We Experiment On Human Beings!

July 28th, 2014 by Christian Rudder

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:



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.

1,220 Responses to “We Experiment On Human Beings!”

  1. John says:

    The joke truly is on us. This entire experiment was one very planned out media stunt and it put this site on the morning news and in the headlines of most major newspapers. It would also explain why OkCupid charged me this morning without my authorization for the renewal of my A-List membership half a week early. They understood the statistical analysis of people who are upset with the ethics of the companies they have subscriptions with. Chances are low that such people renew their subscriptions- I know for sure I wouldn’t have (and will be disputing this early charge).

    It is one thing to simply data mine because the information that people willingly offer about themselves contributes to the entire controversy. If you want to be a private person, don’t put your information out there, right?

    But two things really irk me about this entire thing. One is that I decided to give money to this company because I appreciated that it provided a free dating service while other sites charge through the nose for inadequate services. I have the right as a paying customer, however, not to be given erroneous information about my matches.

    Secondly, the only conclusion one can make about you knowing when people exchange personal information is that you are reading our private messages. This is akin to a postal worker opening my mail before placing it into my mailbox. That is a federal crime, by the way. Amazing how what is a crime in real life suddenly becomes okay “because it is the internet.”

    At the end of the day though, OkCupid doesn’t care about the fact that they did something with adverse ethical implications. This is because it was done for that reason purposefully. They wanted to make the news as that dating site with the controversy. The sad part is that it seems to be all because they want to follow in the footsteps of Facebook and I always thought OkCupid stood out because they prided themselves on being a site unlike others. How wrong I was.

  2. Rolando says:

    I’m always fascinated by the results these experiments turn up. Glad to see these blogs returning, OKC has lead to both great relationships and great friendships for me, and although I may by your own data rank near the bottom of the barrel here I think my chances of making that special connection are best here.

  3. r says:

    Very disappointed. As John put up, and I totally second him, one thing is data mining and statistics, which is totally OK. Placing fake matches to “see where it goes” is even worse than what Facebook did.

  4. Jerry says:

    After filing a complaint thru their contact link, I was able to get a refund. I, for one, will never be paying them another dime.

  5. onstocks says:

    Good job. I like anonymous, unbiased statistics. It helps in dentifying theres matches for everyone

  6. Andy says:

    Facebook experiments on people in order to generate Ad revenue at the expense of making people significantly more agitated and reducing their quality of life by feeding them emotionally charged positive and negative content which inspires bi-polar behavior in many.

    OKC experiments on people in order to improve their service and their systems, without investing in new and ever evolving Ad Spam that AdBlocker can’t completely block with ease. OKC has by far the best system on the market, among all dating services, paid and free alike.

    As someone who spent 7 consecutive months on it, met someone amazing, and got married after a year of being together, sitting here quite happy today, I can say with certainty that they’ve done me a great service. Their service has been growing in popularity as they’ve improved it over the past year, the rising figures for people online at any given time and the speed with which scammers are removed prove that pretty quickly.

    I’d have to say that if anyone is truly outraged by a site doing scientific studies in order to make their site better at it’s intended purpose, especially by suggesting they skew the figures by removing a portion of the population from their test sample, they should die a slow an painful death, alone.

    Fully automated search criteria can also detect personal info being exchanged, in the same way it is often used to detect scammer/fake profiles you worthless little shithead.

    There are no negative ethical implications in this case.

  7. Joe says:

    Have you ever heard of informed consent?

    Your attitude stinks. As for “this is how the Internet works” no it isn’t – I don’t play with people like this on the internet and I trust you not to do so as well.

    You’ve lost all trust.

  8. Janet says:

    I was shocked to get this email from OKC:

    <>

    Was this part of one of these unauthorized social experiments? Were these new matches really rated as “more attractive”? Was I? Was this done simply to get women to spend more time on the site? Does every woman get one of these emails about a month after joining?

