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OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

jonmillward.com

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Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#81

Post by fragmede »

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…

Are you actually offering up an anonymized corpus of your data to play with? Not just because I have some questions I'd like to ask it, but because offering up some data the only way you could actually make that claim.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#82

Post by wtvanhest »

ig1 wrote: post #80
wtvanhest wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m reacting to my thought process in viewing women’s profiles. If I visit a profile just twice I have a pretty good idea that they are checking it every day etc. If both times I visit they were online within the last 2 hours (extreme example) I know they are checking it a lot. While that information doesn’t really matter, I noticed that I sort of laugh about it to myself and make assumptions about the person. If I a…

How often do you have a woman checking out your profile every day ?

There is no way to know, but before I message someone I usually look at their profile, wait at least a day, then read it carefully before messaging them.

In the beginning I would just message women right away, but after a few dates that I could have avoided I decided to be more careful since there is no reason to go out with someone you know will not work.

[by the way] I saw a comment you posted a few weeks ago and liked it so I went to your old blog imranontech.com and read through a bunch of your articles. Really good stuff.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#83

Post by dr42 »

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…

Absolutely, nothing in this experiment is news to anyone that knows about dating dynamics.

The experiment fails to account for the reason why people are on the site in the first place, it assumes the reasons are gender-agnostic, which is not the case.

Men join okcupid to get laid, sure there are some outliers, (usually the most vocal,) and some of them are genuine, but many claim that wasn't that motivation for reasons easily explained by cognitive dissonance.

Women join okcupid to get attention. Sure, a few are actually looking to find dates, but mostly, as my girlfriend says "okcupid is facebook for attention whores". For her, and any girl that grew up cute, she is used to getting a lot of attention, and this is just the online equivalent of wearing a miniskirt to a club. She loves it when guys spend ages writing creative messages, their fawning just plays right into her need for attention. She also loves the control, having the ability to just ignore someone who has spent so long trying to get her attention. okcupid addresses many human needs, but dating is very likely far down the list, past more involuntary needs.

just because the world has gone digital, doesn't mean human psychology changes. Women have been adorning themselves for attention since we first started painting in caves, and men, well, men are just men, it's why there are nearly 7 billion of us on the planet. there'd be 8B if it wasn't for the xbox.

The psychology of relationships really isn't that hard, it just seems like it when you're in one.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#84

Post by dr42 »

impendia wrote: post #61
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…

>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. I am curious: Are there any variables which, after you control for them, make this go away or diminish? i.e., high income, feminist leanings, political beliefs, etc. ?

no. men are on the whole, put off by sexually aggressive women, so women have evolved to use much more subtle forms of invitation.

The "message" is not the beginning of the story. The women selected her photos and wrote her profile, which was really her way of instating the process.

Basic human behavior is the women presents her availability, men respond with courtship rituals - that vary from culture to culture and the online culture is no different, but the basic pattern is the same.

Women, however, instigate the process with variables like the ones you mention (high income, feminist leanings etc) factored into her photos/profile. This is the same as in real life, for example, going out in SF is selecting for a certain type - you wont find many christian fundamentalist, creationist, poor people hanging out in the Marina. Again the woman has made the first move, but the next step is up to the guys to respond. So think of every okcupid profile as an opening message and you'll be closer to understanding the dynamics of dating.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#85

Post by dr42 »

alttab wrote: post #52
goodside wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I glad we have someone from OKCupid on here. Just want to let you know personally that I tried everything when I moved to a new city. Match, PlentyOfFish, and a billion others I can't remember. I got good at writing profiles. OKCupid did an auto-match for someone I didn't find during my own searches. I thought I looked at everything. We apparently thought each other were attractive enough, and thats what spawned the…

while I am glad you have found someone, I would bet that it had very little to do with okcupid, but rather your emotional availability and confidence. If you could have been cloned and A/B tested, I bet B would have met someone just the same in real life without okcupid.

It's like saying I'm so grateful to Muni for introducing me to my gf because I met her waiting for the bus. The bus had nothing to do with it.

But good luck to both of you, regardless.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#86

Post by klipt »

Tichy wrote: post #50
LinXitoW wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That explains why men are more actively looking for casual partners, but there should still be women looking for long term partners (in fact there should be even more than men).

If there are fewer women than men on dating sites, that just shows that online dating is biased towards the casual.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#87

Post by klipt »

rmc wrote: post #42
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…

Feminism != lesbianism. Most feminists still want men as romantic partners.

Now if you're saying there are more jerks online than offline, that would be a valid point, but it has little to do with feminism.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#88

Post by rmc »

klipt wrote: post #87
rmc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Feminism != lesbianism. Most feminists still want men as romantic partners. Now if you're saying there are more jerks online than offline, that would be a valid point, but it has little to do with feminism.

I dunno why you're bringing lesbians into this. My point with feminism is that feminism is about treating women with with respect, and not expecting them to do thing, nor critizing their appearance all the time (too fat, too skinny, not enough make up, etc.) This could explain why some women do not like online dating.

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#89

Post by rmc »

impendia wrote: post #61
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…

>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. I am curious: Are there any variables which, after you control for them, make this go away or diminish? i.e., high income, feminist leanings, political beliefs, etc. ?

You'll probably get totally different results amoung non-heterosexual people…

Re: OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

#90

Post by klipt »

roel_v wrote: post #60
yummyfajitas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the case at hand wasn't talking about a time span that short, either. When you look at it in the long run, I'd say that both men and women have an equal likelihood of selecting a mate who is not the optimum for all qualities they look for. (i.e., to use less Greenspan-eque language, that I think that both men and woman will in the end "settle" for someone if they can't find someone who they'd consider "perfect" r…

> I seem to remember from one of the okcupid analysis posts that the majority of profiles are male.

This is a significant factor. If you run a stable marriage algorithm with 400 men and 200 women:

Men less attractive than the median will remain ummatched.

A 50th percentile man will be matched to a 0th percentile woman.

A 60th percentile man will be matched to a 20th percentile woman.

A 70th percentile man will be matched to a 40th percentile woman.

An 80th percentile man will be matched to a 60th percentile woman.

A 90th percentile man will be matched to an 80th percentile woman.

In other words, all men below the 100th percentile will end up dating way below their "league".

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