Interesting new research on loneliness. (Read it before you pre-judge.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/opinion/smartphone-iphone-social-media-isolation.html

Recent well-conducted surveys investigating impacts of COVID-related lockdowns have found that 3̲7̲%̲ of respondents were socially isolated as early as April 2020. (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/pandemic-lab-the-loneliest-americans-arent-reconnecting/2021/07/22/7977543e-e4cd-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html .) This is an extraordinary finding and is consistent with other independent surveys. Respondents were asked to say how many people they could turn to for help if they fell ill; how many people might lend them money; how many people they could talk to if they had a personal problem or felt sad; and how many people could help them if they needed a job. If they answered “one” or “none” to a̲l̲l̲ of those questions, they were considered socially isolated. That's really serious business.

This is obviously not something that we can just blame on introverts. It's also not something that we can blame on old folks, who tended to experience somewhat less social isolation, actually, than young people. ( https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-teens-loneliness-mental-health-coronavirus-covid-pandemic/ )

Clearly, current online “dating” strategies are not having the advertised levels of success. We need some clever people to devise completely new strategies.

TypeTango, a site even older and less active than this one, remains alive. Though less technically sophisticated, it has a few features that I like. I suspect that it used to do more, but perhaps had to rip out some functions than ran afoul of Myers-Briggs and/or Keirsey copyrights.

TypeTango offers no tests these days. It is apparent that very many of its early members were mis-typed – a problem, perhaps, with whatever test they were using at the time and amplified by the fact that most of their users knew nothing about MBTI. Since then, its users have probably relied on whatever free online tests and instruction that PEVO users find, which produce false results at about the same, still alarming, rate. The posted types are, as often as not, a distraction.

TypeTango has no compatibility algorithm. Search results can be filtered by member age, type, location and recent activity. As an approximation of compatibility, TypeTango allows users to provide dozens of open-ended “keywords” – positive and negative. Users can assign a weight to each keyword, but almost no one does. The open-endedness is both a strength and a weakness. Lists of the 100 most popular keywords are provided. This is far too few. Near misses dominate: synonyms; changes in spelling, parts-of-speech, tense or hyphenation; attempts to cram multiple words into one “keyword.”

A few things I like.... TypeTango allows only one new contact per day and tells you to make the most of it. (Ongoing conversations do not count toward this limit.) Users cannot see the date and time that others last signed-on – only the month and year. There is no “Viewed Me.” All of these features seem to make the site less attractive to those who might abuse it. It does not ask about educational attainment or profession. (Curiously, it does ask optionally about weight and seems to get mostly ballpark-accurate answers.) That's it. Pretty bare-bones, really. Nice logo. The site seems to have attracted about 25,000 total users 19 years-of-age and older since about 2002.

There are a few things that an MBTI / Enneagram site really needs to get right, in my opinion:

#1) It needs to attract a large number of users. This usually means that it needs to offer something more than match-based searching to attract users. PEVO's Chatrooms, Groups, Forums, Polls, Meetups and Psychology pages were a valiant and sophisticated (for its time) attempt to add value. PEVO's bulletin-board style home page is also fairly unique. None of this was enough. The original OkCupid offered hundreds of games, including a pretty good MBTI test and another one that assigned a fairly comical but strangely accurate “dating persona.” It was great fun. It probably did attract many users but was probably too costly to maintain. The feature was dropped ages ago.

#2) It needs to provide some sort of typing algorithm or a tie-in to a specific other site. The results have to be right and have to be explained in a way that is understandable to an unsophisticated user. Many people are obviously content to hear that their “rare” type is the likely reason that they haven't yet met the person of their dreams. Which we know is not true. Let me stress: the results have to be right. In my opinion, all of the historic free online dating sites fall far short, notwithstanding their creators' credentials and/or professed expertise. One way to make the results more valid is to refrain from all the story-telling that usually accompanies the results, describing everything else that is supposedly going on in the lives of typical test-takers of a particular type. That's just astrology. A dating-site test either helps someone find a compatible romantic partner or it fails.

#3) The site needs at least a theory of compatibility. Several of today's best-capitalized online dating sites are using machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence – to adjust their algorithms to do “whatever works” (based on still questionable criteria) to improve the predictability of a match. This is far outside the capabilities of most start-ups, and it is not apparent that it helps, anyway. I have posted elsewhere my belief that most of the MBTI-based compatibility algorithms are very weak, purely hypothetical, not objectively tested and contradictory of one another. An enhanced scheme is needed. PEVO's use of Enneagram Instincts was a valuable addition, in my opinion – one that was never fully exploited here or anywhere else. I also like values-based schemas described above. An algorithm that can adapt to its own successes and failures (based on something more than a swipe) would be better still.

#4) It needs to protect its users from threats – both institutional and individual – to their privacy, security and safety. Too many users still give away far too much information. The site has to be better at protecting them than they are themselves – without losing their interest.

A web site or app that does all these things hasn't yet been built.

@epochalshift, thanks so much for mentioning that. I have no reason to doubt it, but it never would have occurred to me. (Age. Temperament. INTPs are notorious for not caring about, often not even perceiving, social cues like what anybody might think of them. I note that you are the first F-type to respond on this thread.) “...reeks of desperation, even if that ain't the case... “ is a wonderful turn of phrase. So, out of concern that anyone might catch a scent of their desperation, the desperate majority may blithely sabotage their own efforts. Might explain why we are all still out here.

