I am active on a subreddit for people who use OLD, which stands for Online Dating, and which I find funny as an acronym every single time without exception. Not only is the acronym weird (should be OD as I am pedantic), but I am reaching the level of old myself. Double whammy.
The subreddit is great. The people are real and honest and trying, which is more than you can say for most corners of the internet. One guy called me a white knight and a simp, and I wear both of those with a level of pride that probably says something about me that I am choosing not to examine right now. Might need to get back into therapy to dig this one out.
If you have experienced OLD in the last decade then this post, and the parody sites, were written for you.
Anyway…
This is not a cry for help. This is a creative outlet. There is a difference and I would like you to respect it.
It Started With a Dead Fish
The first one is PlentyOfDeadFish.com.
I will not explain it. The name is the explanation. I will say only that the compatibility quiz exists, that it has five questions, and that no matter what you answer, you will be matched with a dead fish. Captain Ahab left a testimonial. It is two paragraphs long. You will feel things.
Then Came the Hovering
BumbleAround.com is technically a parody of Bumble. It is really a parody of you, specifically, at 11pm (2300h in nerd terms), in sweatpants, phone in hand, accomplishing nothing and knowing it.
Courtney’s match is expiring right now, as you read this. There is a scrolling ticker at the top of the page. Gary from Accounting appears in it. I will say no more about Gary from Accounting.
Then It Got Complicated
The third one is BurnTheHaystackWithATinder.com, which I will admit, is a long domain name. It earns it.
There is a Block to Burn button on every profile. There is a Kevin. There is a Debbie who is dating with intention and brings a printed agenda to first dates and cannot figure out why the dates keep not working out. There is a compatibility widget that keeps matching Kevin and Debbie together. The algorithm is not learning from this. Neither are they.
There is also Tanya, who is emphatically not here for hookups.
She really means hiking.
The Part Where I Justify This
All three sites cross-link to each other. I am calling them collectively the Scorched Earth Dating Universe, which is a sentence I typed with my own thumbs and cannot take back.
I posted about them on the OLD subreddit. The response was better than expected, which I am choosing to interpret as encouragement rather than solidarity from a group of people who understand exactly why a person builds fake dating websites on a Thursday afternoon instead of going outside.
I am a tech guy from Minnesota. I founded an ISP in 1993 and have spent three decades watching the internet get progressively weirder. Online dating is one of the more weird things it has produced, not because the concept is bad, but because the execution is a nonstop parade of boat photos, unverifiable height claims, Kevin, and pictures over 10 years out of date.
All of it is worth laughing at. Including the part where I built three websites about it and wrote this blog post… instead of having a date.