Just when you thought it was safe - OK CUPID PART 3: The Return of the WOO!

you can type in any name you want, so you could be stacy too

how long can you be inactive before they just delete your profile? i think i'm approaching a year

yeah there is no way in hell i am typing my real name in that box, my profile has been painstakingly anonymized for a reason

I mean I think I can understand reasons, but for you, why is it important for it to be semi-anonymous?

if it’s a particular proclivity or fetish or w/e no need to answer, I’m just curious if “exists on a meet-up/dating site” is professionally detrimental. I’ve seen a few coworkers on there, assume they saw me, but I guess that puts you on even ground

Being in academia and searchable by sexual interests is a different situation to seeing ppl in similar business fields to you looking for dates

yes. and okc's whole thing is built around giving answers to questions about pretty personal things, some of which are job-ending etc. could make those all private and take out all revealing info from the profile - but then might as well not have an okc profile. more generally being stalked/doxxed is generally not an appealing prospect. and a lot of groups/communities have gravitated to okc and deliberately NOT to first-name sites/apps, in order to maintain their personal safety or the experience of being able to define yourself. okc blog's babbling about how the names your parents gave you are sooo much better than the ones you'd choose for yourself is stunningly tone-deaf for a notionally 'hip' site, in 2017.

but yeah no, not gonna go into detail on my reasons for being anonymous, on a site where i am not anonymous. (no offense taken just sayin, my D.C. identity has always been pretty well tagged to my IRL one for better or worse)

that all makes a lot of sense and I appreciate your discretion!

but yeah, people are judgmental about the wrong things and everyone deserves some discretion, for sure

if you google me you mostly get a lead character from a popular video games series I’ve never played, so... thank you, video game industry

imo their fumbling is partially an inability to let the site exist and grow with the same demographic it’s had. I get the impression their clientele is both aging and shrinking, and owning multiple dating sites means they’re trying to constantly figure out how to capture users without cannibalizing their other sites

I don’t think the aesthetic of Tinder with the transparency of match.com is what anyone wants — okcupid was the site where you created a story of yourself that’s less straightforward and more nuanced.

the conspiracy theory, as with many of their other bad changes, is that they want okc to die so they can focus on those other sites. but that's a silly theory - it's an established brand, you'd want to parlay it into SOMEthing.

I'd hate for there to be no dating site like OkC, that's free and open to all kinds of people and that encourages people to say a lot about themselves. But at this point I'd be cool with something else coming along to replace OkC, since they seem intent on chasing off users with solutions to non-existent problems.

Unfortunately, I doubt a site like that could take off from scratch at this point. OkC being a holdover from a previous era of online dating might be the only reason it's still going.

so afaict the app is now only showing me ppl who've logged in and chosen new names (and/or "names"). desktop match search still shows everybody in my area tho.

I opened the app and several people have "No" as their first name :)

'woman'

"cry"

no

I haven't used OKC in years but tbh I always enjoyed the ritual of eventually learning someone's real name when the appropriate moment came

Sweet, they totally broke messages.

Now when someone messages you, if you don't like them, the messages show up on their profile. For some reason. And they message you "hey someone sent you a message! It'll be on their profile! Which you can find by going into Double Take (ugh) or matches and they'll appear near the top! Probably!"

I mean... wtf is this shit. Makes no sense at all, at all.

it is the weirdest and most convoluted system. wanting to cut down harassment is one thing but was this really the best fix they could come up with?

i saw a woman from ok cupid at the grocery store! she was buying tea, which is apropros given that her screen name used to be something about tea

So I liked someone
They liked me back
I don't know who it is
Or how to find them
This is an awesome website

https://zdware.com/2018/okcupid_removed_visitor_api/

Here’s a quick rundown about some of the less obvious data points:

birthdate - Exact birthdate of the person. Birthdate is considered PII (personally identifiable information) by many agencies in the US and EU.
stalk_time - The time the user visited your profile.
userid - ID of the user, could be used within another attack vector/API.
realname - This is usually the first name provided by the user, especially since the username deprecation by OkCupid
last_received_message - Timestamp of when the user last received a message.
last_sent_message - Timestamp of when the user last sent a message.
location_detail - This is where things get a little creepy, and complicated.
This is an unnecessarily large amount of data for OKCupid’s old visitor feature. The only data you would need for this feature is the username, the time they visited you, a thumbnail, their city/state, and match percentage.

