On one big dating site, most people messaged someone more popular than they were. That was not the mistake.

In January 2014, the most-messaged person in four big US cities on one free dating site was a 30-year-old woman in New York. She received 1,504 first messages that month. That is one every half hour, day and night, for 31 days.

The people writing to her could not see the pile they were joining, and that pile may explain more about online dating silence than any single opening line.

What the researchers measured

The sociologist Elizabeth Bruch and the physicist Mark Newman got a month of messaging records from a popular free dating site, covering every active heterosexual user looking for romance in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle. They published the analysis in 2018 as Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, in Science Advances, and it is free to read.

They ranked everyone by a simple idea. You count as more in demand when people write to you, and even more when those people are themselves in demand. Call it popularity on the site. It says who gets written to, not who would make a good partner, and the authors are careful to say users were not ranking each other this way.

Then they asked who writes to whom.

Most people reach up, and not wildly

The most common habit, for men and for women, was to write to people ranked about where they were. But most people leaned upward, by a modest margin on average, and hardly anyone wrote to people well below them.

That is a measured reach. The authors read it as people having a decent sense of where they stand and aiming a bit higher.

The cost shows up in the replies. The further up someone reached, the less likely they were to hear back, and most messages men sent to women ranked above them went unanswered. Men sent the large majority of first messages, and women answered only a small share of what they received.

When a first message costs nothing, the messages pile up on a few people, and the silence lands on everyone else.

These records come from one site, one month in 2014, four large cities, and only heterosexual users, so the exact figures may not match an app you use today. Popularity here means who gets messaged, which is a different thing from who is kind, honest, or right for you. The study stopped at the reply, so it cannot say who went on a date or who ended up together. The authors also note that their ranking builds in some of the upward lean, since being written to is part of what raises a rank.

Why the silence is not a verdict

Look at that New York inbox again. A person getting a message every half hour is unlikely to weigh each one, so plenty of messages likely go unanswered for reasons that have nothing to do with the sender.

Bruch and Newman offer a likely reason. Online, there are far more people to contact, and writing to one more costs almost nothing, so the competition for attention is probably fiercer than it would be in a room. A free first message feels generous to the person sending it. Added up across a city, it buries a handful of people and leaves everyone else waiting.

Nobody in that picture is doing anything foolish. Reaching a little above yourself is ordinary. The trouble starts when a system lets everyone reach for the same few people at once.

What does and does not change your odds

The study also looked at effort. People wrote longer messages to those ranked above them, sometimes much longer. Among men, longer messages went with more replies only in Seattle, the city where men most outnumbered women. In all four cities, more upbeat wording went with slightly fewer replies for men. The authors' summary was that, overall, the extra effort may be wasted.

People who reached highest also spread their bets least. They wrote to fewer people, and even compared with people who sent as many messages, they stuck to a narrower band of the rankings than people who aimed closer to home.

So the useful moves are not about polish. Writing to a wider range of people, including people who look like your equals, follows from the reply pattern: the less far up people reached, the more often they heard back. Do not count on a longer first message to carry you, since for most senders in the study length did little. And when someone you liked never answers, assume a crowded inbox before you assume anything about yourself.

The authors make one hopeful point. A reply from someone well up the rankings was less likely, not impossible, and in their words, writing to two or three times as many people to get a date is "quite a modest investment."

Popular and right are different questions

Being widely messaged is one kind of signal, and it is the easiest one for a feed to show you. It is not the same as two specific people wanting each other. In earlier work we covered, researchers could predict who would be widely desired, but not which pairs would click.

So spend your first messages where interest already exists. Someone who has already liked your profile has told you something a popularity ranking never can. On Bloom, seeing who liked you is free.