The great thing was that women saw men (and vv) who aren’t only a handful of Gram-worthy photos and a couple of stolen clever pickup lines.

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.

Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like many "only in New York!" things it was really something that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that was actually widespread in our generation.

"New Yorkers will say 'only in New York!' and it's the most normal shit ever."

> And the backend was a DARPA project.

the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?

I think they're referring to the Internet.

Not sure if it was DARPA, but the web server used Tame, a custom event-driven framework at a time where the thread vs. events debate was all the rage in the academic community. (I did a PhD on the topic and that's how I learned about Ok Cupid!)

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 think there was a happy medium somewhere along the way. The minimum word counts on the bios were just high enough to filter people that had no sincerity for the approach. You had to pantomime something of yourself to have a presence. What exists now is just a gallery of faces that could be the result of stable diffusion algorithms.

Look at us here on HN - we're discussing an essay we read about the decline of online dating. We're a self-selecting group too. Tonight's top story: a group of people who like reading essays decry that online dating no longer involves reading essays.

I was nodding my head very hard at this essay, but this has given me something to chew on.

It means nerds (male and female) are now an underserved dating market, compared to when dating sites were in their infancy.