"[...] the largely undifferentiated onslaught of male attention [...]"
The algorithm.
OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#22I don't know if any of this strikes me as particularly new. Every new female account on any dating site gets absolutely hammered with messages in the first few hours. What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city. In Perth, Australia, for pr…
For the reverse experience, try signing up a fake profile to Travel Girls (or any of the other similar sites). A new male profile will get pinged within minutes.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#23Interestingly the SECOND BEST looking woman got far more messages than the best looking woman, both in US and UK. I wondered why.
I think the judges probably voted by looking at actual pictures, where most male selection probably happens at the thumbnail level. I'd argue the second best has a thumbnail that would garner more attention, from color if nothing else.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#24Interestingly the SECOND BEST looking woman got far more messages than the best looking woman, both in US and UK. I wondered why.
Learned helplessness. Most men stop contacting the most attractive female profiles because they never hear back.
Most men stop contacting the most attractive female profiles because they never hear back, and the effort required to make a message that stands out - i.e. is original and interesting - does not justify the very low chance that there will be any response.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#25I don't know if any of this strikes me as particularly new. Every new female account on any dating site gets absolutely hammered with messages in the first few hours. What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city. In Perth, Australia, for pr…
For the reverse experience, try signing up a fake profile to Travel Girls (or any of the other similar sites). A new male profile will get pinged within minutes.
So if I'm prepared to directly pay a woman, I can get company?
I kinda sorta already knew that.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#26I 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 attractiv…
Because of the matching system, two profiles with identical answers would have shown up identically ranked, therefore obvious to any searchers. So they would have been flagged.
And any variation in answers or questions answered would have matched different personalities, throwing off stats.
Had to be done.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#27For 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…
There are a few relevant blog posts:
1. Race and gender data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...
2. Attractiveness data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#28Interestingly the SECOND BEST looking woman got far more messages than the best looking woman, both in US and UK. I wondered why.
Since they were both assigned to the same city, it's quite possible that more people use OkCupid in that city. I have no idea why the author didn't realize what a terrible idea splitting them up across cities was...
This explanation is unlikely because the same pattern was repeated in the results from the UK.
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#29I don't know if any of this strikes me as particularly new. Every new female account on any dating site gets absolutely hammered with messages in the first few hours. What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city. In Perth, Australia, for pr…
For ccomparison, it would have been extremely interesting to host this experiment in Eastern European countries such as Russia. Due to alcoholism and many other issues, quality women there outnumber quality men and have to deal with competition that is much more alike that for men in the West.
I just tried quick 15 minute search on Russian-language dating sites. Most of them show how many people of each sex have been online recently. Again there are much more men, at least twice the number of women.
Google also advertised me a site: "Meet men online. Want to marry a foreigner?"
Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
#30In other news, gay people don't even exist. Seriously, if you are going to attempt this type of "study" gay people are a perfect group, as you can mostly control for gender bias.