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

hehehe in orbit as soon as I hit "submit post"

also this past week that list stopped displaying the more/less qualifiers

aka "less interested in sex" and "more adventurous"

xpost

i think the 'search by username' box disappeared too

I'm sitting here trying to think if I've been on that many first dates in my entire life. I still haven't even been to Hawaii!

also this past week that list stopped displaying the more/less qualifiers

I just 5 mins ago noticed that too. Always thought it was a bit useless tbh

I wouldn't mind if it got added after our usernames on posts here though

more deraily

clickbaitier

less clusterfucky

Uh the search by username box was moved to a different screen, you click on the word Search in the blue bar above and it takes you to a screen that is nothing but a giant text field, which I just do not understand at all but makes me worried that they're going to kill it entirely.

Oh oh can mine be "more needlessly hostile"?

"more desiring of Brussels sprouts"

such a calculating pre-dater.

― estela, Wednesday, January 22, 2014 7:30 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Haha

When my friend used to date this douchebag editor of a magazine she used to call him the pr-editor

That's excellent and I'm stealing that for my next icy, emotionless editor. Third time's the charm, right?

He was already sleeping in his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.

Dude, there is a reason your dates might not be successful, and it has little to do with match rates.

looking forward to a lot more people doing this now it's in Wired and the target readership is all "pfft, I could totally have honed that algorithm to be the crucial 0.1% better"

I hope OKC bans them all for violating T&C but I have horrible visions of the coders there giving them free passes as ~kindred spirits~

I'm just jealous really cz it will probably work, often enough, and often enough be laughed off as a charming quirk if it is even discovered, but there is no elite hack I can pull to make my FACE not a dealbreaker. or my tendency to take things too seriously, a day after everyone else lost interest. or...

i thought dating websites were supposed to do all that stuff for you already

maybe this guy will start his own algorythmoflove.com or whatever

I'm too lazy to find the correct post upthread, but someone did point out that in his original attempt he answers the questions randomly, instead of picking the questions that OKC deemed most important

looking forward to a lot more people doing this now it's in Wired and the target readership is all "pfft, I could totally have honed that algorithm to be the crucial 0.1% better"

I hope OKC bans them all for violating T&C but I have horrible visions of the coders there giving them free passes as ~kindred spirits~

I'm just jealous really cz it will probably work, often enough, and often enough be laughed off as a charming quirk if it is even discovered, but there is no elite hack I can pull to make my FACE not a dealbreaker. or my tendency to take things too seriously, a day after everyone else lost interest. or...

― not a player-hater i just hate a lot (a passing spacecadet), Wednesday, 22 January 2014 16:57 (1 hour ago) Permalink

One dude ran some scripts and bots to collect data for casual sex and was banging ladies for quite some time.

Plus, everyone interprets their dataset. The difference is that a minority is using computer assistance while others just use their brain to interpret and calculate the data.

Oh oh can mine be "more needlessly hostile"?

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, January 22, 2014 12:38 AM (18 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol <3

quite some time, eh?

rather

If he had to go on 80+ dates, I am not sure about the effectiveness of his algorithm. If the threshold for success is number of relationships that lasted for more than two or three dates, I did far better than he did with orders of magnitude less effort. Clearly there are strategies for tweaking your profile to generate more interest from people, but at some point employing too many of them seems like it will increase your match percentages but decrease what you actually have in common with the people you end up going on dates with. It's like moving the work the matching algorithm is supposed to do for you back into the real world.

He's also operating on the assumption that that kind of abstract "precision" can even exist in potential relationships. OKC's matching isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be. The site gives you A. a way of avoiding relationships that will clearly never work due to some giant rift like he wants three kids and you want zero and B. a solid pretext to contact people who might want to go out with you. Hoping to improve the odds much more than that seems like astrology to me, and a waste of effort. Maybe it is satisfying emotionally in a way, but it isn't going to help you find a good relationship and may make it harder. One reason I stopped using the site was I feel like the whole notion of matches gave the idea of "you're nice, but there may be someone 5-7% better" way more solidity than it actually has, like it gave a very inhuman concept a human face, or a list of names and faces to hang that unproven thought on, when really it's just a ghost.