    Janet

  9. Janet says:

    Hey JanetNola,

    We just detected that you’re now among the most attractive people on OkCupid.

    We learned this from clicks to your profile and reactions to you in Quickmatch. Did you get a new haircut or something?
    Well, it’s working!

    To celebrate, we’ve adjusted your OkCupid experience:

    The quote was removed from my previous post. Here it is:

    You’ll see more attractive people in your match results.

    This won’t affect your match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match’s answers. But we’ll recommend more attractive people to you. You’ll also appear more often to other attractive people.

    Sign in to see your newly-shuffled matches. Have fun, and don’t let this go to your head.

  10. Janet says:

    The quote was stripped from my previous comment. Here it is:

    Hey JanetNola,

    We just detected that you’re now among the most attractive people on OkCupid.

    We learned this from clicks to your profile and reactions to you in Quickmatch. Did you get a new haircut or something?
    Well, it’s working!

    To celebrate, we’ve adjusted your OkCupid experience:

    You’ll see more attractive people in your match results.

    This won’t affect your match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match’s answers. But we’ll recommend more attractive people to you. You’ll also appear more often to other attractive people.

    Sign in to see your newly-shuffled matches. Have fun, and don’t let this go to your head.

  11. Janet says:

    Hey, someone – please edit my OKC username from the previous comments, and delete the duplicate! I accidentally included it when the quote was stripped and I had to paste again.

  12. DS says:

    You’re a f*cking stupid *sshole, Christian. Thanks for messing up my life and the lives of many others.

  13. MP says:

    Nice to know. Now I know that I’ll never make a profile on OKC! If you treat people like shit, you will be treated as shit too.

  14. Jan says:

    Phosphor,

    “Furthermore, you’ve made it fairly difficult to find casual sex partners on the site, which is the other giant thing you use online for (again, because it’s not something that’s easy to ask at a bar).” (July 28, 2014 at 3:08 pm)

    I’m FOR anything that makes it “fairly difficult to find casual sex partners on the site” – and if the site wants to attract female users, that needs to be made fairly difficult! As far as I’m concerned, I’d prefer to only be shown guys who are looking for very long-term relationships.

  15. GB says:

    Oh my god when I saw “OKcupid defends human experiments” I was seriously concerned you had been kidnapping users and doing like Nazi medical experiments on them or something.

  16. Gwailo says:

    users of hook up sites, most of whom lie regularly in their postings, upset because the site is being deceitful? Hilarious

  17. Dave says:

    I’ve done a data analysis of the comments section and come to the conclusion that there are a crap load of whiny bitches on the internet.

    Get over yourselves! You’re not that important and they didn’t experiment on you individually.

    I’m sorry that your sad, pathetic little life led you to be such a miserable POS all of the time. It’s no wonder you’re single.

  18. Cry me a river says:

    I’ve done a data analysis of the comments section and come to the conclusion that there are a crap load of whiny babies on the internet.

    Get over yourselves! You’re not that important and they didn’t experiment on you individually.

    I’m sorry that your sad, pathetic little life led you to be such a miserable POS all of the time. It’s no wonder you’re single.

  19. JCM says:

    No matter what the reasons for deceiving your users it is still deception. Yes we understand the value of experimentation, however it is done with actual humans without informed consent. Any University or government doing this would find themselves in deep trouble. All you have to do is tell people what you are doing so they can decide if they want to participate. Perhaps you are afraid of how that would affect people’s perception of your service? Again it all comes to down to ethical behaviour.

  20. Jason says:

    I think this is pretty awesome. If your going to run a site to match people together, wouldn’t you want it to actually be a good match? Getting people to talk and break the ice is a huge step for a lot of people. To become a better site, you need to know if what your doing works or if there are ways of improving it. Experiments like this are critical to making sure things work and learning how to improve the site. I love how it proves how shallow people really are. Most of the comments here just reinforce that fact. Keep up the good work! I for one am interested in what more you guys find out.

