Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The Dangers of the Online Dating

The social situation in the 21st century is allowing people to treat dating in a much more relaxed way. Dating is now much more varied thanks to the help of internet dating sites. The people taking part in such dating events such as speed dating phone dating and blind dating are far more informed and diverse than ever before. This is mainly thanks to the various dating related sites online offering dating information and related links the best sites out there.
U.S. residents spent $469.5 million on online dating and personals in 2004 and over $500 million in 2005, this is the second largest paid content on the web. So there is no doubt that people are extremely interested in finding a life partner or just a short term relationship. Such large sites operating and surely bringing in large amounts of money annually are sites like e harmony, Yahoo personals and Match.com
This is due to the sign up fee and the monthly fee required to surf through the thousands of profiles available on there databases.
This is wonderful for online dating sites making thousands off the recent online dating boom but where does that leave the end user? With so many options out there to find the “right one”
Where do you start? Thanks to many dating related sites now its never been easier to find out just what’s for you.

According to Scientific American, Virtual Dating is the next step in online dating. This involves creating what’s called an avatar and dating in a virtual world. Doing what you would do in a normal date but online which enables you to get to know the person while decreasing the fear of rejection.

However there are many problems with online dating and the recent rise in popularity in such sites as free online dating services. A majority of sites keep members profiles online many months after the person has logged off giving the appearance of having more members than there are online.
Also many sites make it unclear whether members have fully subscribed and therefore are unable to reply, meaning that both members have to be paid members before any offline contact can be arranged.
There is another pitfall where some profiles are just ghost profiles to attract members. This sort of behaviour really destroys the credibility of the online dating industry.
Even if the profile is real there is an inherent lack of trust between profiles due to the whites lies and fake images uploaded to make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex. However this can be mostly diverted by staying away from casual dating sites. Online predators have also cast a grey cloud over the industry due to the secrecy that dating sties provide. This secrecy is the perfect situation a predator needs to set up an arrangement offline.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As long as you do not fall in the hands of online scammers, you are right, online dating is the next step. With so many people now having a busy schedule, who has the time to go out to bars and meet people?!