day. And often the comments sections on these blogs become a place where people flirt with other people who are leaving comments. Yet somehow, from all this, women rarely (never?) take the next step and start something that might compete with Match.com, or Harmony.com or OkCupid. And most of the current dating sites suck, so I think we all agree there is room for improvement.

In general, I think the question-and-answer format is terrible for dating sites. For one thing, it is easy to lie. For another thing, mostly understand themselves poorly and describe themselves poorly. And for yet another thing, many people have difficulty describing themselves in a text in a promotional way. I signed up for OK Cupid last year, and I was struck by the number of profiles that start off with “Oh, I’m really not good at talking about myself, so I don’t know what to say, but here goes….”

Most of the big online dating sites base themselves around a question-and-answer format. I’m fairly sure that is why so many people have bad experiences with online dating.

This is a well known critique of online dating by an economist/sociologist: Why Online Dating Is So Unsatisfying | Dan Ariely

So I start looking by registering myself and looking at other people and then I said, let me ask some of my friends to enroll. So I didn’t ask them to really enroll, I just took their profile sheets and asked people, “Could you fill those out but without your name?” And I took people that I liked more and I liked less, and I took their profile and I tried to figure out could I tell the difference? You know, now, imagine you did this. Imagine you went to 50 people you really like and 50 people you only like so-so, and you asked all of them to fill this profile, then you took this 100 profiles and you tried to sort them out into piles. Turns out we’re terrible at this! Right? So this is kind of an initial observation that something is going wrong in this, in this market.

And then went a step further, did some studies with online daters about how much they enjoyed it and what they were getting from it, until the final stage, we, I figured out, I thought I knew what was going on, which is that online dating sites assume that people are easy to describe on searchable attributes. They think that we’re like digital cameras, that you can describe somebody by their height and weight and political affiliation and so on. But it turns out people are much more like wine. That when you taste the wine, you could describe it, but it’s not a very useful description. But you know if you like it or don’t. And it’s the complexity and the completeness of the experience that tells you if you like a person or not. And this breaking into attributes turns out not to be very informative.

I am jealous about this: http://blog.thislooksfun.com/

My idea for a dating site involved going to real events and making my real event list public, so I could show other people what kind of stuff interested me, and other people could share their lists and I could find women who wanted to go to the same stuff that I wanted to go to. I started work on it this spring but I’ve already got so many websites to work on, I could not go very far with it. And it sounds like the folks doing “This Looks Fun” are doing something very much like what I was trying to do.

Still, it is strange. You’ve got all these guys thinking about how to do the perfect dating site. And yet women think about dating, and women have strong opinions about romance. So the absence of women is noteworthy — I would have thought dating sites would be a kind of site that would have a flood of female founders, but that is not the case.

I mean, it is weird to think that in the future one of the most popular forms of dating (maybe the most popular?) will be designed and controlled by men. Because, I think, for the last 100,000 years, this was one of the few areas of human activity where women played a large role.