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

EWWWWWW they changed the font!!

AND the icons for "x% Ethics, x% Lifestyle," etc.

one of a local pair of conjoined twins has an okc profile. aside from the photos she doesn't give any indication that there might be unique challenges to dating her. knowing what most women deal with, the unwanted email messages must be a nightmare.

Did they get rid of the "visitors" tab?

I still have it on desktop, but not on mobile.

We’ve removed visitors so you can focus on better connections
Without the distraction of visitors, you can focus on the people who really want to get to know you. And when you’re focused on those people, your chances of higher quality connections improves.

Yeah, nah, they just want you to pay for A-list

https://theblog.okcupid.com/why-were-removing-visitors-847b00f4293d

comments are fun

I mean, they have to make money somehow

I have been thinking about reactivating my profile, but the best thing would probably be to workshop the thing with a friend and make sure I'm putting my best foot forward. It seems like a lot of work, but it'd probably be worth it.

I have friends who have had some dating success with other sites, but to be honest, there's this ephemeral culture fit or niche that I still associate with okcupid and not other sites. It might be wrong? Is there anything else that you'd even half-heartedly endorse?

i'm getting close to finally sighing and anonymizing my profile, or turning the damn thing off. which shouldn't be a big deal at all, but i've just been on there for SO long (2004 or so?) so it just feels strange to imagine not having it. also i still meet good people off of it! but it's getting weird and i'm about to have a job where it really would be a problem if the wrong person saw my profile as currently written.

JDate JDate JDate

Brother and his wife met on plentyoffish sayin

xp I’m just some goy looking for love

I'm just a shiksa who met her dream gu(o)y on JDate

just as well philip roth is retired

wait I thought your guy was jewish? xp

No. I was fooled for about 3/4 of our first date, after he told me about going to preschool at the JCC, but got confused after he told me about extorting his mother for an ATV (lol Texass) in exchange for finishing CCD.

Confusing times for non-Jews on JDate.

so neither one of you was jewish but were both on jdate?!? I feel like I should be calling the authorities

iirc they both listed themselves as 'unorthodox' lol

Jdate is the premier Jewish dating site for Jewish singles looking to make a great connection with other Jewish singles. Ready to make yours?

I'm calling the cops

I get a ton of mileage out of of the two-non-jews-meet-on-JDate story, especially given that I work at a Jewish social services agency and about 60% of my clients are Jewish!

My line with the old folks is "I tried to meet a nice Jewish boy, I got one out of two!"

was he looking for a nice jewish girl, or was it all a ruse?

He took a romance pause after the end of a long-term relationship. When he was ready to date again, a friend suggest JDate vs. other dating sites, as she had some positive experiences.

She wasn't (isn't) Jewish.

And married a non-Jew she met at work.

There is no rhyme or reason to these things. But I found JDate a very non-offputting online dating experience, though my time there was limited.

that sounds super sketchy and weird

meanwhile back at OKC i also just noticed that the things you can be "looking for" are now down to "Short-term dating," "Long-term dating," "New friends," and "Hookup." obviously i still miss "activity partners" but it seems particularly gross and obnoxious to change "casual sex" to "hookup," particularly if "hookup" is going to be singular even as "new friends" is plural. it just sounds moronic.

They're trying to compete with Tinder. Kinda unnecessarily.

same parent company! the logical thing would be to figure out what they do that's different, which is basically the questions and the longer profiles so that people trust the matching a lot more, without it taking on the "for squares" vibe some other sites have. they just lost initiative when it came to making it a cool and universally used app, similar to what happened to flickr vs instagram. honestly if the price of a-list was a lot lower the whole thing would make more sense to me since arguably the most valuable pay feature is being able to say "I don't want to see any matches below x percent," and this is also a feature that grows organically out of their unique selling point so the marketing of it would feel like less of an old school extortion than "pay to see who likes you."

same parent company! the logical thing would be to figure out what they do that's different, which is basically the questions and the longer profiles so that people trust the matching a lot more, without it taking on the "for squares" vibe some other sites have. they just lost initiative when it came to making it a cool and universally used app, similar to what happened to flickr vs instagram. honestly if the price of a-list was a lot lower the whole thing would make more sense to me since arguably the most valuable pay feature is being able to say "I don't want to see any matches below x percent," and this is also a feature that grows organically out of their unique selling point so the marketing of it would feel like less of an old school extortion than "pay to see who likes you."

