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”.
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.