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No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

jmtame.posthaven.com

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Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#21

Post by SilentStump »

Connaissance wrote: post #18
InternalRun wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my exact reaction when I looked at that photo.

If you guys are talking about the pic in his post, that's not the author, that's the actual Elon Musk. http://media.aerosociety.com/aerospace-insight/2012/11/23/vi...

Not that one, if you go down to the blendr there are shots of their "users." I think he was just showing what Elon Musk looked like to give context to the person he quoted.

Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#22

Post by scarmig »

draftable wrote: post #20

Wow. I was iffy on the OP to begin with after he basically proclaimed that he had reinvented online dating by essentially cloning www.mysinglefriend.com, and this just confirms it. This whole post smacks of arrogance. Essentially you want us to pat you on the back for giving a big, public “F you” to a competitor because you ASSUME that him wanting to chat means they want to acquire you? If this is how you act in casu…

Well, online dating really is a gigantic clusterfuck. I'm not in the market (found my partner, of three years, on OkC), but I despised the process while I was doing it.

I read the initial post and thread about it and was skeptical, but my thought was mostly along the lines of "go for it! There must be a way to significantly improve online dating, and I certainly don't have any better ideas."

Now I just think he's a dick, though, and emotionally root for his failure. Why the hell be nasty to someone for no reason except free PR?

Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#23

Post by mistercow »

EvanKelly wrote: post #16
scarmig wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do need some better headshots most likely, but that's because any given person on OkCupid likely has terrible, terrible profile pictures. Good resolution, good lighting, and bright colors. Fixing that can immediately significantly improve response rates (or give a response rate, as the case may be).

I don't have a profile, but i do remember reading a pretty interesting OKCupid blog post correlating response rate to the quality of the camera taking the photo. Here it is: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

I don't think you can infer much from that beyond the fairly obvious fact that expensiveness of camera is correlated with interest (and by extension skill) in photography. Unless you control for that, any connection you draw between camera price and perceived attractiveness is bound to be spurious.

Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#24

Post by lnanek2 »

thwest wrote: post #5

Is any serious scammer going to be deterred by needing to obtain a facebook account with 50 friends?

Meh, it's a numbers thing. If they go from 99% fakes like many sites to 50% fakes, it is still the difference between a useless site and useful site.

I use AdultFriendFinder myself, and if I only go by profiles and messages and MSN/Yahoo/etc. chat, then it's easy to get 50 out of 50 girls in a week not actually be willing to meet and only be after getting me to register on a site for their kickback.

I've never been asked to do that on AFF's internal chat/webcam option, however. So even though profiles and messages and mainstream chat are a heck of a lot easier, I never do them any more. If a site can cut out the spam accounts, they could have that easier service in a workable form.

Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#25

Post by spizzo »

draftable wrote: post #20

Wow. I was iffy on the OP to begin with after he basically proclaimed that he had reinvented online dating by essentially cloning www.mysinglefriend.com, and this just confirms it. This whole post smacks of arrogance. Essentially you want us to pat you on the back for giving a big, public “F you” to a competitor because you ASSUME that him wanting to chat means they want to acquire you? If this is how you act in casu…

It's very hard for someone to know they're acting in a creepy or inappropriate way, so people blame the tools they're using very often. Also the founder here probably feels it's a great disadvantage to them to give any credit to okcupid.

Frankly the post confused me at first because when I used okcupid a year or two ago I found it to be easily the best tool available for what it does, and the post claimed there was a consensus that okcupid was terrible.

Re: No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

#26

Post by goodside »

runT1ME wrote: post #13

What fascinates me about the online dating market is that the optimal user experience is indirectly proportional to a customer's lifetime revenue in any site that is ad based or subscription based. If a company was purely motivated by profit, I imagine that some clever use of ML would reveal an optimal ($ wise) timeframe for matching a user with their eventual mate (assuming their matching algorithm was perfect), and…

Nobody at OkCupid thinks like this. We want people to enjoy the site so they're inclined to pay for premium membership, which they won't do if it sucks. We want people to return to the site if they're single in the future, and to recommend it to their single friends. Optimizing for ad impressions over user experience isn't a road we want to go down.
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