Oh boy, did I get a bunch of emails on this. Get ready to puke. When I created POF, I wanted it to be all about finding relationships with the right person. For the first 7 years this worked really well, I got the site to 10 million users without any employees and POF was generating a ton of relationships. So far, so good. Around 3 years ago, everyone started using the website via mobile phones. I figured it was around 50%, not 70%. One of the reasons I re-wrote my was to include the fact that so much online dating these days is done with phones rather than computers. Um… Wait a minute. Men just started using POF as a hookup site? Just in the last three years? Because of cell phones? Markus, are you and I talking about the same POF? POF has been the go-to site for hookups for many, many years. People were using it this way before anyone was playing around with OKCupid. You mean 98% of men on POF are looking for a soul mate? Markus, are you fucking delusional? This is a wonderful example of the lengths people and corporations will go to in order to bend the truth, just to politically correct. But I already covered that. Any first contact between users that contains sexual references will not be sent. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will be deleted without warning. Not a huge deal. There is no reason for a 50 year old man to contact a 18 year old women. The majority of messages sent outside those age ranges are all about hookups. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will get deleted. Intimate Encounters will go away in the next few months. Of those 6,041 women, the ones with hot pictures are mostly men pretending to be women. Intimate Encounters on POF can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women. In short the vast majority of people will not be impacted. As if relationships have nothing to do with sex. Especially and particularly those 18 year-old girls whom Mr. White Knight Markus is trying to protect. Markus realize those younger women are the ones who generally put out faster than those over-33 types? The Problems With Age Difference Restrictions Here are the problems with what POF is doing. These are women who are strongly attracted to much older men. In many cases, the older, the better within reason of course. Men their age actually turn them off. These women usually have no avenue to find these kinds of men in their normal day-to-day lives. So where do they go to find them? By implementing this change, POF has instantly destroyed the entire reason these women go to their site in the first place. Now that 18 or 19 year-old who really wants a much older guy is limited to guys age 32-33 and under. Well Blackdragon, 32 should be old enough for them. Those girls can settle for 32. Who are you to decide that? Who died and made you god? Who made you the arbiter of what ages are appropriate for a 18 or 19 or 22 year-old woman to date? Women on POF already have the ability to block incoming messages from men over a certain age. Any woman can go into her profile and block all messages from men over whatever age she wants. So why the hell are you dictatorially mandating this 14 year restriction to everyone? Having been a business consultant for decades, and having worked with many corporations intimately, I know the answer to this question. Also, our customers are stupid. And younger women are really stupid. I am now going to put myself in the very odd position of defending gold diggers. Why is POF limiting the ability for hot young gold diggers to snag some rich older beta male? The age restriction runs both ways. Women cannot message younger men. Many over-30 women have had conversations they had going with hot younger guys instantly terminated when the new rule was enacted. So now cougars are deemed unacceptable and inappropriate for POF? I thought you wanted to reach out to women with these new rules, you fucking hypocrites. Any woman in her mid-30s or over are now barred forever from messaging hot young guys? Way to go POF. Well Markus, I personally know a few 50 year-old men and 18 year-old women who would completely disagree with you. But what about 45 year-old men messaging 22 year-old women? Is that sick and disgusting too? Or is that okay? What about a 40 year-old man messaging a 25 year-old woman? Is this disgusting too? Care to comment, Mr. Or should I say Mr. God Of What Is Sexually Appropriate? What about the 25 year old girl who wants to message that cute 40 year-old guy? Is she sick and disgusting too? Because of course only 2% of people on POF are looking for sex. POF is about relationships. What do you think men will do now that this new rule is in place? You think you saw a few women complain about older men messaging them? Even though these women could have filtered these men out, but I digress. Just watch all the complaints that will flood in now, POF, with everyone lying on their profiles. And you deserve it. My Change In Advice About that lying about your age thing… I have repeatedly stated that men should not lie online, especially about things that can be easily verified once someone starts dating you, like your age. It will just cause drama and outcome dependence, unless your one and only goal is nothing but one-night-stands which has never been my goal. Lie your ass off. Lie about your age. Also, if you do lie about your age on your profile, come clean about your real age on the first date, or at least by the second date. When I drop my age by a year or two on my profile for testing purposes, this is what I do. Just keep moving to the new sites. The fundamentals will always work regardless. I saw this email the other day and, exactly on cue, wanted to puke myself. The man can hardly ever send out a mass email without embarrassing sentence structure or grammatical errors, yet his relationship ideals are Gospel. I agree that POF can take a hike, his own hubris will be the fall of the service. Once a person is fully and legally an adult they should be able to make those decisions themselves. Not only this, but POF blocks certain types of messages and limits the amount of messages you can send in a day. The amount of work a guy has to put in to get laid from POF at this point is becoming greater and greater as time goes on. Meanwhile, I can go to MeetMe, where I have just as many 18-21 year olds if not more as POF, and I can message them whatever I want, whenever I want, and send them all the same email if I want. If anyone knows of any others, please list them. Skout is better, but no where near MM and OKC. I can smell the brain-dead logic behind these changes. To your excellent analysis BD, here are my 2 extra cents of thought. He thinks — or should i say EXPECTS — because this is what this young MBA with her! She told him, in shiny powerpoint sheets, that it is the middle aged read 33+ woman who brings the money. These woman want good catches, thats solvent men over say 40. Problem is, these men dont want them no idea why?? So IF we simply block these men from contacting the hotties, they will have no other choice but to contact the desperate middle aged women with the money. Another good day for feminism. It is so simple, why could you not see it sooner? Thats hamster logic prime time. Sadly thats exactly like a young MBA feminist chick thinks. Now the question remains: Is Mr. Markus really a male? The 15 year and over age restriction applies as long as you are trying to contact women under 35 otherwise there is no restriction. But NO ONE age 30 or over can message anyone age 21 or under. You must be 29 or younger if you want to message girls age 18, 19, 20, or 21. As was pointed out above, the paid features of POF are mostly utilized by over 33 women. This was a business decision to satisfy the prostitutes who bring POF all the money, nothing more. I think POF will suffer for this! No one was ever messaged by an undesirable age group! What POF is doing now is making the decision against the will of these girls! He had multiple, obvious grammatical errors repeated words, etc in his short email that we actually corrected for the quotes on the blog article. Especially seeing those pics, there is no way in hell I could sleep with an 18 yr old without feeling like a pedophile. As for this nonsense about women over 33 being the main paid members, I sincerely doubt it! The idea that all of us over 33 women are desperate because of our age is pretty laughable though I see this sentiment from MEN online a lot. In this day and age anyone can get a profile someplace like that. Look at all the 12 yr olds on Facebook. So, POF may be trying to cover their ass a bit there too. I agree though that it will most likely just cause an influx of profiles where guys are lying their asses off to try and hook up with very young girls. What I find offensive is the m
