Everybody is nearby when you have subway trains connecting half the people in your country together in under an hour.
The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.
I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect, you don't realize when the golden years are!
http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...
OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but message them anyway.
Tinder's data shows "chance of approach", which is brutal for men who are not too good looking.
IIRC, OkCupid's data shows a bit different thing. The distribution of ratings determines chance of messages/likes - the larger stddev the better chances. IIRC, the most messaged men were ones with ratings characterized by bimodal distribution. Therefore, the most messaged men were not the ones with highest visual rating. I do not recall the distribution of messages, so can't comment much on that.
[0]http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...
You try to improve these things. Going to the gym etc, or focusing on one's career is a start.
You want easy women? Go get a working class job that is predominantley women. Date foreigners. Go to a festival, hang out with hippies, ect.
I have no idea why men put themselves online and then complain it's a stacked deck. One of the greatest facts about real world dating is, you don't have to be the hottest guy on tinder, just the hottest guy in the room (or her mind) that night.
If Tinder sucks, get off it, women will follow when they realise the top 20% of guys dont service 80% of women.
Walk away.
Frankly the bit about dating that bothers me is that women are way too forward and pushy. Instant 'attention' is such a turn off, I cannot wait until women are more demoralized.
I was raised to pursue women, to hunt/chase for something worth getting. Women are constantly ready-to-go, a repetitive temptation and it's a constant turn off. Give me something to imagine, a skirt to chase, an air of mystery, or try and get to know me before it's "straight to the bedroom".
I don't like women as they commonly are in my experience, right now. I don't recognize them as the women I grew up with. They're just sex bots.
What it didn't seem to account for was if you rated someone high enough (I can't remember if it required 4 or 5 stars), OKCupid would notify the person in question that you had done so. If you didn't want these notifications being fired off you had to adjust your ratings accordingly - now 3 stars is the highest rating you are going to give.
I think the stats really just ended up reflecting that men were generally more comfortable having their ratings broadcast than women were.
(What they actually said was that women rate men much lower than men rate women, but the women still respond the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't mean anything.)
> When men message women, women tend to respond most often to men around their own ages. But when women message men, they’re actually more likely to get a response from younger men than they are from older ones. A 40-year-old woman will have better luck messaging a 25-year-old man than a 55-year-old one, according to the data. And a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to a message from a 50-year-old woman than a message from any other age group. When women make the first move, the age gap dating norm is reversed.
[0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-th...
The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person.
It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.
Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you don't.
> and obviously not specific to their race.
It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If you're in a country where the men in a specific age are short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're not all single because their women aren't attracted to them.
And depending on culture, it matters more what impresses their parents, which is being a doctor-lawyer-astronaut who owns a house.
Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong.
You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.
I have no idea if women really are attracted to taller men, but I know what you hear people say isn't the whole truth either.
I’m glad you haven’t had that experience. Doesn’t discount that it’s a real thing.
Comments already devolving into "Yes it matters!" "No it doesn't!" only citing anecdotal personal experience.
I will say that all the women I dated on OKC were shorter than me, likely because it’s common for women to filter by height.
I dated women who were not shorter than me, but met them IRL.
When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today. Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.
/s
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnp589JuL0
[2] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-annie-hall-19...
Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about.
That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.
It’s even more obvious with high school degrees. Most people cross that threshold, so the people who didn’t now represent a usual group of under achievers. The threshold is far below what FAANG’s are looking for, but requiring a HS/collage degree can effectively presort applicants for jobs with lower thresholds.
Unfortunately, such methods consistently exclude many worthwhile applicants from a wide range of jobs the same way asking for a criminal background check. But that then sets up a stronger feedback loop as people have stronger incentives to cross that threshold.
Of course you have to omit the part about taking a gap year and being a community college transfer student.
The only time people who are more than a few years into their career are asked about degrees (and grades) in an interview is at very bureaucratic organizations or when being interviewed by someone themselves barely out of school who lacks awareness.
> is at very bureaucratic organizations
Seeing as this career is a golden ticket with a guaranteed job for life if you’re half competent, I’d spin the complaints from some about these practices around: if an organisation is so detached from the realities of commercial software delivery and what makes a good hire that they’re asking about high school or your degree (and you do have experience), you’ve just received a boon of you all the information you needed. They’re not worth your time and don’t have their eyes on the ball. I’d just be thankful to have dodged a bullet!
Thinking about it I bet someone somewhere has a MA focusing on collage and produces incredible art, so no hard feelings here.
They could have remained as the high-end of dating. 90% of men don’t enjoy using Tinder, and for women it’s just a utility service when being bachelor.
One is that they put the Internet in everybody's hands, literally.
The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface, both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly), the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of whatever it was initially, is severely penalised.
