It’s Dating Sites All The Way Down
Any networked system is a dating site if you squeeze it hard enough.
That’s it. That’s the post.
My thoughts on this were inspired by a person on Mastodon who is spinning up a dating instance while anticipating blowback. (There are a lot of crabbed thinkers on Mastodon with narrow ideas about what it should be for.)
I was reminded of the early internet, when everything was a dating site. Usenet newsgroups? Hell yes. Random phpBB forums? Oh, you know it. Blogs? You betcha. Hell, I even remember a flirtation over the campus VAX network while typing away on a VT100 dumb terminal with green phosphors, all the way back in 1987. Any system that brings far-flung people together by wire, yup, it’s a dating site. Yes, even the click-clacking telegraph, circa 1880.
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=31116
Just because you Can message people about a date on a site, doesn’t mean you Should. Vis LinkedIn.
I did start one dirty-SMS relationship with someone at Uni after meeting in person, we first started chatting in the student message forums. We were both insistent on proper grammar, and were also insistent on factual information. Which we both found hot :)
Thank you Mr. Russell
One of the many reasons why I wonder if I am using the Internet wrong is that I was never the flirter or the flirtee on mailing lists or forums or corporate social media. Respectful compliments to women and nonbinary people who are kind enough to show boobs and bush on the Internet, but that is not flirting as I see it.
I met one woman from the USA who ended up married and in Europe after posting on a forum related to pumpkins that she was single and looking.
I guess I should be clear, I don’t feel like you have to explicitly ask for dates in the comments of your favorite twitch stream (or whatever) in order to use your network of the hour as a dating site. It’s a dating site if you have a chance to make clear who you are to an audience large enough (or specialized enough in mutual interests) that your special someone can find you, or vice versa. Once mutual online attraction becomes clear, then’s plenty soon enough to start talking about getting together, although (in my experience) whatever meeting you have will probably feel “beyond” dating in some way.
Well, I have been posting on the Internet for about 15 years, and posting regularly on my own sites for about 10 years, and it has not lead to mutual sexual or romantic interest so far! So in this as in many other things, maybe I am doing it wrong.
I would agree with the commentator on the other post that the best thing for the unhappily single to do is to spend more time with more people of the gender or genders they are interested in, but if someone is isolated there are usually reasons for that which need to be addressed.