Random profiles which “match” you will pop up, and it’s very easy to click on them and respond, wink, etc. Two real profiles amidst 50 fake ones may help your odds, but it won’t make you the proverbial “last man on earth” so that you’ll be able to hook up sans competition.

Just because you can exploit the system doesn’t mean you should. When you do, you weaken society’s fabric as a whole. This is endemic of the political exploitation which has come to characterize America, and those that look up to it. Witness the fall of Rome.

If I could, I’d take my ball and go home.

Nothing that this guy did prevented any of those other men from approaching this woman. I think that’s key. Also, nothing that he did forced her to respond to him, and he didn’t mislead her about who he was or his apparent genuine interest in her. I think it walks a tightrope thin line (and, again, probably crosses over when he uses her as an anecdotal data point without her knowledge or permission), but I don’t think the method itself is unethical just because it’s assholeish (totally a word).

Btw, it sounds fake.

All a guy needs to do is to approach single women, treating them with honesty and respect. Use a variation of the line from Lyle Lovett’s Give Back My Heart: “What’s your name, my name’s Lyle” Carefully substituted YOUR name for Lyle’s. Women who are interested in dating will accept, and don’t worry about the rest. If the date goes well, you end up in bed on the first date, because who has time to waste three dates on someone who may be lousy at sex?

I found my current girlfriend through OKCupid, and it was hard to find a good match. I spent at least 10 hours creating and revising my profile so it would say exactly who I was, and I was able to find someone who is a great fit for me because of that effort.

How depressing, to think that my efforts might have been fucked up by an antisocial dickhead who’s willing to screw up the entire system for their own advantage.

This is a version of the “tragedy of the commons,” in which a shared resource is destroyed for everyone by individuals who don’t act in good faith.

I don’t think I see a huge ethical problem with it, though it does seem like kind of a douche maneuver. A super-creative, kind of hilarious douche maneuver that sort of brilliantly skewers the politics of dating.

Ultimately, he didn’t mislead the woman or misrepresent himself. If she hadn’t liked him on his own merits, she wouldn’t have gone on the dates with him, and if she hadn’t been into him and attracted to him on the dates, she wouldn’t have slept with him.

But…the part where he’s using her and some intimate information as a data point in all of these conversations without her knowledge or consent is sort of another story. I’m not quite as comfortable with that.

Stupid, because for all the effort you put into a strategy like that, the most you can accomplish is that your target doesn’t have the option to decide between you and someone else. Your target still has the option to decide between you and no one at all. That strategy can’t assure you that your target finds the note you sent him/her interesting enough to answer, that they find your conversations interesting enough to meet up or that they find you nice enough in person to pursue this further. I also seriously doubt that it would work. Sending a message is almost no effort, documented by that fact that usually women get a serious amount of ‘first contact’ messages on OKCupid. So this whole strategy fails if your competitors simply contact *all* women in their area, the 50 fake ones and the 30 real ones.

As for the second part, I think it’s probably fake because someone who thinks that certain women are “out of (his) league”, who thinks he needs an elaborate scheme like that to get a date, and who doesn’t realize that not all women are interested in “hunks” must have a serious lack of self confidence and would appear as creepy in person as that scheme sounds, which makes the ‘success story’ highly unbelievable, as most people would pick the “no one at all”-option over someone like that.

Essentially what he said he did was commit fraud. When users sign up for an online dating service, there is the reasonable expectation that the people on the other end at least exist, even if we all know they fudge their profiles at least a little. By creating bogus profiles, (which is against the Unique and Bona Fide Profile section of their TOS) he essentially ruins the integrity of the service for everyone except himself for no other reason than not being able to compete against (in his opinion at least) more attractive men.

You can argue that his actions didn’t amount to much damage. His love interest may be livid at the fact that she missed out on potentially better suitors, but she can always dump his sorry ass and hop back online. What happens though, when every desperate guy makes his own plethora of profiles? We’ll have users creating fake profiles so that they can drown out the competition and focus on one specific user who is also fake because that profile was created by another desperate user. The utility of free dating sites grind to a halt.

Online dating is difficult enough as it is. For guys, it’s difficult trying to design a profile that balances being honest and truthful about yourself and your interests, against retaining some measure of attractiveness in a setting that thrives on anonymity and is inherently subject to system manipulation anyway (i.e. I really don’t think any human being is as artistically inclined or as charitable as the dullest OKCupid profile claims to be). I’ve heard women complain that the issues they face with online dating is just an onslaught of men who will contact them with almost generic-seeming emails, as if though they’re messaging every single woman on the site hoping for any kind of a response (which, I’m sure some of them are). But considering so many profile’s for women exist solely for data mining and spam, this only encourages men to fall back on mass-messaging, whether they want to or not. It’s just about the only way to get any responses.

So I don’t know. Internet dating is great in theory, because it gives you an opportunity to meet people based on their interests, rather than becoming attracted to them physically THEN finding out they’re devout Christian fundamentalists who support book-bashing and gay-burning. But in reality, the whole thing is subject to too much manipulation. I think what these guys did with their “hack” is really not that different than anyone who posts a woman’s profile to lure men to a particular website, or to obtain their information for marketing purposes. With that said, I also believe there’s a special level of hell reserved for anyone who takes advantage of another’s desire for companionship to their own ends, and that’s what these people do. Acts such as these only reinforce to most people that internet dating is a bust, and make it that much harder for people to meet one another.