Three Ways to Outsource Your Online Dating

BreakingModern — A few weeks ago I hung out with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. He’s a 28-year-old attorney and a regular user of OkCupid, a popular dating website. Let’s call him Eric. Eric pretty much has dating profile copywriting down to an art — he churns out a few hours a week submitting romantic queries and fielding witty replies on the site.

The grunt work is tedious, but it definitely is effective.

three-ways-to-outsource-online-dating-tinderAfter Eric summarized the gist of his online dating life — a hookup here, a boring date there — I said, “So basically, at any given moment, you have a rolodex of at least five to eight people within a 50-mile radius who are casually sleeping with you.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “It’s not a rolodex,” he replied. “It’s a smartphone.”

Back in ancient times, people used to think that “meeting someone from the Internet” meant you’re likely having coffee with a roofie-wielding ax murderer. Today, people are casually using dating apps like Tinder. Tinder aggregates romantic prospects using GPS-data tracking and user-generated data.

If nothing else, it brings an unprecedented convenience to dating.

You know what’s also convenient? Hiring people to do things you don’t feel like doing. Or implementing shortcuts that will get you more results with less work. Here are some examples of people who have gone through extra measures to streamline their dating lives.

1. Hacking digital dating platforms to maximize results.

Seriously. It’s a thing. There’s a math genius who went through extensive measures to hack OkCupid. He mined the website for user data in order to automate his statistical likelihood of finding his soulmate. (It worked – he’s now engaged.)

A software developer named Yuri de Souza hacked Tinder to optimize his results via reverse engineering and automating his swipes. Here’s a geeky breakdown of how he did it.

Similarly, there’s a strangely adorable robot named Tinder-O-Matic that will automatically “like” every prospect on Tinder. At a rate of 10,000 unconditional likes per 12 hours, you can maximize your return on mutual matches.

 

Or … you know … you could just swipe left and right manually. Like, with your hands and stuff. The way most people do it.

2. Create your own poor man’s dating concierge service.

Back in 2009, Tim Ferriss infamously outsourced his dating life as a “social experiment.” He created a project on Elance — an online outsourcing platform for hiring freelancers — seeking assistance with the recruitment of 20-minute coffee dates.

“It was very professionally done,” Tim Ferriss said on stage at a speaking event. “I was living in San Jose — nicknamed Man Jose, for good reasons at the time — and I posted a project on Elance which was setting coffee dates for me, in an online calendar. I recruited half a dozen teams around the world, India, Philippines, and a team of Americans in Jamaica working for $4 an hour. They all had a spec sheet — this is tremendously offensive to some people, please have a sense of humor — with links to girls’ profiles I found attractive, and others, not so much. It was very specific.”

While Ferriss doesn’t necessarily condone hiring a virtual assistant to shotgun-blast mass messages to your ideal type, it worked out for him. One date ended up developing into a long-term relationship.

Online Dating Couple

Image: Nikki Varkevisser, FCC

 

3. Hire someone to write a dating profile that doesn’t suck.

“Your online dating profile is just like a resume,” writes Melinda McIntire, a relationship blogger and freelance online dating profile editor. “And just like a resume, to maximize the best options, you should have an expert review your personal dating resume to secure that date and eventual relationship.”

McIntire — who met her romantic partner on OkCupid — is among the dozens of freelancers on Fiverr who will critique, write and rewrite your dating profile for hire. It’s a surprisingly affordable service that will run you little more than five dollars on Fiverr.

“Most people are not specific enough. It feels very generic and not genuine,” said McIntire in an interview with HTC. “For example, a ‘sense of adventure’ means many things. It’s all about telling your story. At the very least, get basics like spelling and grammar down!”

If the Terrible OkCupid Messages on Tumblr are evidence, this is not an embarrassing service. But it for sure is an inevitable one.

For BMod, I’m

 

 

Raquel Cool

Author: Raquel Cool

Raquel Cool is a Silicon Valley-based writer who covers tech, culture, science, and feminist issues. Raquel’s work has been published by the The Bold Italic, The Social Justice Journal, Mutha Magazine, Our Bodies Ourselves, and aNewDomain.net.

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