otm

I don't think that's entirely it. I don't use OKC but this is what stood out for me:

- On average, respondents select 350 questions from a pool of thousands
- OkCupid’s algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen — more or less at random — had proven unpopular.

surely the chance of you + a potential match not answering the same q out of thousands is really high - so he was just getting over this barrier (which to me seems a bit arbitrary - I'd have thought the answers were more important than the combination of questions you choose) to be able to get to the 'real' important stuff?

also do ppl really answer 350 qs and does this all go on their profile because that's some serious work

ppl can only see how you answered them if

1) you chose to make your answer "public" (this is the default but you can make any answer "private" and the answer still contributes to the algorithm

and

2) the person looking has answered the same question and also made it public

and yes i see people with 350 q's answered all the time

Well, I don't really believe he answered questions more or less randomly. It was probably not even close to random, even accounting for the initial run of questions it asks you not being random at all, in terms of being a subset of all the questions available.

I guess I am comparing this with my struggles internet shopping when I just want to see all the shoes to pick ones I want, not have to second-guess whether the store has helpfully decided they are 'mid-heel' rather than 'flat' or 'tan' rather than 'brown' and then choose if I want to see 'sale' or 'designer' or 'regular'

Ive answered ~250 q's, and approx half of those (mostly the drug/sex related ones) are private.

The idea then is when you're looking at someones profile, click on the "the two of us" link, look at your answers, see what matches and what doesnt. I then often answer extra q's I might not have seen, if theyre in the list of the person I'm viewing.

Mostly, I just feel sorry for the guy, based on his partner saying, basically, you can hack OKCupid but you can't hack relationships - like, this guy probably believes that since he's "smart" he can hack a relationship, and was surprised to discover that he couldn't?

He just seemed to go into the thing with such a pre-limited idea of who he wanted to meet (the whole "creative, indie type chicks" thing just screams "manic pixie dream girl" to me) and then, having hacked the system to give him the cheat-codes to achieve high matches with girls who met that rough description - was surprised to find out that hacking his profile to make himself seem more attractive to certain "kinds" of girls did not actually therefore render him attractive to - or attracted to - any individuals?

It's this thing that people who have been told all their lives that they are super-smart often tend to do - think of human interactions as a game, therefore believe they can game the system - and are surprised when they end up played.

The other way of looking at it is that he was doing a lot better because of his "hack", i.e. getting some rather than zero dates.

imo the last 2 posts are both right; OKC really *is* a game in a lot of ways but once you meet someone IRL the game is over and you're just a flawed human sitting across from another flawed human

Obvious next step is to create dummy androids/holograms to go on trial dates with your chosen target, find out what they do/don't like in advance.

It all falls apart, though, when she falls in love with a hologram.

lol wait i missed the part where he wanted to meet 'creative, indie type chicks' like are the questions to up your match % with them really that mysterious to answer??

An adorable 29-yo "likes" me, he seems perfect and basically exactly like all my irl friends and is so cute but is the same age as my youngest brother. Maybe I'll give it a whirl and see how crepey I feel.

Aaaaand I mean "crepey" in both senses.

u gonna smother yourself in sugar, lemon juice, bananas, cream & serve warm?

imo the last 2 posts are both right; OKC really *is* a game in a lot of ways but once you meet someone IRL the game is over and you're just a flawed human sitting across from another flawed human

― |$̲̅(̲̅ιοο̲̅)̲̅$̲̅| (gr8080), Thursday, January 23, 2014 1:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

booming as fuck

Okay not that sense.

imo u shd judge him on his emotional & intellectual maturity & not the li'l number by his username, anything over abt 21 and frankly it doesn't matter

also gl *thumbs up* new job & new man in same week u can do this

sorry for the folowing vague mini-brag but: i just want to share that i had a banner day on okc yesterday

io have u messaged him/did he message you or is this still in reciprocated 4-starred zone

they put u in a banner ad?? nice

I got the "so-and-so likes you" msg so I msged him. It's the least consequential early stage of contact.

Aaaaand I mean "crepey" in both senses.