OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
jonmillward.com
OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
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Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#2For anyone not aware, OkCupid has a fantastic blog where they do all sorts of statistical analysis on their members:
It hasn't been updated in over a year. Downer. Getting bought by match.com has clearly had an effect. I have the extremely dubious honour of having had my profile featured on there once as being of "average attractiveness". People still visit my profile to this day, despite me not used it in a few years. Now that's good long tail traffic.
Anecdotal evidence: all the girls I know on OkCupid have said that they are harassed the second they turn on the IM system, so they have it turned off. Not that it makes a huge difference- they get flooded with messages, varying from the inane ("hey baby, what's up?") to the creepy.
Given the sheer amount of crap they have to deal with, I don't think for a second that online dating is "easier" for women. Having to reject hundreds of suitors might sound preferable to having to approach tens, but I doubt that it really is.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#3>The fact that the first stage of online dating is so heavily stacked in women’s favour doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any easier for them, compared to men, to reach the end goal of pure love or perfect sex.
Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game. This conclusion seems like a white lie the author created for women.
No one is looking for perfect mate. Both men and women choose their partners from whoever is available. If women got 20 times more messages than men do, then women's pool of mates to select is 20 times larger than that of men.
And even if some people happen to hold the notion of perfect mate, women still has a better chance of finding the perfect mate than men do.
With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#4>The fact that the first stage of online dating is so heavily stacked in women’s favour doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any easier for them, compared to men, to reach the end goal of pure love or perfect sex. Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game. This conclusion seems like a white lie the author created for women. No one is looking for perfect mate. Both men and women choose their partners f…
Not necessarily. You're assuming the only difference between the women and the men is relative numbers. Let's say 15 women are on a dating website and 30 men. Taken in and of itself, this sounds great for women.
But the distribution of objectives matter. Let's say 13 of the women are looking long-term committed relationships and 2 are looking for something casual. This is a gross oversimplification but bear with me. If 25 men are looking for something more casual and 5 are in it for something more long-term, all of the sudden you have a system with 45 people where only 7 of them "have it easy" if you go by numbers - 2 of whom are women.
Now these aren't real figures but anecdotally I would say I'm in the right ballpark. At any rate, it sufficiently illustrates that "easiness" has nothing to do with relative size of the gender pools.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#5For anyone not aware, OkCupid has a fantastic blog where they do all sorts of statistical analysis on their members: http://blog.okcupid.com/ It hasn't been updated in over a year. Downer. Getting bought by match.com has clearly had an effect. I have the extremely dubious honour of having had my profile featured on there once as being of "average attractiveness". People still visit my profile to this day, despite me…
And sadly, the article "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" bashing match.com was taken down right after the acquisition.
Very interesting use of statistics by these guys.
There seems to be a mirror here http://interestingreads.posterous.com/why-you-should-never-p...
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#6For anyone not aware, OkCupid has a fantastic blog where they do all sorts of statistical analysis on their members: http://blog.okcupid.com/ It hasn't been updated in over a year. Downer. Getting bought by match.com has clearly had an effect. I have the extremely dubious honour of having had my profile featured on there once as being of "average attractiveness". People still visit my profile to this day, despite me…
if anything, I wish they would update the blog. News from some inside sources says that they are so over extended (running too lean?) that it takes them weeks to get new stuff started (that aren't in the pipe line).
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#7I was totally with this up until:
I then herded our collection of fake people...to five different US cities, where they would be allocated in pairs. The best looking man and woman in one city, second best boy and girl in another, and so on.
So the control is lost, even though care was taken to give them similar usernames.
In my experience OkCupid is drastically different in different cities. I feel that the attractiveness scale is completely useless when the profile gender pairs were seeded into different cities.
I actually stopped reading at that point though, so perhaps there was more to learn, but that was kind of an ender for me.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#8>The fact that the first stage of online dating is so heavily stacked in women’s favour doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any easier for them, compared to men, to reach the end goal of pure love or perfect sex. Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game. This conclusion seems like a white lie the author created for women. No one is looking for perfect mate. Both men and women choose their partners f…
Not necessarily. You're assuming the only difference between the women and the men is relative numbers. Let's say 15 women are on a dating website and 30 men. Taken in and of itself, this sounds great for women. But the distribution of objectives matter. Let's say 13 of the women are looking long-term committed relationships and 2 are looking for something casual. This is a gross oversimplification but bear with me.…
I understand where you are coming from. In a game as complex as dating with so many variables, you can easily come up with many situations where the general rule doesn't follow. However, on average, there are some obvious conclusions one can draw.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#9Curious as to why you tried to control the experiment as much as you could, but then decided to move all of the profiles into different cities?
They should of been located in the same city. How do we not know that LA girls and guys are more loose, and Boston women don't even use online dating.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#10Interestingly the SECOND BEST looking woman got far more messages than the best looking woman, both in US and UK.
I wondered why.