Mitcz.com : Official blog of Rev. Mitcz, the demented devilish comedian from Hollywood, CA.

I was reading through OKCupid’s fascinating number-crunching blog “OKTrends” and stumbled upon an entry about success rates for wording in messages. If you have 5 minutes to spare, give it a read.

Nonetheless, here’s a quick breakdown of Do’s and Don’ts.

Do Not…

• Use netspeak/slang. (words like “ur”, “u”, “luv”) or bad spelling (“wut”, “realy”, “cant”)
• Use physical compliments (“you’re sexy”, “beautiful”, “hey cutie”, etc)
• Mention using outside services to get to know them (email, AIM, yahoo, cellphone, etc)
• Mention god. Unsurprisingly (to me, at least), Jesus and God decrease reply rates even amongst other religious terms.

Do…

• Be humble, especially for men. Surprisingly “sorry”, “awkward” and “apologize” all had high success rates.
• Mention something in their ad. The phrase “you mention..” had the highest rate of any term
• Mention a common interest. It appears common taste in a specific band is your best bet.
• Compliment something non-physical. Phrases like “it’s cool that..”, “fascinating” and “awesome” did very well
• Use “how’s it going”, “what’s up”, or even “howdy” (my fave). “hi”, “hello” and “hey” achieved very low success rates.
• Mention atheism. Oddly enough, it got a success rate almost on-par with musical tastes. No other religion fares well, though.

The Perfect Message*

Putting all that data (hooray science and math!) into a human-readable form means that the following form letter should yield you the highest possible success rate for messaging another user on a dating site. The keywords/phrases from the OkTrends article in bold, insert your own variables between {brackets}

How’s it going? Cool profile. I noticed that you’re a fan of {band}, aren’t they awesome? Have you heard {obscure older album by that band, or one similar}? It’s amazing. Also, You mention {random topic}, so I’m curious what you think of {similar topic}. Sorry if these questions seem awkward, but I’m pretty sure you’d have some fascinating responses, being a fellow {atheist, vegetarian, metalhead, gamer} with good taste.

Hope you’re doing well, and maybe we’ll talk soon.

There ya go, kids. It’s like having an aggregating math robot do all your small-talk for you! Have fun with that and let me know if it works.

Theoretically, if the robots are to be believed, this hits all the right chords. I’d feel cheesy sending out this message, too, but it’s worth a shot

Diggin' my shit? Well then..