I am going to slightly bend my ban on love life-related posting here. I feel OK doing it, because this is more like a consumer report than another 'forever alone' post.
I decided to rejoin match.com this week. I had been a member for a few years, and cancelled the account about four and half years ago.
A lot appears to have changed since then, and not for the better.
During the first 24 hours my account was active, I received about ten winks and a couple of emails. That was certainly better than the results I had gotten the first time.
None of them lived anywhere close to me, but they all seemed genuine – no sultry 'Russian beauties' with garbled English pleasing to be making the contact of me. One of them even commented on specific things I had written in my profile.
But within 72 hours, all but one of those contacts had disappeared. They were all fake, possibly the same person or group of people, probably planning to phish me for credit card data or lure me to a malware site.
Doing a little Googling today, I see that match.com has been the target of a few lawsuits over the past few years, alleging that perhaps more than half of its user accounts are fake.
This did not seem to be the case the last time I was a member.
They deserve credit for aggressively tracking and deleting the bogus accounts, but it is a little disconcerting to see ten winks at eight pm, and all of them gone by the next morning.
The user interface is also different. It almost seems designed to force users to click around all over the place, trying to figure out how to respond to an email or look at winks.
Twenty bucks a month seems like a lot to spend for this kind of service, and I suspect I will keep it maybe ninety days and then let go of it again.
2 comments:
I've heard some people suggest that the elusive winks et al are bots or associate accounts run by match.com to give the sense that there are possibilities ... hang around.
I have no idea how true this is, versus malware or drinking-and-clinking behavior.
The best luck I've had doing the online dating thing was eHarmony. 80% of the time there's was no romantic spark, but then again, I enjoyed 80% of the dates I went on. Far more than Match.
Of course eHarmony is much more expensive, yet it was enjoyable to go on dates with men I had some sort of compatibility. Made for a much more pleasant experience. I was least likely to plot an escape.
Then again, perhaps this just worked best for me. My personality type falls in 1% of the general population. So maybe I'm just a freak of nature. :)
-Nina
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