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

okcupid -> "quirky", somewhat more friend oriented with long-form profiles, younger
plentyoffish -> normy, more hookup? all ages
tinder -> social network savvy swiping, no profiles
match dot com -> give me wife (?)

plentyoffish used to be unsolicited dick pic HQ according to women I know who used it, guessing that's changed if they're part of that cartel now

I almost posted "low class" but that's a horrible social judgment. Got the impression POF is very much myspace-era aesthetic for dating

what was that music video where someone was comically using plentyoffish?

Lady Gaga "Telephone"

yes! thank you. god what a wonderful video.

Dude was showing the gorilla pictures of female gorillas and he for real is like "next one please" pic.twitter.com/o2FPjCJPMb

— Sierra Anderson (@Sierra_2015) November 12, 2017

bananr

<3 u gorilla. don't settle!

errybody is supposed use their first name now apparently

I got off this pos app

Partly bc i got a fwb and another woman who has me feeling like i cld be in love again but were only friends rn. Taking it slow w the latter bc im actually rly afraid of messing it up or ~something~ happening that will draw us apart as per usual

Man I know that latter feeling! I hope it works out!

Thank you

Bless 🙏

omg this real name thing

are you fuuuuuuuuucking kidding me

‘newb cybok’ is some wheels-within-wheels nerd
shit doc c, kudos

sybok even bah

haha thank you

just one of the many wonderful usernames okcupid will no longer let me use to protect my identity, safety and employment

lol and they're already tripping over themselves trying to halfway walk it back

We love our members. You do not need to use your government name or even your full first name. Use the name, nickname, or initials you’d like your date to call you on OkCupid.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) December 22, 2017

lol do they not have any internet people working for them at all????

it's kind of disillusioning to find that everyone is just named like stacy or whatever

but for some people it makes them less absurd, not to have some goofy meaningless self-invented marketing tag

iirc Doc Casino actually has a cool name, but one that might make it easy for people to search for him elsewhere, which would suck

I would just be Mike again, which is fine since I suck at cool tags anyway

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.