Beautiful people crush the dreams of ugly ones
The Internet dating laugh of the week concerns the virus attack on an cyber dating website called Beautiful People, an cyber dating site which purports to only allow attractive people to join and apparently weeds out people who they consider to be, well, too ugly for the service.
The virus - which some believe may have been planted by a disgruntled ex-employee - caused around 30,000 people to be allowed to join when in fact their God-given look should have caused the site's ugly alert to ring loudly thereby preventing them from becoming members.
In order to become a member, you have to voted in by other members who come from the same geographic area and age group as you are.
The virus has cleverly been nicknamed the Shrek virus - after the ogre from the movie. In the movie, we were told that at the end of the day your looks hardly matter and that's it's what inside that counts but apparently the creators of this online dating site missed the message.
In that regard, the site has been busy deleting the profiles of these 30,000 apparently undesirable members and also trying to figure out who is at the bottom of this evil act. It has cost the website over $112,000 in lost member fees but then again they also won themselves a much higher amount of free ads, haven't they?
Certainly the service has received plenty of free publicity because of the issue although it's hard to say if the publicity is good or bad. These days though perhaps it doesn't matter since many people who hadn't otherwise heard of the site now know about it and might try to join.
It does get you to thinking though: Could someone apply to join, get declined and then try again and then get accepted, as if to suggest that they suddenly became more attractive?
Conversely can you get kicked out of the system if it's been deemed that you've let yourself go and are now an ex-beautiful person, no longer worthy of attractive person status?
So many questions and so little in terms of answers.
Apparently 1 out 7 people who try to join the dating site get turned down based on their attractiveness which sounds a bit harsh for someone who might already be stressed out by being single only to then get hit by a double whammy when they get rejected by a dating service like this one.
The good news of course is that there are plenty of other Internet dating service out there that aren't this shallow so my suggestion would be to move on and find a dating website that isn't this harsh.
Personally speaking I will say that this sort of website is lot better than the cyber dating sites that promote adultery which I personally find hard to take seriously.
At the end of the day, attraction is in the eye of the beholder unless the beholder happens to be the person giving the thumbs up or thumbs down for potential members on this site. And truthfully I would have thought that the rejection rate would have been considerably highher than 1/7 for a website that prides itself on culling the herd and only allowing the hot people to join.
Either way, it's certainly brought to light an interesting aspect of Internet dating that many of us have probably never considered before when it comes to quality control and policing the memberships of various online dating services.
About the Author
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Danna Miller |