I'm optimizing for relationships, not dates.

For some people, the main barrier to relationships is trouble getting dates, or trouble doing well on dates. The more dates these people go on, the better they will get at dating, at which point they'll be able to move on to actually attempting relationships.

Signalling more social skills than you actually have isn't going to work out in the long run (except insofar as being able to signal competently is much of what they are).

As you say, being able to signal competently is a big part of social skills.

In my experience in real life, people who try to signal more social skills than they actually have tend to get seen through or make people feel uncomfortable almost immediately, or get believed on a permanent basis. While I think it's possible to hit somewhere in between, where people initially think you're cool and then later decide that you're a loser, doing so is hard, because signaling substantially more social skills than you actually have is hard.

I suspect that most of the time, the amount of social skills that someone can "fake" is about the level of social skills they could attain if they would practice a bit, get some good reactions from people, and believes in themselves. In some cases, merely one or two tries of a new social behavior with such positive results are enough to grant you that social skill.

It might be a bit easier to signal social skills you don't have in an online profile, I admit. But still, people can message with you, talk by instant messengers, or talk on the phone to get a better idea of where your social skills are at. Short of having a friend write for you, it's still hard to fake social skills in your responses.

Let's say that these filters fail, and we end with an originally social unskilled guy who was able to act socially skilled online, on a date in real life with a woman. This scenario could plausibly happen, but I don't consider it very bothersome for several reasons:

• If the guy has been learning how to signal social skills online, perhaps he's learned something about social skills in real life
• If the two of them have built up an online connection due to his "internet social skills," then he may be able to approach the real meeting with more confidence, and less nervousness. Under those conditions, he may actually perform with better social skills than usual... perhaps even as good as his internet social skills.
• The woman may have gotten to know him from online conversation, and won't judge him on social skills so much. He may have been able to create a halo effect for himself online that will make his real life social efforts look better.
• The guy is displaying ambition and a desire to improve himself, which are attractive traits to many women.
• The guy will learn social skills from going on the date, which will help him appeal to the woman he is going out with, or to future women

Even if she ends up finding his social skills lacking and decide to not have a second date, the guy was still making an effort to improve himself, so it should be forgivable that his social skills seemed better than they actually are. Although it does waste a small amount of a woman's time to give a "practice date" to a guy who doesn't turn out to have the social chops she originally thought, I think it's even worse for women if socially challenged guys have no way of learning the ropes, because then women's options are limited to men who acquired social skills by default during their socialization (which filters out many guys who are introverted, shy, sensitive, nerdy, short, or who got bullied as children, a category of men that actually would make good long term mates if only they were bit more socially skilled and exciting).

Of course, it's understandable if individual women don't want to be giving dates to guys with a major mismatch in social skills from their first impression, but I think this worse case scenario is rare, because it's simply too hard for men to fake substantially greater social skills in ways that women can't detect, even online. Furthermore, given that women have more stringent personality and behavioral criteria than men, and typically expect the guy to take an unequal share in the burden of initiating, women are just going to deal with the fact that men have a longer learning curve for satisfying women's preferences, just as many men are just going to have to deal with their girlfriends taking longer to get ready.

I certainly agree with the idea that nerds with no social skills would be well-served to develop those skills. But then the point isn't making them appear more desireable; it's actually making them more desireable, which is beyond the scope of the post.

I agree, and I'm not going to hold that against your post. However, it means we shouldn't say stuff like "no one you want to meet would find you boring" when it's not necessarily true, even online.

I contend that a lot of the time, for men at least, it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out a way to present themselves online that would turn off people who would otherwise be good matches for them. This could even be a matter of subtleties like signaling, photo choice, or even the order by which you list your interests/traits. Attraction based on discovering additional qualities about a person is not a commutative operation: order matters. Let's examine a guy who plays guitar and is also a programmer, and reveal these facts in different order. Guitar player + programmer = cool guy with a nerdy side. Programmer + guitar player = nerdy guy trying to be cool. The example may not be that stark (though it certainly could be); the point is that earlier traits revealed have massively higher weight, such that they can even determine whether later traits revealed are seen as positive or negative (in my example, find out that the cool guitar guy also has a nerdy side can actually boost his attractiveness). The significance for online dating is that many traits should be left off the main profile entirely, and saved for later revelations.

Think of it this way: there is a space of the plausible narratives that you could create for yourself, but not all of the points in that narrative-space are equally attractive, even if they are equally factually correct. For males especially, there could be large differences in attractiveness of their different self-narratives, because women are more selective about behavior and personality.