When I'm typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words I'm typing, or the source I'm typing from, or just off into space as I'm thinking my thoughts ... and be reasonably assured that what I think I'm typing is what's actually appearing on screen. And if not, editing to correct and fix issues is reasonably straightforward. If necessary I'll switch to a Real Editor (that is, vim, Vale Bram Moolenaar) which is another quantum leap beyond in-browser textbox editing.
When I'm typing at a virtual touchscreen keyboard, I am staring at the keys themselves and trying to hit the the keys I'm actually intending to hit. I'm not monitoring the output (which invariably has errors), I'm not looking at source text, I'm not thinking and composing my thoughts.
And then editing what I've written is also painful.
The resulting typos, losses of thought, and general incoherence in my own writing absolutely pains me to look at. From what I can tell, other people seem to suffer similarly.
I've given up using mobile devices for input (unless I can use a hardware keyboard, and even that rarely), and ... frankly it's a much improved situation.
Smartphones shallow the mind in many ways.
You won't be surprised I've never got the point of limited space places like twitter...
When people said that those text pages, around 2000, what was the name? WAP? were going to get everybody online, I was very skeptical. But of course, that was pre-iPhone.
One of my daily drivers is a large (13.3") e-ink tablet. Reading on that is actually a pleasure, though it's led me to another conclusion: scrolling sucks.
I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than ePub) both because the same material stays in the same place on the same page regardless of other settings (I have a strongly spatial memory), and because the layout is usually just simply much better than what fluid-layouts achieve.
What really drives me nuts though is having to scroll on webpages. It's imprecise, half the time I'm clicking on something I'd not intended to, and it's much harder and less pleasing to read.
But size and print clarity alone make this a huge improvement over smartphone displays.
Sorry to hear about the eyesight issues.
At home I use a 27'' screen with the regular glasses. I fear that if for a next job at some office they don't provide a similar one, the situation will repeat, now with regular glasses vs reading glasses :-m
I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than ePub)
ePub didn't grow on me and I couldn't put my finger on why, I guess that's the reason.
About WAP phones, this was the one the company provided:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/gefgsm...
Not bad, but not much I could do with it and they took away when I resigned.
The problem of focusing at multiple distances is ... a challenge.
I've reported issues / feature requests to Daniel multiple times, most of those have been addressed.
The "save to ePub" feature is among my absolute favourites. It's simply genius:
I am fine with "instantly jump by constant amount per mousewheel click"
Smooth scrolling ? Much worse
Smooth scrolling custom-implemented in JS, with ramp-in ramp-down speed? Close the webpage
This is reasonably determinative (the scroll distance is the same in each case), convenient (it's easy to hit those keys), and not confusable with other intent actions. That last point is key as very often when I'm attempting a scroll action on a touchscreen interface I instead commit a click action (usually navigating off-page). Which is maddening.
On touchscreens, not only can I not scroll by a prescribed amount, not only is input through an onscreen keyboard completely crippled, but there's an ever-present drag/click ambiguity which on Android at least (and from my limited experience with iPhones suggests there too) is everpresent.
Add in e-ink, and there are the additional levels that refresh rates drop low enough that following scrolling is tedious, and the display technology makes the many, many paints of a long scroll expensive in terms of battery life. Web browsing drains battery at 10x the rate of my e-book reader.
Einkbro at least mitigates some of that. Going back to Firefox or Onyx's Chrome-based browser is excruciating.
I never thought of it, but now that you mention it, yeah my eyes are on the text, not on the typing.
I switched to messagease in the first place because I make far less mistakes and it's faster to fix a one-letter goof than redo a whole word with swype (sometimes several times, also the gestures fail on unusual or jargon words).
The concept here does look as if it fits touchscreens better, appreciate your mentioning it.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a website duplicating the original OKCupid method. It's just that it requires someone willing to say "no" to the Marginal User and stay niche.
And from what I can tell, Mastodon is duplicating the original, pre-value-extraction Twitter experience. But the main filter it has at the moment is the network effects from Twitter and Facebook; as it grows that filter effect will be reduced.
/s
There are plenty of options to separate smart people from regular crowd. IMHO, a separate DNS server, which unlocks alternative Internet, is the easiest way to move away from regular people, because it's a bit complicated to switch DNS on a mobile device.
IMHO, we need a bait. Something, that will bring in smart people, and only smart people. HN detracts regular people, because it looks boring and doesn't help to continue discussions. This is good for HN, but bad for discussions (and spamers).
I'm thinking about mix of a court and wikipedia. Something, where we can play our game (who is right? who is the smarter?) on steroids, something where we can layout our arguments, facts, ideas, and then discuss them (flame all night long), until someone else, an arbiter, will read all that and declare a winner. IMHO, a topic and number of win/lost/unfinished discussions will be a good indication of smartiness and expertise in a domain.
