When a new IM or social networking site becomes popular, there's a limited "golden period" where everyone is "open and friendly". This means, their profile is unlocked, they're happy to chat with and befriend strangers, and so on. However, as more and more people join the new service, girls get harassed by weirdos online and after 6-12 months people start locking down their profiles. I've had several female friends who showed me the kind of messages they were getting on myspace, friendester, FB, etc., if I were them I'd have locked down my profile too.
For IM clients the dynamic works a little differently. When people first sign up to the newest popular IM client (yahoo IM, AOL IM, MSN, Google Talk, Skype, etc), there's a certain freshness and fun factor in using it. That goes away after few months to a year.
I've been meeting and dating women that I meet online since the BBS era. I used to be a SYSOP to local 4/10/12 line BBS's in Southern California from 1989 - 1990s, and we had lots of fun at BBS meets. I think that was actually a better environment, because everyone was relatively local (otherwise they'd need to pay toll charges to call in).
The BBS scene went into decline in the 1990s and I moved on to telnet & talk/ytalk with girls at the universities. It seemed a bit silly that you'd sit at the university computer lab and talk with someone online, while the person is probably sitting 2 rows over or in another lab on campus. But it was a fun way to meet people "blind" until everyone got together and went out on a group outing at California Pizza Kitchen. The girls were fun but I was stupid and bought CPK stocks, thinking that since I ate there so much, I mind as well invest in it. Well, the stock tanked. ;p
Pretty soon people stopped using ytalk and moved to IRC, then windows based IRC clients like mIRC. I was active on EFnet and Undernet. Meet a girl on Undernet that I should've married, but she decided to move abroad to Japan and that was the end of it. As time went on more and more weirdos joined IRC and wrecked it like they did to usenet. By then folks were moving from ICQ to Yahoo IM, and in late 1990s to early 2000's, many of the girls that I meet in TW were on Yahoo IM, average age ranging from teenager to early 20's. A few came to visit to the US and I went to TW to visit them from time to time. A decade later, they're now married with kids, running restaurants, or leaving their jobs to become full time home makers.
Adama wrote:
So forget the fantasies of joining a cooking class or becoming a hairdresser to meet women. It won't change a thing, because women in general (in general means all of them really) have already made up their minds that you (or what you represent in their minds) are not the type of man they are interested in.
I went to culinary school for couple months and did meet some girls, but I'll say that there was a big difference in attitude between class locations. My school has locations in Los Angeles and Orange County. When I went to attend class in the LA location, the young women in the class were kinda rude. The OC location is at Laguna Beach and the people were much more laid back, friendly, and financially well-off. There was a girl that I had a lot of chemistry with, but she was significantly younger and moved to France for college shortly after. It's like a cliché that this kind of stuff happens to me, because I've dated a number of foreign exchange students in the past and I'm "well experienced' at being left behind. IMO culinary classes are better at chatting up with your classmate than wine tasting classes, because the latter tends to be more formal and have less student interaction.