> First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.

In my empirical observation it is not correct. Dating is local. The proportion of men and women on the sites in a locality will roughly match the proportion of men to women in the dating pool. Among the people that I know in NYC every woman who is single has dating apps. About the same percentage of men have dating apps. NYC is split fairly even between available men and women which if not to say that there are more women looking to date in NYC than men.

> The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.

Empirically, I again have to disagree. I had a very similar conversation with a couple of people at a party so we did an experiment the weekend after party -- all of us went to the Whole Foods on Bedford Ave, popped in virgin SIM cards into our phones and created Tinder profiles: One M4F, one F4M, one M4M and one F4F. We set the distance to one mile and spent two hours hanging around the store both inside and outside. Between 6 of us, during that hour we saw in person 19 people that all of us agreed were on Tinder, of those 11 confirmed that those were them ( all of us used the same "Hi. Excuse me. Me and my friends are having a bet about Tinder. Is this you?" -- men were more successful getting confirmation both when they were approaching men and women but not by much)

> Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone.

It is because men's messages are as bad when they are "spamming" as when they are "putting thought into it". Online dating is online sales: putting up a website does not lead to sales. You need to make it:

1) attractive

2) relevant

3) understand your pitch

4) qualify your prospect

5) lead your prospect to sale

If you don't have much to offer other than a badly built website ( bad photos ), with irrelevant product ( bad text pitch ), do not understand your pitch ( why should she date you and not Brad? ), do not qualify your prospect ( she lives 33 miles away in NJ. Are you seriously thinking she would be coming to Brooklyn to date you?! ) or lead the prospect to signing on the dotted line ( did you forget that you compete not only with Brad but also with a re-run of Law and Order or Netflix and she does not know you from Adam as of yet so why is she coming out again? ) you won't succeed.

I recommend watching "Groundhog day". That's the movie version of the "i can't get a date" problem before the internet era.

> I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

Online dating converged to "dating". The same people who are able to successfully convert seeing a stranger in a coffee shop to getting strangers number/instagram/facebook and going out with that person the same day/next day/next week are the people who can do it online. The medium is different but the process is exactly the same.