> I'm thinking about mix of a court and wikipedia. Something, where we can play our game (who is right? who is the smarter?) on steroids, something where we can layout our arguments, facts, ideas, and then discuss them (flame all night long), until someone else, an arbiter, will read all that and declare a winner. IMHO, a topic and number of win/lost/unfinished discussions will be a good indication of smartiness and expertise in a domain.
Any system based on voting will be overwhelmed by clueless people upvoting "wrong" thing, just look at reddit.
Only moderation works but that brings all kinds of problems with who is moderator and who chooses them, and what they are allowed to do etc.
It is designed to serve text documents with links and not much more. That it is a poor choice for anything else is a feature, not a bug.
Of course then it would be mostly bots as it would probably be trivial for modern LLMs to solve.
Bitnet Relay in 1992 had some, not even all universities connected and I know of marriages that originated in the IRL(!) relay parties. We actually drove across Europe to meet our online friends.
> for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean. Specifically, no more than 1/k^2 of the distribution's values can be k or more standard deviations away from the mean.
IQ is (if I recall correctly) normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15. So for a distance of 1.3... standard deviation (i.e. a distance of 20), you can't have more than 1/1.3...^2 = 56.25% of the population so far from the mean (below 80 or above 120), or 28.125% _above_ 120.
(I found my literal 99% match before OKCupid went too wrong, so I don't really know how it fell. I'm assuming overt monetization poisoned the well.)
Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad students and don't love writing (or reading) essays.
The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.
It allowed folks a direct avenue to those they found attractive and could use skills other than paying, stellar photography, and quotes from highly upvoted r/Tinder comments as a way to convince others to go on dates.
People have been either really successful with the way dating apps operate now (they’re incredibly attractive males or just about all females) or they’re incredibly frustrated because the algorithms have taken so much control away.
It’s a sad reality. RIP OKC.
"New Yorkers will say 'only in New York!' and it's the most normal shit ever."
the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?
You can read the paper they published: "events can make sense" https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/krohn.htm...
I met some ex-OkCupid engineers at a later company who said the framework was smart but a pain to maintain in then long run.
I was nodding my head very hard at this essay, but this has given me something to chew on.
Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter OKC seems to once have had.
The problem is that when you choose eternally needing customers you have to switch to the types of people who will never have a long term relationship - which Tinder style apps work better for.
But those kind of people also drive away the ones looking for a long-term partner.
Really sounds like poisoning the well.
I had another OKC date from that era where the woman had a very high IQ, her father was a prolific author and her late 20’s brother was VP of ask.com at the time.
I had just assumed it was the Silicon Valley bubble clientele (and still just might’ve been). But only 3 years later I recall younger male coworkers describing how much dating apps declined and how terrible the dating scene had become with “swipe culture”.
Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
Like if you have the same let's say 20% profit in the world of business is not enough, you want the RATE of your return to go higher even if the product allowed you to stay stupidity rich.
Economically better is a good pair of words that leads to enshittification via greed
As they say, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
Enjoying the generosity of other people is fine, but it gives you no right to expect it to last indefinitely.
Have you read the post or seen how the things go?
The paying user get fucked too, just give it time.
You are right. The greed of affectionate users who refuse to pay has destroyed many a service!
That you would not pay $100/month for a site like the original OkCupid.
I always had this weird vague hunch that spark match become OKCupid. Any info on this?
> SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later renamed OkCupid.
And I definitely think you're off base about mobile devices being popular because they're mobile. People will sit at home and use a phone that is an incredibly worse experience than using an actual computer, and think it's an adequate substitute. They don't need the mobility in that situation, but they really think there's nothing wrong with the user experience.
I’m not exactly the demographic of “only uses mobile” - I am very much a “pre-mobile internet user” (coding, games, music all required me to pick up some desktop skills) but can attest to the fact that I don’t hate the experience in a way that’s commensurate with how much I’d hate having a hot laptop on my stomach or sitting in some other room typing this out.
At what age does someone need root access to become interested in a career in CS/IT/web dev/whatever?
Or, if not root access, like what kind of "desktop level capabilities" should I have had that I did not have, given that I did not have a desktop as a teenager or younger?
I am Gen X. I can think of exactly 0 friends who had their own desktops as teenagers. (Their own, as in were not really their parents' work computer, did not have to share with the family, could do whatever they wanted with, etc.)
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
You do not need root access necessarily, but you do need to get familiarity with the platforms you will actually be using when working, ie. Windows and maybe macOS.
For Gen X and most of millennials, that platform was the only platform that existed. Using computers necessitated becoming familiar with "real" computers. That is no longer the case which is why gen Z are digital natives that have the digital literacy on a similar level to baby boomers.
