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.

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.

Kind of paradoxically, men are very open minded or very even handed with their votes of women.

I know that shorter messages are better in terms of reply rate. The optimal length is something like 50 characters. Characters, not words.

Women are much more discriminating. I think both types of people are equally interested in having an attractive partner. But women essentially give the thumbs up to only half as many guys as guys giving the thumbs up to women.

To be universally liked is to be relatively ignored.

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.