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OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

jonmillward.com

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Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#41

Post by rmc »

dude_anon123 wrote: post #30

In 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.

Exactly. I was reading this, and had the inbult assumption that all men like women and all women like men.

Way to erase a minority.

It also slightly feeds into the idea that "women have it easy!". I'd be interested if a straight female were to conduct a similar experiement and write it up. What would her perspectives be?

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#42

Post by rmc »

jacques_chester wrote: post #11

I 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…

Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.

Lots of men are jerks to women. There's this movement called feminism…

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#43

Post by entropyneur »

BadassFractal wrote: post #16
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

I 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.

As someone who lives in Eastern Europe (Belarus) and has been a heavy and analytical user of dating websites (in fact there is only one in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet) I can say this:

1. Your assumption is false (it's the same as saying "due to obesity and other problems in the US quality men outnumber quality women").

2. Your conclusion is definitely false. The situation is exactly the same as elsewhere: the demand from men is many times higher than the supply of women.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#44

Post by goodside »

tghw wrote: post #40
goodside wrote: post #37

Hi. I work at OkCupid. I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men. This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposal…

Is there any chance of OkTrends coming back any time soon, if ever?

There are no plans to permanently stop doing posts as far as I know. OkCupid's user base has been growing rapidly over the past year, to put it mildly, but we're still only ~30 people so we haven't had much time for the more peripheral aspects of the site. I know there are some things in the works, but I'm not directly involved so I can't really give a time estimate.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#45

Post by roel_v »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #34
nostrademons wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're familiar with the Stable Marriage Algorithm, right? The math doesn't bear you out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem It's been proven that the algorithm is optimal for the initiators of proposals, i.e. men in contemporary Western culture, although women can hack this by asking guys out themselves. The confusion is because you've artificially restricted the universe to a subset of its true si…

You are misinterpreting the stable marriage problem. Among other things, the stable marriage algorithm guarantees that at each discrete time instant, each man and each woman is engaged to someone. Reality doesn't have this constraint.

No, but rounding gender distribution off to 50/50 and assuming that polygamists are a rounding error, there are an equal amount of male and female singles. Or did I miss your point?

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#46

Post by goodside »

jacques_chester wrote: post #11

I 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…

"Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience."

Correction: There are more men using the site who happen to be similar to you than there are women. Filtering your pool to people with a 90%+ match percentage is like showing up at a comic book convention and saying "Damn, this city is a sausagefest!" There could simultaneously be lots of Perth women with stereotypically female tastes and interests complaining that those with 90%+ matches are all women.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#47

Post by yummyfajitas »

roel_v wrote: post #45
yummyfajitas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misinterpreting the stable marriage problem. Among other things, the stable marriage algorithm guarantees that at each discrete time instant, each man and each woman is engaged to someone. Reality doesn't have this constraint.

No, but rounding gender distribution off to 50/50 and assuming that polygamists are a rounding error, there are an equal amount of male and female singles. Or did I miss your point?

You did.

In a real life discrete time instant (e.g., an evening at the bar), most women will choose to go home alone rather than accept a second best partner. In the stable marriage algorithm, not a single woman will.

I.e., the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#48

Post by sjs382 »

goodside wrote: post #37

Hi. I work at OkCupid. I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men. This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposal…

To your whole team: Thanks for an awesome product that changed my life for the better!

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#49

Post by hythloday »

jsnk wrote: post #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 f…

It's far from obvious to me that men have it harder than women - going by traditional gender roles, men can select from the set of women, women can select only from the subset of men who messaged them. Can you elaborate on your definitions and assumptions that lead to your intuition?

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#50

Post by Tichy »

LinXitoW wrote: post #35
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

I 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…

The question then becomes: Why are more men than women actively looking for partners?

Easy: women can always get laid if the want to (not necessarily with whom they want to, but still). It's cheap for a man to try to pass on his genes by sleeping with a woman once. So why not give it a shot, even if the woman is not that attractive? On the other hand, for a woman it is very costly to pass on her genes.
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