  21. Rob says:

    Wow, this site is built on using data to modify user’s experience on the site to lead to outcomes that users desire – actual connections.

    There is no way they could do this without creating a hypothesis and testing that hypothesis.

    Even the one where the match % were flipped upside down seems totally reasonable. If they found that match % did not predict actual long term exchanges, then match % should be scrapped. Or even more weirdly if it caused exchanges regardless of actual matching, then perhaps more thought would need to be put into whether match % is something that needs to be adjusted to not improperly interfere with a relationship that has potential.

    This is why research and testing matters. Otherwise you are flying blind and perhaps causing great unintentional harm because you never bothered to figure out the truth.

    I am glad that OKC tested whether match % is garbage. It looks like it is not quite garbage afterall, but is still pretty questionable. Without following people after the fact to see if they get married and such, I think this experiment is not deep enough to draw any conclusions from.

  22. Jace says:

    Congratulations on losing any remaining respect I held in mind for OKCupid, post-match.com takeover. As part of your BS match score rearrangement, you’ve utterly defeated the ENTIRE POINT of your site. The sole feature of your site that made it stand out from all others was the matching system, not its freeness. Now that we all know your rating system could at any time be lying to us, what reason do we have for believing in it or participating in question responses?

    I assume this was the ultimate plan in disassembling OKCupid for Match.com.

    When you lied about match scores, I did indeed get contacted by someone who wouldn’t have written otherwise. The result? I looked at her profile, her questions, and her communication with me and decided OKCupid was insane. I was polite with her, as I always am with everyone on the site, explaining that, despite our match scores, an attentive observation of each other’s profiles proves we were anything but a match. This wasted our time and left us untrusting of the ratings. After okcupid sent me the correction lie email (presenting a totally fictional reason for the incorrect score), I shared this with the person who had previously written to me. Now I’m going to go tell her that it wasn’t a mistake and that we were lied to.

  23. Gregory Maus says:

    Honestly, whether a stunt to promote Rudder’s book or not, I have to applaud OKCupid for being so open about these experiments. Companies (and possibly governments) conduct these sorts of experiments all the time, sometimes automatically, and at least OKCupid (and perhaps slightly less intentionally, Facebook) were willing to be open about it.

    That said, while I have no particular issue with the first two experiments mentioned here (or any of the other analyses that have been reported on this blog for years), the third may cross something of a qualitative line for actively deceiving users about compatibility.

    Even so, the actual difference in response rates of that experiment is fairly trivial, so it didn’t actually change much or likely affect anyone’s life significantly in the grand scheme of things. Of course, the alarmist panic/rage machine that is the media doesn’t particularly about such fine points and will continue to facilitate the story catching like wildfire–exactly as intended.

  24. Matt says:

    So you blew the whole concept of the website so you profit from the sales of your book, with your “operating theory is that hotter guys were assholes more often?” Somehow I would expect a CEO to keep those theories in the locker room and not expose the guile to your entire operation.

  25. Aeon says:

    Ditto Mike D.

    I don’t get what all the butthurt is about. Are people *that* naive about sites, especially social media, collecting data? Especially a site that is based on “math” or collecting data for the purpose of determining matches?

    I used OKC on and off for two and a half years. It was, by far, the better of the dating sites. It was indeed my favorite for its layout and matching system. I put a lot of stock in the matching system, and it worked, and worked well for determining compatibility in key areas/criteria. But I certainly wasn’t naive or gullible. I *knew* what questions resulted in higher match percentages. Anyone with the ability to think objectively and critically should be able to compare a match percentage with the answers to the questions, especially “deal-breaker” or mandatory questions. Also, if the content of the profile doesn’t line up with the answers and match percentage, it should be more than obvious.

    I knew the difference, in how questions were answered, the profile content, between a 30% match and a 90% match. They were glaringly obvious.

