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How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

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Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#41

Post by randallsquared »

crazygringo wrote: post #28

It's funny... doing all this 'hacking' to create profiles with awesome match %'s... is pretty pointless. In my personal experience, a match below 80% is a red flag (serious incompatibilities), but above 85% there aren't any big differences. Like he said, he went on 55 dates, but only three second dates. The 55 dates really isn't too hard to do without the hacking, it's just a question of time. And the "three second d…

"he probably would have done better just simply browsing on the site, and only directly messaging the girls he found interesting in the first place."

He'd already tried that, the article claimed. The problem is that he didn't know what was important to the women he was interested in, and so didn't know what parts of his life to mention in the OKC profile, to attract first dates from women he, as you note, might well have messaged anyway.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#42

Post by jcc80 »

asnyder wrote: post #36
jcc80 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he did answer questions before but with thousands upon thousands to choose from it would be pure chance that he would answer the same ones as the type of women he was interested in. Is it wrong when a person does something they wouldn't normally do to get noticed? For example, is asking for directions when you're not really lost to strike up a conversation "lying and manipulation"? Literally, I suppose it is bu…

Not completely true. You can find someone you're interested in and then click on "She cares about" and that will list all her public questions that she cares about, he can then answer those. My general concern is that manipulating of the data in this way essentially lowers the value of the data in general and thus becomes a cycle resulting in the actual features of the site being no longer useful.

Oh, my take was that he exposed how the data keeps people apart. The number of matches is greatly determined by which questions you answer instead of the actual content of the responses. I suppose I understand why they do it though, since the system would feel useless if you had hundreds of people (in a big city) that were a 99% match. It provides people with a sort of false selectivity.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#44

Post by justinsteele »

com2kid wrote: post #39
crazygringo wrote: post #28

It's funny... doing all this 'hacking' to create profiles with awesome match %'s... is pretty pointless. In my personal experience, a match below 80% is a red flag (serious incompatibilities), but above 85% there aren't any big differences. Like he said, he went on 55 dates, but only three second dates. The 55 dates really isn't too hard to do without the hacking, it's just a question of time. And the "three second d…

> The 55 dates really isn't too hard to do without the hacking, it's just a question of time. That I disagree with, 4 years and hundreds upon hundreds of hours sunk into OKC, and I've had maybe 2 dozen dates from it. Knowing how to optimize the site would be very useful. From pictures (OKC has MyBestFace that helps with that) to profile text. This guy obviously had good pictures (great pictures alone can make a profi…

Have you had an opposite gender friend review your profile?

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#45

Post by izaidi »

cperciva wrote: post #31
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #7

> It was first date number 88. A second date followed, then a third. After two weeks they both suspended their OkCupid accounts. You know... there's a damn big chance you find someone worth having a relationship after 88 dates . Something tells me his technique was no better than just dating at random.

He wasn't optimizing for "finding a good match". He was optimizing for "get dates with the type of people who might turn out to be good matches".

Even so, it speaks poorly of his method (or maybe just his personality?) that it took 90 dates to actually find a good match.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#46

Post by asnyder »

[deleted] wrote: post #43

[deleted]

From the looks of it the reason she wasn't offered in the first place is that he didn't really answer many questions at first. You have to answer at least a few hundred for it to be useful.

It sounds like rather than actually trying to use the service he didn't feel it was worth the time and rather spent enormous effort to figure out what questions he should answer and how best to fill out the profile.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#47

Post by klipt »

gweinberg wrote: post #25
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are totally full of it on what their deal breakers are. They'll thoughtfully answer a survey one way but then behave very differently in smelly meatspace.

Hey, if you can come up with something better, there's a market opportunity. Matching people up by scent isn't the worst idea I've heard.

I think something better already exists - it's called speed dating. It was invented by a rabbi as a Jewish matchmaking event where you meet many people over a short space of time (maximising the chance of finding mutual attraction). But most cities have very few events which are consequently overpriced due to lack of competition.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#48

Post by klipt »

[deleted] wrote: post #43

[deleted]

> (I believe most people could find an interesting match even just by randomly selecting 88 people that fit their criteria)

Sure, but it's a lot easier to meet those 88 people if you can get them to message you. For most guys to meet 88 women via OkCupid they'd have to send thousands of messages, which would probably take years.

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#49

Post by ryjm »

asnyder wrote: post #23
jcc80 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I celebrate this. Two people found love and are getting married. I think it's great. He answered all questions truthfully but let the code determine the weight of each answer. It's not like he wasn't giving honest answers. And yes, he created two profiles, but then deleted one. He wasn't sure which group of women he'd match up with best. I guess you see this as fundamentally dishonest but I think the couple says it b…

Yes, but he ONLY answered those specific questions that were deemed important to his target audience. The fact that he answered these honestly is great, but he left out the set of questions that was important to him which would give him differing results and be more honest for his date. Also, weighting is somewhat important, by having an algorithm maximize this defeats the purpose. Yes, if the point was to get two pe…

The article did not mention anything about skipping questions that were important to him; it specifically said that he had originally been picking questions "more or less" at random.

You're also assuming that the set of questions he had algorithmically selected did not overlap with the questions that were important to him. This seems unlikely.

The only dishonesty here is that by (presumably) determining the breadth and detail of his answers by order of importance to the cluster, he is in effect answering the questions /as if/ they are as important to him as they are to the average representative of that cluster. But if everyone else was also answering the questions "more or less" at random anyway ("He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user"), this doesn't seem so bad (and is probably why his algorithm gave him so many failed dates, since the relevant questions wouldn't have been answered).

Honestly all he did was make himself way more visible. You'd probably get a good amount of dates by making a sign and sitting in Central Park too. Sure, it's a bit distateful, but no less manipulative than that (and much more clever).

Re: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

#50

Post by scarmig »

justinsteele wrote: post #44
com2kid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 55 dates really isn't too hard to do without the hacking, it's just a question of time. That I disagree with, 4 years and hundreds upon hundreds of hours sunk into OKC, and I've had maybe 2 dozen dates from it. Knowing how to optimize the site would be very useful. From pictures (OKC has MyBestFace that helps with that) to profile text. This guy obviously had good pictures (great pictures alone can make a profi…

Have you had an opposite gender friend review your profile?

The generally accepted rule is 1) Be attractive and 2) Don't be unattractive. That's more than a bit reductionist, of course, but tweaking your profile text or message texts only helps at the margins, assuming you don't have deal breakers. com2kid isn't going to be getting dozens of inbound messages a month just by revising his profile (sorry, com2kid).

(On the other hand, updating your pictures genuinely can give you many, many more views, messages, and responses.)

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