If you bestow a four or five rating on someone's profile, that member will receive an automatic message that says you think he or she is hot. This feature is seemingly helpful in that it serves as a time-saver; an automatic message is quicker than a manual one.
But data showed that only the young, athletic men were very likely to take advantage of QuickMatch. Piskorski hopes that entrepreneurs and academics alike will keep these findings in mind when evaluating and building online social platforms in the future. I don't doubt this is true, but I don't consider it a terribly penetrating new insight into human behavior.
For all the qualities in a woman that a man might find attractive, one of the biggest attractors is simply whether the woman will like him back. That's what this Visitor function lets the man know. Associate Professor Mikolaj Piskorski investigates whether these sites are helping the lonely—or just making life easier for young singles who are popular already.
Key concepts include: Researchers studied a random sample of , OKCupid members, focusing on two important stages of forming a relationship: spotting a potential mate, and initiating contact. Older, shorter, and relatively overweight men tended to view more profiles than their younger, taller, slimmer counterparts. However, those who were most likely to view lots of profiles were least likely to initiate contact with an e-mail message. Some of the features on OKCupid helped users to overcome the normative restrictions of the offline world, while others only served to help those who really needed the least help.
Each question comes with a couple of sections. In the first section, you answer the question for yourself. The second section is something a bit more unique. You select which answers you want your potential partner to choose. Sometimes this can be the same answer, but sometimes it can be more complex.
For example: when asked if passion or dedication is more important, my answer is passion. I would, however, prefer my potential partner to answer dedication. I have found that if the potential dater has answered a number of questions, the match percentage is generally accurate. Paid upgrade option — There are always options to upgrade and Okcupid is no different. Follow us:. By Neal Ungerleider 3 minute Read. Impact Impact 7 countries just committed to ending any fossil fuel extraction Impact This new biodegradable glitter is made entirely from plants Impact Can this startup for home kitchen cooking create a new kind of takeout?
Design Co. Design Young architects prepare for the devastation of global warming in the Middle East Co. So the city built an office building that floats Co. I first heard about it from a beautiful, platinum blonde, size 2 friend of mine after she received an message identical to the one above. I totally sweated it for a few minutes, because I had not received any such message, and I mean, c'mon, who wants to feel ugly?
But see, the thing is, I'm hot. Sure, I'm a size 14 with a partially-shaved head and facial piercings, but I have gotten very positive feedback about my physical appearance my entire life.
So in my head I rationalized, "Okay, well OKC is rewarding people who are more traditionally attractive, who are doing a good job of keeping up the gender binary, yadda yadda. Now, this guy is really conventionally hot tall, thin, white, dark hair, blue eyes, square jaw, full lips , to the point where I initially worried he would consider himself out of my league. Do you know who has, though?
A nerdy, socially awkward guy friend of mine with a receding hairline, unkempt mutton chops, long fingernails, and generally plain features. He showed me the message in his inbox, ferreals. So there goes my theory, right out the window.
So not only is OKC's new system of segregation totally offensive and dumb, it's also being executed in a pretty strange way. It's cool, though I still see plenty of hotties in my "uggo user" world! I agree that the way they present it is offensive, but the way that they came to have this feature is actually a reflection of the ways that they are more democratic than most dating sites.
Yeah, it sucks to talk about, but it's a very real part of online dating. Participation in their "Your Best Face" experiment is voluntary, but I think that there's an argument to be made for doing it. The ostensible goal of participation in a dating site is getting dates, right?
Setting aside all the emotional and social anxieties surrounding that, doesn't it make sense to take advantage of information about what works for attracting users on a particular site? I did it, and was surprised by which pictures were popular with other users. If your goal is to have people click through to your profile, there's definitely something to be gained from it. Full disclosure, I also got one of those emails, and my hotter-than-me husband did not.
He's an active user, I hadn't logged in in months. I think the email is just marketing, playing to a common desire to feel attractive. And even when they do things that seem skeevy, there are plenty of ways covered by other commenters that OKCupid is still miles ahead of other sites. What I don't get is that my friend got that email today, and he's a fat, ugly old man.
