Today I was musing on AM on why it has been so bad. Lately I'm getting inundated with message notifications in my email and dozens of fake messages to delete.
The problem I see is that there is so much "noise" it is very very difficult to identify potential connections.
I have vague hope that maybe an AM person jumps on this. Or they can hire me on a contract and I can implement. *laugh* Anyways, I'm interested to see what others think of these ideas.
Mutual Interest Tag: There is the favorite you can hit on someone's profile. Imagine if when both people favorite each other there was a tag that was generated that you could then filter by. Let me see mutual interest. The downside I see is that some people will favorite EVERYONE and fake profiles will likely favorite everyone as well. However, the person does have the power not to favorite low effort profiles.
Add the search filters to the mailbox: Let me set standard filters on my mailbox and only see messages based on my filters by default. I think this would help both genders. Being able to filter by age, distance, and any other criteria. And of course add that mutual interest tag as a filter item as well. Then when I look at my mailbox I'm not seeing people from 100s of miles away. I only have to deal with those that match my filters.
Bulk Message Delete: It is really freaking tedious to delete messages. Maybe I'm missing functionality for this already. Right now the easiest interface to delete messages is on my phone. If I have those dozens to go through on my computer it is a pain in the butt. Now maybe it is my process. I usually look at the profile before deleting. I don't look at messages because there is nothing useful to look at. Collect message? To what point? They want a picture again if the profile is empty then what is the point? Then once I see the profile is empty or has a profile message like weird fortune cookie I delete it. Let me be able to just click on a bunch and hit delete.
Bonus Feature: Never Button: Opposite of favorite. Never want to see this profile again, filter from my searches, and filter from their searches. Wouldn't it be nice if you see a message you suspect is fake or definitely not your type that you could just make it go away? Helps everyone. Someone who has never'd me will not show up in my searches. That is perfect right? Me bothering them and they have no interest serves neither of us.
Anyways, I'm curious on people's thoughts on features like this. I'm not sure where to lobby for these with AM. Technically, they are all not difficult to implement.
My personal theory is that AM's current model is shortsighted. Forces guys to burn tokens fruitlessly until they give up. Changes like this become a long term investment on the platform. It becomes effective platform for meeting others and worthwhile to stay engaged. I think they could keep the rest of their business model the same and just implement those functional pieces and greatly improve the experience. Additionally, it adds some powerful ways to reduce the excessive fake profiles that have inundated the platform lately.