A long while back, Jon and I both started to notice advertisements for Geek2Geek on various webcomics, though I specifically recall seeing it on Questionable Content, and as of this writing, the ads are still being displayed.
Being intrigued, I signed up and checked it out, after all, who wouldn’t want a geek after their own heart?
If I were to use just one word to describe this site it would be crap (or a more colorful synonym).
The most noticeable problem is the speed of the site.
It is slow.
Slow like every page has a different set of 5 MB JPGs for you to download before it will display.
Somedays it will be faster and seem like maybe there are only unique sets of 2-3 MB images on each page, but that’s about as fast as it gets.
You might think, nay, hope that this slowness is indicative of the number of users, but this does not seem to be the case, or at least not in any reasonable proximity to the locales I previewed.
Which brings me to a common pitfall of most newer dating sites: not enough users. A dating site lives and dies by the number of users it has. After all, who is going to pay eHarmony $20+ a month if they don’t have any matches for you?
Geek2Geek definitely suffers from this problem and this may be related to why the site is so slow. Why spend the money on the servers/connections if you don’t have a decent user base?
Next up, the math for the website is often wrong, to the point where if they were a human you wouldn’t ever trust them on the issue. The issue in question is Age, something that can be fairly important on a dating site.
Now, personally, I don’t want to date anyone under 21, so I set my match settings to reflect this, however, I routinely received matches that were under this.
“But”, you say, “you don’t have to look at their profiles!”
Ah, but that’s where the math fail comes into play.
When I go to my “New Matches” page, it shows me my matches along with some basic info, location, tag line, profile name, picture if available, and age. If you then click the profile name, you would go to the full profile where you would find, more often than not, that the age was different from what was shown on the previous page.
The only logical reason I can come up with (other than they are being deceitful) is that they use two different math functions to compute age of a user. Regardless of the reason, it is wrong and should be an obvious fix. One that, even after repeated unreturned attempts to contact them still hasn’t been fixed. And really, there is no excuse for this, especially on a website that is supposed to cater to geeks. If the head geek of the site can’t even do basic math (seriously, it is just a DATEDIFF command, how hard is that?), why should I trust in them, at all?
Pictures are another problem. Very, very few of the profiles I looked at had pictures. A simple setting to only show me users with pictures would resolve this; alternatively, take a page out of eHarmony’s book and offer me the option as to whom I share my picture with, i.e. only those users who also have a picture posted.
Part of the lack of pictures could be related to the lengthy approval process required any time you make ANY change to your profile, including uploading a picture.
This is starting to turn into more of a rant, so I will close with this: do not under any circumstances spend your money on this site.