    The men I dated or formed relationships with, it wasn’t simply due to perceived compatibility. The match percentage actually aligned with their worldviews, objectives, ideas, and personality. They were actual matches.

    And in my husband’s case, I didn’t assume he was an excellent match because it said he was a 96% match. I came across many high 90’s matches, but I needed to dig further to see if that percentage had actual weight to it. That high 90s match might have only answered 200 questions (compared to my 1000+), which wasn’t high enough for me to judge true compatibility in key areas. There was often a lack of variety in the questions answered. Sometimes their profiles weren’t actually filled out, and I greatly preferred lengthier and more detailed profiles.

    In my husband’s case, he answered 1600 questions, and I answered 1200. We answered over 1000 questions in common. We had similar mandatory or deal-breaker questions. The content aligned with his answers, and he presented himself pretty accurately. His profile was detailed and in depth. The matching system works, at least in my situation, and others I know. But one should not rely on the percentage alone. They should review other information in order to reach an actual assessment. (answers to questions, content of profile, exchange of messages — diction, writing style, content, interest, etc.)

  26. ADHDColorbomb says:

    The comment section here is just hilarious with all the outrage. Basically the experiment showed that
    A) People are shallow and don’t actually look at a whole lot other than how people look,
    B) That people often do not actually read what people post about themselves,
    C) That people just look at the metric number and don’t actually look at how they stack up against someone in the questions which for the most part drives the metrics and see how they actually agree or disagree on various aspects of life.

    ALL OF WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF HOW THE SITE IS SET UP

    So to summarize: people are angry that they cannot trust their own shallowness and laziness now. LMFAO.

  27. HannibalMiller says:

    The outrage here is hilarious. They’ve been doing this kind of thing since the beginning. They don’t need to specifically view the content of your messages to get this data. Quit being such whiny babies.

  28. SpotOn says:

    Pretty much matches with my own findings on other sites:
    1. Men and Women are vain, picture means everything. Although the less attractive the person is the more likely they are going to read the profile. For example, on sites I used a very desirable guy picture and some stuff “I’m actually married. I haven’t been able to hold a job in years. Has a serious drinking and smoking problem.”
    The friend, chat, email etc requests flowed like water.
    I did the same with a female profile although in the body of the profile I simply put “I’m actually a guy.”
    Same result, a flood of emails.
    Nobody reads the profiles if the person is attractive enough.
    Ideally in my findings you have to look..mostly attractive and have a picture of you doing stuff you love the most. *That* sells your profile.

    Anywho, I’m happily married. I was one of the odd data skews. I read the profiles then sent a message. Really you have to. Glad I did, I’ve been married for 15 years. The matching system on 3 sites said we were the worst match. Still tease each other after all this time.

    Sorry for any you who feel cheated but the odds are stacked against you missing on that perfect person. Maybe you SHOULD read the profiles? Just sayin…

  29. interested says:

    @ OP/Christian Rudder: So that’s why there were no new posts since 2011! I’ve read all of the posts in this blog while procrastinating at work, twice; they are excellent. I will definitely try to read this book.

    @ John “the joke truly is on us”:
    They probably have a system to check when people send x@x.com or ###-###-####, I highly doubt they read each message to check for this. As for planned media stunt, if you check the blog, they have a whole bunch of posts about statistics, it’s not the first time they’ve done this. Of course publishing this now and adding a link for the book at the bottom are in the interest of selling the book, but even your favourite actor went to Jay Leno to sell his new movie and Jay Leno fucking sucks.

  30. Schmojoe says:

    I don’t see why people are getting so riled up, especially when the curtain was pulled. It kinda sounds like alot of people had numerous bad experiences more so than actually losing respect for the site. If that is the case, my condolences. I personally have met people off of this site anywhere from 10 – 99% match (never really see a 1) and all (but one) of those interactions went well. I didn’t go in expecting anything of the person except to be treated like a person- and I think that’s the trick. If I were to go in with the attitude “I expect to get or be banged TONIGHT” that would change my perspective on the site’s use and purpose and my opinion of people kinda as a whole. I find that the best way to use this site is to virtually wave to someone online to join you for a drink in real life and allow an organic relationship to form from there. Or maybe I just got lucky that not *everybody* is a suspicious asshole.

