Post: #1

Note: I left out some pictures because only 10 images per message are allowed. If you want to see the article in its entirety, read it here.

Quote:I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out. Like this young buck, trying to get a potato to cry.


We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

Here are a few of the more interesting experiments OkCupid has run.

Experiment 1: LOVE IS BLIND, OR SHOULD BE
OkCupid’s ten-year history has been the epitome of the old saying: two steps forward, one total fiasco. A while ago, we had the genius idea of an app that set up blind dates; we spent a year and a half on it, and it was gone from the app store in six months.

Of course, being geniuses, we chose to celebrate the app’s release by removing all the pictures from OkCupid on launch day. “Love Is Blind Day” on OkCupid—January 15, 2013.
All our site metrics were way down during the “celebration”, for example:




But by comparing Love Is Blind Day to a normal Tuesday, we learned some very interesting things. In those 7 hours without photos:




And it wasn’t that “looks weren’t important” to the users who’d chosen to stick around. When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in the middle of conversations that had started “blind”. Those conversations melted away. The goodness was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.





This whole episode made me curious, so I went and looked up the data for the people who had actually used the blind date app. I found a similar thing: once they got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how good-looking their partner was. Here’s the female side of the experience (the male is very similar).





Oddly, it appears that having a better-looking blind date made women slightly less happy—my operating theory is that hotter guys were assholes more often. Anyhow, the fascinating thing is the online reaction of those exact same women was just as judgmental as everyone else’s:





Basically, people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.

Experiment 2: SO WHAT’S A PICTURE WORTH?
All dating sites let users rate profiles, and OkCupid’s original system gave people two separate scales for judging each other, “personality” and “looks.”
I found this old screenshot. The “loading” icon over the picture pretty much sums up our first four years. Anyhow, here’s the vote system:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!


Our thinking was that a person might not be classically gorgeous or handsome but could still be cool, and we wanted to recognize that, which just goes to show that when OkCupid started out, the only thing with more bugs than our HTML was our understanding of human nature.

Here’s some data I dug up from the backup tapes. Each dot here is a person. The two scores are within a half point of each other for 92% of the sample after just 25 votes (and that percentage approaches 100% as vote totals get higher).



In short, according to our users, “looks” and “personality” were the same thing, which of course makes perfect sense because, you know, this young female account holder, with a 99th percentile personality:


…and whose profile, by the way, contained no text, is just so obviously a really cool person to hang out and talk to and clutch driftwood with.

After we got rid of the two scales, and replaced it with just one, we ran a direct experiment to confirm our hunch—that people just look at the picture. We took a small sample of users and half the time we showed them, we hid their profile text. That generated two independent sets of scores for each profile, one score for “the picture and the text together” and one for “the picture alone.” Here’s how they compare. Again, each dot is a user. Essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you.




So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.

Experiment 3: THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
The ultimate question at OkCupid is, does this thing even work? By all our internal measures, the “match percentage” we calculate for users is very good at predicting relationships. It correlates with message success, conversation length, whether people actually exchange contact information, and so on. But in the back of our minds, there’s always been the possibility: maybe it works just because we tell people it does. Maybe people just like each other because they think they’re supposed to? Like how Jay-Z still sells albums?

† Once the experiment was concluded, the users were notified of the correct match percentage.
To test this, we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)† Not surprisingly, the users sent more first messages when we said they were compatible. After all, that’s what the site teaches you to do.




But we took the analysis one step deeper. We asked: does the displayed match percentage cause more than just that first message—does the mere suggestion cause people to actually like each other? As far as we can measure, yes, it does.

When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are. Even when they should be wrong for each other.




The four-message threshold is our internal measure for a real conversation. And though the data is noisier, this same “higher display means more success” pattern seems to hold when you look at contact information exchanges, too.

This got us worried—maybe our matching algorithm was just garbage and it’s only the power of suggestion that brings people together. So we tested things the other way, too: we told people who were actually good for each other, that they were bad, and watched what happened.

Here’s the whole scope of results (I’m using the odds of exchanging four messages number here):




As you can see, the ideal situation is the lower right: to both be told you’re a good match, and at the same time actually be one. OkCupid definitely works, but that’s not the whole story. And if you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth. Thus the career of someone like Doctor Oz, in a nutshell. And, of course, to some degree, mine.

Post: #2

Second article with real story: OkCupid admits setting users up with 'awful' matches, hiding photos and manipulating profiles in mass psychological experiment
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...mbers.html

Quote:OkCupid's co-founder has admitted the firm has been performing mass psychological experiments on users, similar to the ones that landed Facebook in hot water just weeks ago.

Christian Rudder’s blog post, ‘We Experimented on Human Beings!’ backed Facebook's controversial approach - and says its users were subjected to similar experiments without their knowledge or explicit consent.

The company removed text from users’ profiles, hid people’s photos, and even told some users they were exceptionally good for each other when in fact they were in fact an awful match.

The company admittedly performed these experiments just to see what would happen.

‘We might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah,' Rudder wrote.

'But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing.

'Neither does any other website.

'Experiments are how you sort all this out.'

Post: #3

Makes sense- I've even saying that the pics after most for a while. I think guys shoul do whatever they can to make themselves more as attractive as possible in their photos.

Okc dating is essentially tinder but with the pretense that all that other info matters a lot.
It's like comfort tinder.

Post: #4

Online Dating due to our visual nature is a severely skewed market-place:

Ok Cupid experiment with a bunch of f/m fake proiles:

After 7 days:

   

After 4 months: (mailboxes of hottest girls were full after 3 weeks and he did not delete messages - they likely got 2000-4000 messages in 4 months):

   

Now of course if the good-looking men had gone and contacted the women with game, they would have generated some response, but still - online sexual market place is one giving women a huge plus. Tinder is due to the automatic swipe-right-messaging different and girls thus "chase" good-looking guys way more than on OKCupid.