Sadly, liking something like this on Fb which happens to have less than 100 likes reeks of desperation, even if that ain't the case...

Re: attracting more visitors. Something else that I've suggested here on PEVO is that everyone Like or Follow https://www.facebook.com/ProjectEvoLove . So far, they have only 79 Likes and 81 Followers on FB. There is nothing currently going on there, but that could change.

Yeah, i agree that algorithms (in general, not just MBTI ones) are mostly bullshit. But you could also create an app without alogrithms or match-making.
I think the problem of this site is that it doesn't draw enough new members into it. My opinion: If you want to make things more attractive for potential users you have to move on to something more modern.

@MillieMisanthrope: I appreciate your concrete suggestion. Birdy, of course, is based on MBTI. I presume that most of the sites/apps praised by @devang12 are also based on MBTI. There is something to be said for a better user interface that draws in more visitors. MBTI matching algorithms, however, have built-in shortcomings (as do some others that I've explored.) In several places on PEVO I've shared this old link: http://pstypes.blogspot.com/2009/03/myers-briggs-compatibility-part-1.html . Basically, the MBTI compatibility theories all contradict one another and none of them have been shown to really work, except perhaps anecdotally. That's why I've advocated for a different approach. The original OkCupid was terrific, but it was sold to IAC (Match.com) about ten years ago and it's never been the same since. I avoid all of IAC's sites/apps now, as much for privacy reasons as for bad matches.

I'm new here. But as far as I can tell this site seems to focus more on building online communities, forum discussions etc rather than the typical "dating" aspect. There's nothing wrong with that if you're interested in that kind of stuff. If your plan was to focus more on the "community" aspect I think you did a pretty good job.
But I think people looking for dating are (nowadays) more drawn to apps rather than websites or forums, so if you'd like to focus more on the "match-making" aspect in the future I'd recommend making an app.

The "Birdy" app for example seems pretty interesting. At least for those interested in dating. There's only the Beta version available for now, but I think there's some potential in it.

There are many new websites/apps which are doing this in a better way...why don't you check them out

Most personality inventories like MBTI, Big 5, etc. are intentionally values-neutral. I've written elsewhere that I think that social values are at least as important as temperament in forming all kinds of relationships. I posted two of my favorite values scales at http://www.projectevolove.com/polls/view/231/value-priorities and http://www.projectevolove.com/forums/topic/456/moral-foundations , so I am just consolidating those posts here. (Because several people had difficulty following the original links, I recently found alternative sites offering the same tests.)
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Your results of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) and the Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Questionnaire can be posted on your PEVO profile or in the Polls and Forums. We need to collect a critical mass, of course, but no one else is doing this, so if you like it, tell all your friends.
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Neither test assigns you to a “type.” You need to decide for yourself whether you are looking for an identity or a companion. Supplemented by MBTI, Enneagram, etc., these could be great tools for finding compatible friends, associates, lovers in this time of social distancing.

I actually like it as is, but I of course would like to see more members. I`d like to thank the developers as well for making it available for free! Thanks to read for this post. I hope that someone else has suggestions that could get the number of active users up.

There has always been some frustration among users that this site has never achieved its full potential. So, here's a place to describe what you'd like it to be (besides more popular.) If you've got an entrepreneurial bent, you might describe how we might get from here to there, in baby steps.
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Caveat #1: The original developer and current administrator of this site has (have?) expressed negative interest (so far) in developing it any further. So, your ideas are more likely to be advanced if: a) they describe things that members can display on the current home page; or (b) if you have the skills to build something yourself.
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Caveat #2: Over the years I've seen a handful of PEVO members develop their own independent sites, posting links on PEVO's home page. As far as I can tell, none of them have yet flown.
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Hey, if it were easy, it would have been done already. Let's show a little creativity and look for that breakthrough design concept.

In case anyone missed it, the fifth scale in the Big 5 is Neuroticism, a trait that Carl Jung's model (and Myers-Briggs) explicitly avoided. 16personalities maps the Big 5 into MBTI types, adding something they call “Identity.” While it it possible to rotate the principle components of any factor-analytic space, let's keep it simple. “Mind” is close to Big 5's Extraversion; “Energy” is close to Openness; “Nature” is close to Agreeableness; “Tactics” is close to Conscientiousness; and “Identity” is close to – you guessed it.

Is that really true?

Has anything been done about it?

For sure

Wow! Very interesting results. Shows just how very lonely we are when the most uncommon types are so hugely over represented. :( UGH.

Breakdown for women.

Breakdown by men.

Long before I found this site someone put the breakdown of types and instincts here. I have recently calculated the same and have added the gender differences as well. Below is the totals for both men and women.

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BetaCrasher said:
Best INFJ Meme.

I couldn't upload the file on the first attempt, and there isn't a delete option.

INTJ: lovable charming brats. Haha

Share a meme of your favorite (or not so favorite) MBTI types!

entj reverted to peeing his pants LOL.....there goes my idea of dating an entj down the drain :D