  31. Kevin says:

    Love your posts! Where have you been the last 3 years? :)

  32. Rob says:

    The testing doesn’t strike me as particularly unethical. What bugs me is that this study verifies that too many people place too much faith in this stupid “matching” percentage, as I had feared. So many of the questions are just plain *silly*! “Which superpower would you rather have? (flight or invisibility)” They are fun to look at (especially if someone places a funny explanation on the end), but to take seriously the percentage of questions you answer the same? Why would anyone think that “chemistry,” or even compatibility, could be predicted by filling out a questionnaire??? That’s why I’m not on eHarmony! I personally *do* read profiles, but I understand how difficult it is to get one’s personality across in writing, so I still contact some women who fail to do it well (because they are pretty, or have a nice smile – *something* has to attractive). In the end, I guess I have to hope that women who *really* would hit it off with me are *also* reading profiles, and *also* smart enough to discount the stupid matching algorithm, and instead get their sense of men from their pictures and what they actually *say*! Cupid seems to still have faith in their matching algorithm, but hopefully fewer people will have such faith after reading this article. But maybe most won’t read it, and all they will get out of the media hoopla is that “Cupid experiments on people”! I noticed that some people took this as a cynical ploy by Cupid, to simply increase their exposure. Perhaps. My assumption had been that they were just being proactive, and trying to manage the reaction, rather than being caught back on their heels by a leak. But perhaps this will help Cupid maintain its market niche as being a more “upscale” site: because I think stupid and lazy people will be more upset at the idea of this testing than intelligent ones will be. As someone who never took the percentages seriously, how could I be upset if Cupid told me false ones?

  33. alleuhrenbleibenstehen says:

    I’m not mad. The match percentage is a joke anyway. No one wants to date a clone of their self. Conformity is taken as a surrogate for compatibility. I do enjoy Okcupid’s refreshing lack of morality though – in a completely non-sarcastic way. It’s fun to see people lash out when they’re reminded that they can be tricked just like everyone else. Love is anarchy after all, and what better place for it than here on the internet. Might want to scale back the “genius” talk a little though – don’t want to break an arm jerking yourselves off before you have to wave goodbye to all the disenfranchised guinea pigs making a beeline for pof and the other free dating sites.

  34. Jack says:

    Hmmm. If a dating site experiments with people to see if they will date, and they date, and sometimes it works, what’s the problem here? How do you figure out how to make your site more successful than your average bar? I think you experiment. Good luck to them and to all of those who continue to be members and meet great – and sometimes not so great – people!

  35. Sigmundr says:

    Anything I put on the internet, I’m aware that anyone can view. So I am not ever bothered about these things. Don’t want them to know? Don’t put it on the internet. It’s a very simple method.

  36. Draga says:

    I’ve not lost trust in OKC for admitting this. Yes, data is very important and the experiments done here are not as bad as what facebook did. If we’re going to be upset about getting teased a bit with the accuracy of profiles being a match, perhaps you’d like to be a bit more concerned with how many users blatantly lie on their profiles in the first place. Thousands of fake pictures, fake summaries, questions answered in a business-like “ill answer the way the audience wants to hear” sort of way.

    If you are upset with OKC I have some bad news for you, sons. Dating in the real world is just as bad. It’s all about trial and error, and maybe OKC needed to test some of these things to help their algorithm programming a bit.

    Look on the bright side. Facebook admitted to purposely messing with our moods. I can tell you for a fact that the constant changes to my newsfeed in the consistent ongoing experiments they aren’t telling you about, and during the time thereof I was far more depressed. So what if a website showed you skewed match results. It’s up to you in the end who to decide is a match, not a silly algorithm or even an RNG. OKC hasn’t tried to make its users suicidal yet, so they’re okay in my book.