Having good pics can make the difference of +2 in appearance.

Post: #5

Notice even the below average looking women get more than the good looking guy. Hell the 3 other men are not horrific nor on the level of the ugly betties here.

Doesn't tell me anything new really. Women look up, men become thirsty.

Post: #6

Would love to make a dating site for people with a BMI less than 20.
Users would be required to go to a trainer/doctor to have your BMI/body fat percentage checked once every six months. These results are then submitted by the health expert to the site so that your body type can be "verified".

Thin
Athletic
Muscular

would be the only body types on the site and these would all need to undergo a six month verification. If you let your body slip, your account gets deactivated until you get your shit back on track. Also you can view user's "fitness history" to see how much their weight has bounced around in the past.

Post: #7

As a technologist, I admire the guys at OKC. They aren't afraid to question the foundations of their entire system.

The only ethically delicate thing I see is messing with match %, but since it's a completely proprietary algorithm, how do you know it's even working, anyway? It's just a number that you believe.

Quote:After seeing these results, OkCupid also decided to tell people who were actually good for each other, that they were bad, and just to see what would happen. Hearteningly, these pairs quickly realized they were incompatible.

Baloney. 16% vs 20% conversion rate. You could as easily say 80% of everyone on OKC quickly realizes they're incompatible. A journalist who understands statistics is such a rare commodity that Nate Silver started an entire news service based off of that.

What comes out is that the match % is a gigantic signal, and it's a signal to women mostly since they're the ones doing most of the screening. This is exactly what the Mathematician Hacks OKCupid article discovered, so OKC is just corroborating his finding.

Fuck the dailymail and their bullshit outrage. What they don't tell you is that they collect behavior data and run A/B tests too. Everybody does. If they don't their ad network does.

Post: #8

Quote:This whole episode made me curious, so I went and looked up the data for the people who had actually used the blind date app. I found a similar thing: once they got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how good-looking their partner was. Here’s the female side of the experience (the male is very similar).
...

Oddly, it appears that having a better-looking blind date made women slightly less happy—my operating theory is that hotter guys were assholes more often.

How many of those "good times" eventually led to sex?

Then, of course, there's the egotistical women who don't like a partner who is better-looking than they are.

Quote:As you can see, the ideal situation is the lower right: to both be told you’re a good match, and at the same time actually be one. OkCupid definitely works, but that’s not the whole story.

If by "definitely works" they mean has a "measurable in very tiny ways with marginally significant influence." Or, more casually, "doesn't work at all."

Post: #9

I appreciate the research the OKCupid does. If done right, it's very revealing of actions over words. Such research strips away the bullshit of social expectations and what we tell each other in "polite company.

Of course, it's only truly useful if the research methodology is sound and the resulting data clearly points to a solid conclusion.

Post: #10

"As a technologist, I admire the guys at OKC."

"I appreciate the research the OKCupid does. If done right, it's very revealing of actions over words. Such research strips away the bullshit of social expectations and what we tell each other in "polite company.

Of course, it's only truly useful if the research methodology is sound and the resulting data clearly points to a solid conclusion."

Except OKCupid is just as guilty of perpetuating bullshit. Its vaunted algorithm is next to pointless. Academics have been saying for years there is no data to validate their models, or eharmony's or anyone else's. I've been saying the same thing. The most efficient outcome is just getting people in front of each other in real life.

People and girls especially have this belief that with more analysis they can better discern who is a good match for them, sight unseen. In reality, you just have to hit the pavement and talk to them in person. I've long thought that speed dating is one of the better means for matching people, but attractive young girls do not go to singles events.

Also, these studies show that online dating tends to lead to girls banging guys out of their league and then getting pumped and dumped as a result - so people who want relationships or even just to bang their sexual equals are disappointed.

Post: #11

(07-29-2014 12:11 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  ...

Also, these studies show that online dating tends to lead to girls banging guys out of their league and then getting pumped and dumped as a result - so people who want relationships or even just to bang their sexual equals are disappointed.

Then you get Tinder-"realizations" like these:

Quote:Tinderfessions @tinderfessions · 14h
I’ve fucked two guys from tinder and they’ve both stopped talking to me, guess pussy game isn’t that strong - Jan

But alas - her realization will not be correct. There is nothing that she could do via "Game".

Post: #12

(07-29-2014 12:11 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  Except OKCupid is just as guilty of perpetuating bullshit. Its vaunted algorithm is next to pointless. Academics have been saying for years there is no data to validate their models, or eharmony's or anyone else's. I've been saying the same thing. The most efficient outcome is just getting people in front of each other in real life.

That's what I was trying to say, but it wasn't clear enough. The match # is a made up number. The mathematician who "cracked" OKCupid proved this. All it does is give the girl a signal that you & her are "compatible".

Post: #13

(07-29-2014 07:48 PM)RockHard Wrote:  

(07-29-2014 12:11 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  Except OKCupid is just as guilty of perpetuating bullshit. Its vaunted algorithm is next to pointless. Academics have been saying for years there is no data to validate their models, or eharmony's or anyone else's. I've been saying the same thing. The most efficient outcome is just getting people in front of each other in real life.

That's what I was trying to say, but it wasn't clear enough. The match # is a made up number. The mathematician who "cracked" OKCupid proved this. All it does is give the girl a signal that you & her are "compatible".

Once saw a profile that was 0% match and 99% enemy with me.

Totally legit.

Post: #14

UPDATE: Looks like a lot of users haven't been able to login for the past week. Could this be related to the FTC cracking down on them for this experiment?

Many are saying so, even though some claim the that phone app still works.

Pertinent: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30...32351.html