“A Tech-Enhanced Yenta”

That’s how Maureen O’Connor describes The Dating Ring, a matchmaking start-up that crowdfunded a campaign to fly female New Yorkers to meet men in San Francisco. Along with 15 other women, O’Connor braved the trip. Here’s an excerpt from Day 3 of her journey, which she describes as “the night things get dark”:

Some of the men at this party are more eccentric than those we received as matches. A programmer who donated “several hundred dollars” to the Crowdtilt likens the donation to “giving $2 to a homeless person.” In an affectless voice, he analyzes the relative Asian-ness of each of my facial features, then explains his frustration with online dating: “I prefer to use reality as my platform. There’s zero latency, no lag. Do you know what lag is? When you do something online, you don’t get a response right away. Meeting women in reality — boom! — fully responsive.” As he says this, he begins to touch me. I flee. Soon thereafter, [Dating Ring co-founder] Emma Tessler points out a different man she believes to be “obsessed with” me. She offers to run interference, and I do not see him again. …

As the party grows, we become inundated with men. We are experiencing gender imbalance in the wild, and it is chaos. Every time I turn, there are men lined up waiting to deliver carefully rehearsed greetings or to initiate repartee. At this point, I am so exhausted from constant socializing — even Lyft rides feel like first dates — that I feel a breakdown coming on.

Meanwhile, Shaila Dewan considers dating sites as the quintessential online brokers (NYT):

The good news is that the more seemingly useless brokers are, somewhat counterintuitively, the more valuable they can be in signaling our interest – what [author Paul] Oyer might call the “money to burn” move. If anyone can wink at you free on a dating website, or for that matter beam in a job résumé, their actions don’t mean much. On the other hand, if someone fills out hundreds of questions and pays $60 a month – or in the case of a job applicant, researches a company and writes a detailed proposal – it signals a much deeper interest. Academic economists, in fact, use this sort of signaling in their own hiring process. When top-tier candidates are interested in working at lower-tier schools – for reasons of geographical preferences or spousal considerations, perhaps – they are encouraged to send a special “winking” signal to schools that might otherwise consider them out of their league. [One] Korean dating site has tried something similar, holding a special event in which most participants could send two virtual roses. The signaling worked. Not only was the response rate higher for people who received a rose, but the roses worked better on people of middling desirability, those who might not otherwise believe that someone of higher desirability was a serious suitor. So, on some level, an expensive broker does nothing more than indicate the level of your game.