  37. Cheri says:

    I’m alright by this. It’s plainly obvious that Match % has nothing to do with actual compatibility, only agreeability. Anyone who has been disappointed by this article can be upset about it all they want but it’s only saying that most people looking for a biased love are idiots and don’t in fact care about who you are or what you do but what you can offer them, and it’s undeniably true that these people exist regardless of whether you like hearing it or not. There’s no reason to be offended unless you consider yourself part of this mass of strangers that realistically have nothing to do with you.

  38. pebblesnbambam says:

    yeah, okay so i read this long ass article and all i got was info i already knew. mmkayyyyy so i went on a ton of dates from the site and at least half of the guys were like, “what? you have a kid?” yeah muthafudgesickle, didn’t you read my profile? i guess all those site visits were you just being a filthy, dirty boy making lewd “hand gestures” at my cute squirrel face. come on, y’all. OKC it’s a networking site for players: they have found the perfect little platform for easy, nearly infinite hookups. but this goes both ways, boys. i know some pretty fierce maneaters chomping at the bit, too. rahr! if you are going in with pure intentions, best of luck. you’ll need some armor. and garlic. all these people are vampires!

    moral of the story: DON’T BELIEVE THE INTERNET, dummies. Lemon OUT.

  39. S says:

    Here’s my experience:

    I’m an A-list subscriber; I pay for the service so that other users don’t see when I view their profile.

    In September of 2013, I started getting emails with a picture of me and another user (with a “+” sign between our photos) and the language: “You’re a match” and “You like each other!”. BUT — these emails were telling me I had matched with people I had never 1) “liked”, 2) rated (with 1-5 stars), 3) messaged or 4) bookmarked. Some of the emails were for profiles I had never even visited.

    What do you think each person interprets “You like each other!” to mean? I assume it means the other person swiped affirmatively in Quickmatch, rated with 4-5 stars or bookmarked.

    A few times, the user with whom I was matched (and who received the same email) would send me a message saying something like, “Hey — I see that we ‘liked’ each other. We should meet for coffee …”. I wouldn’t respond, and occasionally I would run into these people in real life at the grocery store or a restaurant.

    I think I may have been an unwitting participant in psychology experiment #3 (or perhaps a different experiment.) Other options are: 1) there is a bug in the software that “likes” users when the user has not actively done so or 2) “You like each other!” is just an extremely poor choice of copy for “you may be compatible — you should check each other out.”

    I contacted customer support multiple times, and they insisted that I must be swiping users positively in their Quickmatch feature. This disingenuous matching happened 20-30 times, so it’s highly unlikely that I swiped incorrectly. In fact, I rarely use the Quickmatch feature. I also have no doubt that many of the users for which I’ve been told “you like each other!” are users whose profiles I’ve never once visited.

    So now there are people in my community who think I’ve indicated a romantic interest in them, but they think I ignore them when they reach out to confirm that interest. It reminds me of someone in junior high school lying to someone about someone else’s romantic interest in order to bully them.

    What if a company called someone on the phone and told them someone else had a romantic interest in them? Would this be a violation of privacy? Defamation? Bullying?

    What does it do to a person’s reputation when others in a real offline community thinks he or she is deliberately playing with others’ emotions? What does it do to a company’s reputation when users think it is playing with their paying customers’ emotions? What does the American Psychological Association think about a web company doing cruel experiments on humans?

    Every time I got one of these deceptive emails, I felt anger and confusion. What did that do to the quality of my daily life?

  40. stern says:

    I loved the ending.

    But I admit I was expecting a take on the tinder system: a stripped down “matching” where the only variants are the user pictures, the locality and if both liked each other. This seems clearly the new- and someone would say the most functional- answer to the dating networks dilemma.

