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Agreement on CBHacking's points.
I found the match factor to be very predictive. With an ex-boyfriend of mine, the boyfriend I found via okc and a more recent one I had 99% match, though the maximum height of the match factor is constrained by amount of questions answered and the way you answer them, so you might not get that high in the first place. 95% is really decent, I never found anyone <80% interesting enough to talk to for longer.
For the enemy thing I recommend checking the answers marked "unacceptable" that go into the factor calculation. Sometimes these come merely from interpreting a question differently.
I'm open to describing which strategies would work for me (24, female, white, European), but I am not sure how much they generalise. I rely on profile text quite heavily for getting an impression of the other person and will often send the first message. I'm informed that isn't typical though.
Some types of messages I got: 1.) mass messages Just "Hi" or "Hi :)" or "Hi how r u" or similar. These are very common. I tried to talk to some of those people and the conversations tended to be extremely boring, uncreative and the people lacked raw intelligence (e.g. they would not understand irony).
2.) creepy and/or sexual (mass) messages The usual expected "Are u into casual sex?" or similar, but also "I like your white skin". I haven't seen people be creepy on purpose. But my experience on the site might have been somewhat more sheltered than average.
[Edit: Actually looked through my old messages, found some examples. I think the second person counts as "creepy on purpose. http://i.imgur.com/3eRozU9.png and http://i.imgur.com/iAX9Id9.png ]
My general observation was that > 70% of the people who send short messages appeared to lack what I would have considered baseline intelligence. Some of them are also incredibly desperate. I haven't seen a lot of unfriendly messages and most of them could be declared my own doing, since I tended to get impatient in situations where people evidently didn't read a single line of my profile (e.g. asking "are you single?" when this is literally in the header of your profile).
3.) profile-related comments Not always for dating, just pointing out a single thing they liked or asking a single question. Really appreciated, might lead to talking more but in my experience these often weren't dating-related.
4.) more elaborate (up to several paragraphs) messages Always with reference to something I wrote on my profile. Generally friendly, intelligent people, I enjoyed the conversations (and friendships) resulting from this.
If she has a long profile text, a reference to or question about one or more of those things is strongly recommended. That's what the thing is for - if you don't find any of it interesting, you probably won't find her interesting either. Writing long texts costs a lot of time, so it's disappointing to see people just skip it.
I didn't spend a whole lot of time on okc available, but during that time I got ~8 messages a day. I tried to answer all the longer ones, but it's painful to turn people away and I personally understand if people don't reply at all even to a multiple-paragraph-message. Maybe that helps with understanding the large amount of "silent rejections". I'd recommend making a first message not longer than 2 paragraphs, so you don't have so much sunk cost.
Personally I solved the flood of messages by asking people to send me a short message, after which I'd take a look at their profile and answer if I was interested. This was optimal for me since it reduced the guilt over not answering carefully-crafted messages and I was judging based on profile anyways.
There's an excellent longer post somewhere on LW about how to write a good profile. Okc itself has a few interesting blog posts e.g. about the optimal length of a first message. I'm open to answering questions should that be useful.
TL;DR: Agreed on the "check the match questions, especially the 'unacceptable' ones" comment! The enemy rating can be a total lie.
Oh jeez, OKC match questions. I'm sometimes amazed that the site works as well as it does when the match questions (and their answers) are so terrible. Some very common problems I have with them:
1) Questions where the only possible answer is nuanced - "Would you date a person who ?" for some X that has a wide range of possible meanings - and the only possible answers are yes and no. No "maybe", much... (read more)