Mike, here's another thing to add to your "yahoo employee" theory: almost all of these 5-star testimonials came in on normal business days (never weekends, which is normally when you see most other reviews). Also, with this flood of positive feedback for yahoo, you'd expect to see a few recent positive reviews for match.com et al on this edatereview site, right? Well, just go ahead and check them out if my point isn't already obvious.

The truth of the matter is that all of these online dating sites provide relatively the same customer experience - that's why we're writing these reviews, right? And, everyone would agree that these sites do a decent job at what they're "supposed" to do - provide a means to at least contact other single people. Unfortunately, the USERS are what bring down the experience for all of the other genuine customers, thus creating a system that DOESN'T work for most people.

Almost all the people who I've known to have tried these online dating sites have had miserable failures. It's because the women get so much response by sketchy men (ie, men twice their age) that they don't know how to deal with the sheer amount of response that they get. This puts them in a position where they can be as picky as possible, turning down perfectly qualified men. In turn, men have to send out mass email solicitations to get a single hit. Thus you have a system where women have been given the right to become superficial and men have to lower their standards just to get a date. On top of that, you have men who lie about their height/income and women who lie about their weight in hopes of "beating the system." The only people I know who have carried out a successful relationship as a result of online dating have been non-superficial people who genuinely want to meet a nice person. In other words, they're not looking at the photos first!

Don't get me wrong in thinking I'm blaming everything on the "users." All online dating sites are sleazy operations that are designed to suck as much money from the customer as possible. They all have crap customer service, and they don't care if you meet the right person or not. But on top of all that, it's ultimately the users that turn the entire operation into a miserable failure.

However, I still recommend that everyone try online dating at least once - just for a month. Because, there are some lucky people out there who can manage to get these things to work, and you don't want to pass up that opportunity in the small event that your next significant other is waiting for you in the form of a contrived online profile with doctored photos.