Rest in Pieces
Once upon a time I subscribed to a sexy magazine. The magazine had a tagline: Literate smut. Its pages were filled with thought-provoking articles and artful nude pictorials of scruffy-yet-hot hipster people. The magazine didn’t last though. Facing financial pressures, the publishers halted the presses and moved the entire operation to the web. To placate loyal subscribers they issued credits good for the magazine’s online personals.
My experience with online hookups had been limited. During the early days of the electronic Big Bang I’d dabbled in online chat and had phone sex with a Rubenesque chick from Texas. I never quite understood what people found so compelling about the online world: it all seemed a little nerdy, even to a closeted geek like me. But like all Americans I cannot resist free shit, so I posted a profile and resolved to put my credits to good use.
Thus began one of the wildest, most unpredictable years of my life. I slipped down the rabbit hole and discovered a world populated by impossibly gorgeous, hyper-literate chicks who were as likely to send me home with an obscure novel as leave a lipstick ring around my cock. Daters approached their profiles the way one might approach a short story for the New Yorker or a spoken word piece for the Nuyorican. I can honestly say I never had a bad date—everyone was fascinating, even if everyone wasn’t always sexually compatible. My entire fucking weltanschauung shifted. I met Nikki. I met Jen. Had I not said what the hell and posted a cheeky profile, I’m quite sure there never would have been a Naked Loft Party.
And so this week it was with great sadness that I witnessed the demise of Spring Street Networks, perhaps the last bastion of sanity in the rapidly consolidating, lowest-common-denominator world of online dating. The company’s executives blew through millions of dollars in venture capital financing and still couldn’t make the numbers work. Believe me guys, I know what that’s like, but I still cannot quite grasp what, precisely, was so difficult about running a paid dating site when so many other sites offer their services for free. The question is academic now, of course; the personals you might have enjoyed through The Onion or Salon or Nerve are now in the hands of Various Inc., parent company to FriendFinder, the giant octopus of the online dating market.
Former Nervesters are angry as hell. Nerve’s shiny new personals blogs are filled with scathing rants, as are the dating boards at craigslist. Some have even likened the changes to mismanagement of FEMA proportions. Their message is universal: the new owners don’t understand what made the Spring Street personals great and probably never will.
I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that the dramatic decline in the growth of online personals services comes at a time when blogging and free social networking services are ascendant. Facing competition from all comers, the overlords of the online dating industry have done what all large companies do in the face of their imminent demise: pile on useless features and raise prices. You can almost picture Tad from marketing running into the boardroom and exclaiming, breathlessly, “Everything’s gonna be okay. We’ve got Blogs!” In an effort to increase retention and extract as much money as possible out of each customer, the big boys have actually made it harder to meet people online.
Rest in pieces Nerve personals. I’m drinking a beer now, remembering what was and dreaming of what could have been.
