Meet Gary Kremen:
In 1992, he was a 29-year-old computer scientist and one of the many graduates of Stanford Business School running software companies in the Bay Area. One afternoon a routine email with a purchase order attached to it arrived in his inbox. But it wasn’t routine: the email was from a woman. At the time, emails from women in his line of work were exceedingly rare. He stared at it. He showed the email to his colleagues. He tried to imagine the woman behind it. ‘I wonder if she would date me?’ Then he had another idea: what if he had a database of all the single women in the world? If he could create such a database and charge a fee to access it, he would most probably turn a profit.
In 1992, that couldn’t be done – modems transmitted information too slowly. Then there was the scarcity of women with online access. Because in its early days the internet was prevalent in worlds that had historically excluded women – the military, finance, mathematics and engineering – women were not online in big numbers. …
So Kremen started with email. He left his job, hired some programmers with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached. The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax.
He and some associates registered the domain Match.com. Emily Witt goes on to highlight the most recent dating megasite, OK Cupid, whose abundance of choice is a drawback for many:
As the sociologist Eva Illouz writes in Cold Intimacies, ‘the experience of romantic love is related to an economy of scarcity, which in turn enables novelty and excitement.’ In contrast, ‘the spirit presiding over the internet is that of an economy of abundance, where the self must choose and maximise its options and is forced to use techniques of cost-benefit and efficiency.’ At first it was exciting but after a couple of months the cracks began to show.
That dilemma is bolstered by a journal article published last spring:
The trouble with love algorithms, the researchers suggest, is their reliance on personality attributes that are far from the most important predictors of a relationship’s success. The qualities that do matter, such as a person’s way of coping with stressful situations, are all but impossible to measure online. The report concludes that searching for love on matchmaking sites is no more effective than trying to pick up strangers at a bar — or on Twitter.
"To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works," Northwestern University associate professor Eli Finkel, the lead author of the study, told the Association for Psychological Science in February. "For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science in favor of unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords, like ‘matching algorithms,’ that merely sound scientific."
The Dish 