That's the root of this blog post, the rise of Tinder, and the big shift to mobile in general. Nerds aren't the only people on the internet anymore. The average person is now on the internet. OKCupid was very much the dating site of us thoughtful nerds, those who thought text and personality tests would help them find a better match. Most singles in the West at the time just went to the bar, got intoxicated, then made base conversation with whomever engaged their base interests. That demographic moved to Tinder.
Unless you're specifically targeting a nerd-heavy demographic (e.g. academics, devs, hackers, etc) with a high margin product, if the goal is to create a mass appeal product then making nerds happy just isn't profitable. We're too small in number and too picky.
Of course there is a human element too. Dating sites give the illusion of choice, and a result a lot of potential matches aren't realised on, as the partner is good looking enough.
So then the trick is to provide the illusion of successful relationships (but of course not ones that actually pan out in the long term).
OkCupid, in its heydays, indeed managed to match people on common values by asking detailed questions. A lot of modern dating apps are far more focus on looks and common interests.
Yes they look cute, and love rock climbing too, but hate children, and never want any. It will result in a good match in your mid twenties, but likely going to result in irreconcilable differences when you approach 30. Unless of course you both hate children :-)
Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant (ahem) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile.
Sorry everyone...
If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.
Our personal misery and loneliness aside, the long-term societal effects as generations wear on will be fascinating.
the top point is that more users usually lead to a worse product, no?
The success of the "nightclub app" is that people feel they are a match only as long as they "drink", and by morning they are thirsty for more. Growth comes from the heartache of loneliness, failed relationships, and divorce. A worse product (poor matching, and stifled communication) is the actual goal of a more profitable dating app, not simply being a consequence of having more users.
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Date_onomics/7GDVBgAAQB... (page 22)
It seems to have over and over where a product and brand that makes decent profit is utterly destroyed in an attempt to acquire a new market.
Advertising, novel technical infrastructure, new branding, etc... all of this needs to be done for a new brand -- and then who knows if any one will come visit?
Or, you can just make whatever short-term changes to your existing successful product, juice the metric you're looking to juice, and (in theory) cashout before the long term repercussions take affect.
Take this OkCupid example; they had their website model. They could have just created "OkCupid Nights" as a separate Tinder-like product reusing as much of their tech as possible.
That said, other point: Why not just accept you're no longer growing? The company would've stayed solvent for years yet, with a steady group of users coming in and out over time as the brand becomes synonymous with thoughtful dating profiles instead of the rapid fire hot-or-not that is Tinder.
Instragram was able to pull their users into Threads pretty easily without making Threads a direct part of Instragram. It is still it's own thing with it's own brand.
Literally everyone says that they are different and want a smart partner, but when they actually hook up they aren't ranking high intellect.
I liked okcupids blogs. The maintakeaway I had from reading all of them was:
1. How much appearance played a role in being attractive.
2. 90+% of women attempted to hook up with the same 10% of men, while men were much more open to women not in the top 10%.
3. What people claimed they wanted in a partner had almost no relation to what they actually wanted, when looking at who they messaged, who they viewed, and who they responded to.
All apps now are very aggressively tracking everything, so they have a much better idea of what makes people open their wallets, and intellect apparently isn't one of those things.
I don't think you're characterizing the results accurately, particularly point #2. I don't think they really had a way to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true but doesn't add much.
Maybe not, but #2 was from a blog that specifically looked at the data of messaging: how many men received messages, how many women received messages.
IIRC, nearly all the women received messages and sent messages, while only about 10% of the men received messages while all of the men sent messages. I don't really see any other way to interpret data showing that both men and women sent messages at about the same rate, but only about 10% of men received any messages.
Now I don't have the blog handy (and I rather wished I did), but my takeaway #3 was from reading all the blogs available, in basically one marathon sitting, not from one particular blog.
This is not to say you're wrong or right, but I don't think the numbers tell us much without seeing the full distribution.
Apps are not developed for the sake of the users. Apps are developed in order to make a profit.
If your higher intellect users are not ready to pay good money for your product, it can only be one of two things: either they are cheap, or your product is not that great. Considering that there is no correlation between intellect and cheapness, I would exclude the first hypothesis.
Then you end up with a crappy product (and it was your higher intellect users who voted it crappy) and a bunch of advertisers ready to pay you bread crumbs for your users' attention, and you suddenly realise that you need a lot of crumbles to get a sandwich.
In the case of OkCupid, I did buy the premium offer, and used the possibilities (mainly see the answers to the quizz, and filter people) to make a profile that would show 99% match score with the kind of women I was looking for.
At some point, it got close to a game, which was very fun and satisfying as I could meet nice girls as a result ;-)
I’m sad to read that it’s gone downhill since it moved into new ownership.
A voice interface might help. By default in the app of course, not a phone feature the user has to use to TTS into the app.
I feel this is the turning point leading to downfall of many companies.
Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.
OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.
I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.