I'm somewhat surprised there aren't any dating sites that have set up a built-in "brown M&Ms" system to help with the shotgun strategy problem.
By "brown M&Ms", I mean something like Van Halen's Brown M&Ms rider condition; some key piece of text that requires an actual profile read to answer. Almost like a captcha but based on certain pieces of the profile.
The profile owner writes "List 5 of my interests, and my dog's name" and provides a list of acceptable keyword responses. Only messages where the not-captcha is properly filled out get through. (Or, alternatively, they get downgraded in priority.)
This would require people to actually read and parse the profiles, and put some minimum degree of effort into contacting someone.
I can think of several dozen problems with this approach, but I suspect they're surmountable with sufficient cleverness.
(In case the reader hasn't heard about this: Van Halen's extensive rider required a bowl of M&Ms to be provided, with all the brown M&Ms removed by hand, on penalty of show cancellation. The entire purpose of this clause was as an easy way to see if the venue had read the damn contract, and took it seriously. Any time they saw brown M&Ms, they knew something else would be wrong, (probably something dangerous and technical) and started a full re-check of the venue from scratch.)
A simpler version of this would be to use fuzzy matching on the person's history of messages. Which would rule out copy-canned messages right away, and would also prevent them from just changing a dot here or there in the message.
I'm very interested in dating sites btw, and I have quite a few ideas up on http://ideashower.posterous.com (no time to go thru and pick out the dating-related ones right now, alas).
By "brown M&Ms", I mean something like Van Halen's Brown M&Ms rider condition; some key piece of text that requires an actual profile read to answer. Almost like a captcha but based on certain pieces of the profile.
The profile owner writes "List 5 of my interests, and my dog's name" and provides a list of acceptable keyword responses. Only messages where the not-captcha is properly filled out get through. (Or, alternatively, they get downgraded in priority.)
This would require people to actually read and parse the profiles, and put some minimum degree of effort into contacting someone.
I can think of several dozen problems with this approach, but I suspect they're surmountable with sufficient cleverness.
(In case the reader hasn't heard about this: Van Halen's extensive rider required a bowl of M&Ms to be provided, with all the brown M&Ms removed by hand, on penalty of show cancellation. The entire purpose of this clause was as an easy way to see if the venue had read the damn contract, and took it seriously. Any time they saw brown M&Ms, they knew something else would be wrong, (probably something dangerous and technical) and started a full re-check of the venue from scratch.)