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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

#101

Post by enneff »

com2kid wrote: post #94
mjmahone17 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your messages sound really stilted and like you're really nervous. They jump from one random topic to the next, without actually showing anything uniquely you . > But, well, I own a 5 foot long remote controlled floating dolphin. I gave up on being 100% sane long ago. Technically I am sane, but I do enjoy having fun toying around with things. I also drive a bright orange car! What this says: I own toys, you should kn…

The point about the orange car was meant to be self deprecating! (The $10 inflatable dolphin is supposed to be cute, ends up being really freaky looking, go figure!) The dolphin was actually something I brought into work for my team to play with, we had a good chunk of the building watching as we flew it around our atrium. The problem is, it is hard to capture that I am the sort of person who is always thinking of wa…

Try ending with the question, rather than leading it. For instance, taking your line about weird foods and flipping the sentences yields this:

    I think squid jerky was one of the more interesting foodstuffs I've tried. What other sorts of weird things have you had?
The revised phrasing is more conversational. Ending with a question gives them something to go on. Otherwise they finish reading the message wondering what squid jerky is like and why you would say "foodstuffs" when you could use "foods" instead. And don't use weird language like that. Just say what you mean, simply. Your messages read as if you're trying to fill them with personality. ("Life is divine!" comes across as weird.) Stop using exclamation marks.

You don't want to put too much information into messages. When you say less the other person will fill the blanks with their imagination, and people tend to be optimistic. They'll see you as they want to see you. Whereas your messages are full of a subtext that makes you seem over-enthusiastic and a bit "quirky!" (in other words: annoying).

Sorry for being blunt, just calling it how I see it from the few messages you have posted.

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

#103

Post by 70forty »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #89
70forty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current girlfriend is Cambodian, and we met via OkCupid. I noticed that of the ~1000 Cambodian girls using the site, none of them matched above 80% with me. I disregarded this and I'm really glad I did. Personally, I was searching for someone who seemed sweet, adventurous, and spoke English well. I think I read through just about every one of those 1000 profiles, but my girlfriend's stood out... in a way that I co…

I'm gonna assume you and Paul12345534 aren't white dudes b/c that'd be a behavior for creeps.

I'm a white dude. Why is that creepy? Because I'm dating someone of a different race/culture? She's exactly my age, college educated, speaks excellent English, makes more money than me, etc. I was explicitly trying to minimize any sort of power differential (which is part of why I looked online in the first place, the subset of women who are computer literate tend to be more affluent / socially mobile).

By the way, I live in Cambodia... what the fuck am I supposed to do? Not date anyone? I guarantee you I would be more likely to end up with a mismatch of power if I stuck strictly to IRL dating.

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

#104

Post by curt »

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…

After I figured out OkCupid I had about a 30%-40% message to date success rate. I've shown friends and while they haven't had quite my success they've drastically increased the number of responses they receive. The key is to keep it simple, 3-4 sentences. First is a funny line about something in her profile to grab her attention, next comment on something shared, finally a funny open ended question. One or two messages later ask her out for drinks.

Don't just say "hi" or write a book, that just doesn't work.

Now I've been off the market for a couple years so things might have changed but more than likely they haven't.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

keerthiko wrote: post #61
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…

I spent about one year on OkC @ approx 40minutes/day on the site, and got about 20 first dates, 10 second dates, 2 third dates, and 2 fourth dates. They were almost all 85+% matches, and weren't that hard to find. However, I would say that my manual filtering probably took way less time than he spent implementing his models. He probably learned more engineering and advanced math while I learned how to read subtle mes…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by joshfraser »

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…

Change your income to say "Greater than 1 million / year". The women will come to you. They might not be the women you want, but it's a much smarter attribute to lie about than say your height which she'll figure out right away.

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

#107

Post by nostrademons »

izaidi wrote: post #45
cperciva wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Friend of mine used to run a dating site. She said that on average it took people about 6 months of solid dating, usually 50-100 dates, before they found a good match.

There are some people that get into relationships much more quickly, but oftentimes those are the same people who get out of relationships really quickly, because they didn't choose a good match to begin with. There are also outliers who find someone great when they're not really looking, but they are outliers.

Think of it this way: someone who went on 90 dates before they found a match set their bar at the 99th percentile. Someone who went on 10 dates set their bar at the 90th percentile. Someone who went on 2 set their bar at the 50th percentile. These aren't exact figures - there's luck involved too - but they illustrate the trade-off involved.

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

#108

Post by scarmig »

DannyBee wrote: post #57
scarmig wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Sorry, but this is just bullshit. It's what guys tell themselves because they can't write reasonable profiles or write non-creepy messages to women. I've read what most guys send my female friends on okcupid. Not just the random idiots, but what i would think would be otherwise intelligent people. It often comes off as desperate or creepy. It's certainly true that it helps to be attractive. But I'm an average looking…

Did I say a typical guy can't get dates on OkC? No. It's easy to--I'm somewhat below average in the looks department, but I had a steady stream of dates (probably averaging somewhere between 1 and 2 per week) on OkC while I was on it (until I met my current partner on it).

The point is that you're not suddenly going to triple or quadruple your inbound message rate or reply rate by improving your written profile. This much is clear, and the fact that your average guy profile gets nearly as much positive attention as your real profile indicates as much.

However, smartly choosing quality pictures is probably the one thing anyone should do, and you're going to get far more value back for the investment than putting hours writing a profile slightly more witty and more interesting than your previous profile. It triples, or quadruples, or quintuples your reply rates.

ETA: Another way to look at it is this: someone who writes a boring profile and sends stilted messages will, at best, only be able to write a slightly less boring profile and won't in general be able to improve their crappy messages (with the assumption that the profile or messages don't contain stupid dealbreakers in the first place), no matter how much effort they put into the rewrite. If writing is an area of weakness for you, then rewriting isn't going to do much good for you. On the other hand, crappy pictures can be replaced in a matter of hours with something that anyone can tell is much better, even if you're not generally considered attractive.

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

#109

Post by nostrademons »

klipt wrote: post #83
Gracana wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of average and unattractive people are in happy relationships. That "rule" is just something that uninteresting people tell themselves to try to avoid taking responsibility for their situation.

So you'd say the real rule is "be interesting"? The problem is there are plenty of people with passionate, interesting lives, but who aren't good at communicating that interest, or have interests that don't appeal to (most of) the opposite sex. In dating, where first impressions are everything, it's often more important to appear interesting than be interesting.

The real rule is "be interested". Being interesting follows from that, but being interested is the part you can control.

I've found that when people have persistent difficulties finding a partner, it's almost always because they aren't actually interested in the women they date, but have some platonic ideal of a woman that they think they ought to date and so are dating the wrong people.

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

#110

Post by nostrademons »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #89
70forty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current girlfriend is Cambodian, and we met via OkCupid. I noticed that of the ~1000 Cambodian girls using the site, none of them matched above 80% with me. I disregarded this and I'm really glad I did. Personally, I was searching for someone who seemed sweet, adventurous, and spoke English well. I think I read through just about every one of those 1000 profiles, but my girlfriend's stood out... in a way that I co…

I'm gonna assume you and Paul12345534 aren't white dudes b/c that'd be a behavior for creeps.

There's a big difference between dating someone specifically because she's Cambodian and dating someone who happens to be Cambodian. If I read the GP right, he's talking about the latter.
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