oops sorry

We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid. Within 10 minutes we banned him for life.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) August 17, 2017

was it a shirtless mirror photo that gave him away

hang in there everyone, sometimes you get really really really lucky. and i wasn't for four years but it's worth it.

aww yay!

yeah I've met several of the best people in my whole life on this dumb thing.

the new "respond to this!" links under every single section of the profile are suuuuch bad design though

Aw man congrats foz.

I thought that i was going to make a similar post but it's like that one gang star song? You know, the one with the sample?

it seems like they've just undergone some big match % inflation. everyone's match % with me has just gone up like 10-15 pts.

Yeah I've seen some weird boosts, too. Don't know what that's about.

yeah something is definitely up. here's someone where i supposedly have a 97% match, but if you go to Questions, our matches in the categories on display are 89, 81, 89, 93, 92, 92. so... 97?! at this point someone has to be a 99% for me to have any faith at all in it.

DC have you noticed a lot of matches popping up that you hadn't seen before? I'm just wondering if they've changed an algorithm or two or what. After getting used to seeing the same twenty five people when I browse matches suddenly there are a bunch of new ones.

idk - NYC has enough turnover on there that there are always one or two new faces around, i think. so, hard to say. could be they're being a little fuzzier with the distance math or something like that?

main thing though is having people up in the 90s who should by right, i think, be buried down in the 80s where i totally don't even

Definitely seeing that.

xp Ohhh didn't know you were in an actual city, heh. Distance might be it, locally, but I also search "Anywhere" sometimes (kind of my "just a guy staring at the ocean" time) and I've noticed it there too.

have photo captions always failed to display on mobile? that's... stupid

i think if you fiddle around with other parameters like the age range, you are shown unseen people even if some of them were within parameters to have been shown before. like it norms it around the whole set of parameters, so you get ppl 'like that' that intersect with your question-based match criteria?

DC, those algorithims suck anyway. Why don't you just stalk people at your campus library?

... what?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKF3cVCXUAE06yC.jpg

lol had to look that up to see if it was real and not satire... it is

another new change: people you've 'liked' no longer show up in search results - you have to click through the stars menu to get to "who you've liked" - and "hide" has been transformed into "pass" although it's ambiguous whether they're still hidden forever or "until you've run out of other options" as the dialogue box states. basically they're trying to get it to a tinder-like "MAKE A DECISION NOW YES OR NO." which isn't exactly how i use the site but might not in itself be an unhealthy change to make. it's just really clunky and inconsistently rolled-out.... you can't "pass" from the match-browsing itself (though you can Like there), only from the profile or from DoubleTake (formerly known as QuickMatch). if you pass people on that they now stay marked as passed (as opposed to "not starred") which i guess makes sense but just ... a lotta stuff getting shifted around.

seems like at least some of the decision-makers really really want everybody to just be using DoubleTake. and then other people are pointing out that the whole brand is built on the higher-quality percentage matching and the filters and "special blend" and so on, and so "matches" sticks around. if i actually had to bite the bullet and yes/no everybody in the city i would soon be down to nobody left to look at and the site would be at an end for me. maybe that's okay.

the big one is that you can't "hide" from the browsing-matches screen anymore which is REALLY fucking annoying

This was mildly interesting (given that OKC have crunched stats saying how prevalent racism is in dating choices):

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609091/first-evidence-that-online-dating-is-changing-the-nature-of-society/

so making you like people's profiles before you message them, sure, fine, maybe it will cut down on random assholes sending women terrible messages. but now the message buttons they stuck on every single picture and every single paragraph have all become "like" buttons. so now on fiddly touchscreen interfaces, accidentally touching a random spot on the screen will now result in liking a profile like 50% of the time. which, no problem, i'll just undo it, right? except that they also just made it impossible to unlike someone's profile without hiding them completely for an arbitrarily long period of time. just unfathomably shitty design.