  41. Kat says:

    The idea that this “experiment” would do no harm is ridiculous. Matching people with fundamentally different POVs could certainly do harm emotionally, and the potential for violence is there.

    Further, it does harm to OKC’s reputation. Why should anyone trust this site again?

  42. Kassiah says:

    I really think that users that have one sentence or less under each section of their profile should be deleted after a certain period of time. If someone doesn’t have anything to say about themselves, then I automatically assume that they’re trying to just get by with their looks, which isn’t a personality trait in which I’m interested.

  43. Duncan says:

    Awwwwwe yeah okcupid data blog is back.
    This is literally the best thing ever.
    Thank you for making my Tuesday amazing.

    With much love, from an aspiring economist.

  44. M says:

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

    I am a guinneapig. And your words are worth nothing.

  45. Jon says:

    That’s how websites work? Pretty awful response, way to shirk any sort of responsibility.

  46. Aeon says:

    “The idea that this “experiment” would do no harm is ridiculous. Matching people with fundamentally different POVs could certainly do harm emotionally, and the potential for violence is there.”

    Really!? Because only naive people can’t deduce when a match percentage is not a reflection of the individuals answers to the questions of the content of their profile.

    I could spot a fake 90% match easily. I had a lot of high 90s matches in the time I used OKC, and if a profile displayed a 90s match, but his answers didn’t reflect what I associate with a match in the 90s (certain criteria met), and his profile gave me a different vibe, I’d know it was hogwash.

    How could someone *not* know that a false match, as in the experiment, is not a true match by the first phone conversation or initial date. I mean, really. Perhaps certain demographics of people simply do not properly deduce and assess possible matches outside the percentage itself. In that case, it’s their own damn fault.

    Had previous partners been a false match, I would have known very, very early on just by their answers alone. If the deal-breaker questions expressed a worldview opposite of my own, it would be patently obvious. Heck, even the content of the profile would be telling enough.

  47. Pete says:

    Where do I sign up for the Class Action lawsuit to get all my money back?

  48. Brian says:

    Um… wow.

    You’ve managed to out-skeeve even Facebook. Congratulations.

    Bonus points for the gleeful, “this is how it is, kiddies” tone of your article, too.

    Oh, by the way? I just canceled my (paid) OkCupid account. I know the loss of my meager financial contribution won’t have any effect on your bottom line, but I’ll feel better knowing I’m not giving any money to such untrustworthy, unrepentant jerks.

    ‘bye, OKC. It was fun while it lasted.

  49. Sherry Levinson says:

    Perhaps you should concentrate on content and authenticity of people. This site blows for people who are actually looking for a match. There ate so many fake liars wirh boggest id that is never checked for accuracy. So called soldiers in uniform from other countries saying they live in nyc when they are not in the country. Same for contractors another broad base term of people who don’t live in the counyry let alone nyc nys. Who is checking on that? Who checks the photos which shouldn’t be posted. That is a study you should be doing

  50. Tim says:

    over 7 years ago I met my girlfriend on OK cupid. We have been together ever since, we are planning to get married in the next year. I tell this story because I have seen a lot of “you butthurt people are single losers” or “you must have had a bad experience” or “clearly it didn’t work for you and that’s why you are upset now” posts.

    The fact is, coming from someone from the old guard of OK cupid that fits none of those statements, this was flat out an immoral thing they did. The understood agreement is that free users give info in exchange for use of OK cupids matching algorithms to find a compatible match. The users, free and paid ones, gave all that information with the (as it turns out now false) belief that OK cupid would give them as accurate a match as they were able to give. As it turns out, they did not, and went as far as to deliberately give them information that would be completely false. All in the name of some experiment where you find out if some people are willingly lazy and shallow. Something walking around in public for 5 minutes in any major city would have given you the same results doing.

    This wasn’t wrong because we feel like “butthurt losers” it was wrong because it was a complete breach of confidence between two parties who had an agreement and implied trust.