A great piece of advice for online dating is to stand out from the crowd. So greetings like "hello" and "hi" are very common. They do less well than things that are a little bit quirky or a little bit weird, like "howdy" or "holla." The rarer your salutation, the better it does, in general.

We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook "experimented" with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work.

Because the way love works in general, you don't need everybody to like you somewhat - you need one person to like you a lot.

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look.

Text is, in some ways, on the way out, unfortunately. There are dating sites now that are just pictures.

Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.

Going to a site with more users seems obviously better to me, but at the same time, having a bland, middle of the road profile with bland, middle of the road pictures seems like a bad strategy to me.