sounds like their internal api (programs inside the site using data that are only on their network) and external apis (available from the web) were the same? uuuuungh

yup dumb dumb dumb

Always amazes me how much easier it would be to not be a scumbag company

One of the dating apps I used to use, can't remember which one, used to have an "xx miles away" feature when you looked at a match's profile, accurate down to like a tenth of a mile. After messaging with one match a bunch I could tell whether she was at home or at work based on the distance away. Super creepy; it was essentially a GPS tracker. Nobody needs that information.

but you need to know she's thirsty @ work

They're showing an instant replay, and the one announcer is citing a Cardinal fan in the stands claiming it was a homer as proof it was a homer

ooops, wrong thread

https://i.imgur.com/E2QUKJS.png

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

After talking with Carl, I begin to see him as a remarkable success story. “Without [ Mendota] and Jesus,” he tells me, “I would have been a Manson-, Bundy-, Dahmer-, or Berkowitz-type of criminal.” Sure, his fascination with the morbid is a little creepy. Yet here he is, now remarried, the father of a 1-year-old son he adores, with a flourishing business. After our phone interview, I decide to meet him in person. I want to witness his redemption for myself.

The night before I’m scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, I receive a frantic email from Carl’s wife. Carl is in police custody. His wife tells me that Carl considers himself polyamorous, and had invited one of his girlfriends over to their apartment. (This woman denies ever being romantically involved with Carl.)* They were playing with the baby when his wife returned. She was furious, and grabbed their son. Carl responded by pulling her hair, snatching the baby out of her arms, and taking her phone to prevent her from calling the police. She called from a neighbor’s house instead. (Carl says he grabbed the baby to protect him.) Three misdemeanor charges—spousal battery, abandonment and neglect of a child, and intimidation of a witness—and the psychopath who made good is now in jail.

I go to Los Angeles anyway, in the naive hope that Carl will be released on bail at his hearing the next day. A few minutes before 8:30 a.m., his wife and I meet at the courthouse and begin the long wait. She is 12 years Carl’s junior, a compact woman with long black hair and a weariness that ebbs only when she gazes at her son. She met Carl on OkCupid two years ago while visiting L.A. and—after a romance of just a few months—moved to California to marry him. Now she sits outside the courtroom, one eye on her son, fielding calls from clients of the funeral home and wondering whether she can make bail.

“I’m so sick of the drama,” she says, as the phone rings again.

Carl is a tough man to be married to. His wife says he’s funny and charming and a good listener, but he sometimes loses interest in the funeral business, leaving most of the work to her. He brings other women home for sex, even when she’s there. And while he’s never seriously beaten her up, he has slapped her.

that's a lot of article for one keyword

Was thinking the exact thing

Like uh why this thread again?

quintessence of ok cupid

Lol dawg

ok dude

ah, the innocent days when OkCupid ruled the online dating landscape.

sigh

incredibly beautiful person who messaged me first and then abruptly stopped replying when i asked you out, what’s on ur mind

turns out i was buried under a pile of weirdos, but now i got the digits and a date :-D

tried to log in to this for the first time in three years and my profile was deleted

that's reasonable, but it's unlikely i'll ever have the energy to make a new one

Probably not worth said energy, tbh.

diminishing returns

We’ve introduced a dating forum at https://t.co/rVJHNl5voI, so singles who feel the same way about the virus can meet and not have to worry about differing attitudes to social distancing. https://t.co/haGHFYuzuy

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) August 9, 2020

Is there any reason currently to use this over the apps?

iirc there is no reason whatsoever to use a dating forum based around being a "lockdown sceptic"

or did you mean OKC? it has an app!

Is there any reason currently to use an app promoted by someone who calls himself toadmeister?

I meant OKC, and yeah I guess now that it has/is an app it seems to have sanded away all the weird bits that maybe made it unique and useful?