I don't know what that exactly means for their algorithm That said, I did find my babbycakes there so I should probably be quiet! I'm a chubby, brown gal with facial piercings and not exactly the desired demographic there. Perfectly acceptable. Okcupid is looking at how people really react to each other, not assumptions. On oktrends they go through their data and one of the least surprising things is that people use looks, not well written profiles or developed list of shit you have seen or read, to decide who to message.
People are pretty offended by this and lets be honest, it is immaturity that leads this to being offensive. We want it to be like school, where somebody tells us we are special and can do anything in the world if we put our mind to it, but in dating people don't just want the person with inner beauty, they want both inner and outer beauty with advantage going to how you look on the outside.
Is it superficial? Should I, as a less attractive man, be able to deal with this and still find a valuable partner? Again, of course. The most telling thing here is this "2. The policy reinforces the notion that hot people deserve love and happiness and "ugly" people should just get used to being alone. OKcupids policy is perhaps the exact opposite of beautyism. If anybody is being patronized it is the Okcupid staff by people who aren't taking time to think about their actions and are simply taking offense to the possibility they may be ugly.
I find that patronizing and unnecessary. Shouldn't users be in control of who they do and don't correspond with on the site? To me, that is most definitely privileging attractive people over those deemed less attractive. Even if Aaron is right and they are actively manipulating their algorithms in the hopes of mixing the matches up a little more Why do they have to put it in such an immature way? Why couldn't they just say popular which is really a more accurate statement anyway since the ratings are supposedly user generated?
How is it patronizing to encourage people connecting with each other? To stop people playing fantasy and have them look at people who are real viable options for a connection? Sure your window gets narrowed, but it isn't like you are destined to fall in love with one person and somehow okc has messed it all up by trying to do something to get people to date.
Another issue I have is that because okcupid decided to recognize that yes, there are differences in "attractiveness", they can see the difference in their data, they can see it in their users browsing habits, they have created a hierarchy. A hierarchy only exists if you believe that a persons attractiveness actually means they are more valuable than another. They haven't done that. They have recognized people don't deal with others they believe are significantly less attractive to them, so now you segregate to increase the chance of people responding to each other.
I mean the site is based on segregation, what do you think a match percentage is? It is a way of breaking down and pairing people. It is a way of refining your options, but now that the refinement reaches a place we are not comfortable for it to go, because we fear being less than someone else, we fear not being beautiful, it has become wrong.
So in a sense I see people arguing that they are entitled not to be classified as ugly. I see "beautyism" in the sentiment that segregating attractiveness levels creates an above class and a below class, because the underlying sentiment is that the attractive people are more worthwhile, and at this point i am repeating myself. So what if I can't see this knockout in Berkeley? There are literally hundreds of other options worth my time, and not just my time but anyones time.
That is too easy an assumption. Don't worry, I am not saying you aren't, but me assuming that would be acting exactly how I am supposed to act, and I like to leave the preconceived narratives to fox. While your points may be valid, how do you explain the last sentence of email that tells the recipient to go ask an ugly friend?
Because even with your weird bell curve logic, that still sounds like they're calling everyone who didn't get that email ugly. For those who have been granted "attractive" status, "Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Okay, I actually agree with this one. Regardless of the actual changes, their purported rationale for doing it and their way of expressing it to their userbase were both pretty terrible.
The policy makes dating decisions on the users' behalf without considering personal preferences. Sure, I learned in my Sociology class that people typically end up partnering with other similarly-attractive people; I'd bet many of you have read the same. However, we've all got different preferences when it comes to physical attractiveness, and just because someone hasn't gotten as many click-thrus as someone else doesn't mean that users won't find that person attractive. It's patronizing to think that OkCupid would decide who's hot and who's not, especially when hotness is completely subjective.
I don't know if you can opt out of this. If you can't, that's a problem, but has anyone actually tried? Just wondering - I use the site, but didn't get the email, so I don't know whether it's an option somewhere in your account.
As for it supposedly being patronizing that OKCupid decides hotness Employees aren't tossing you into one half or the other based on what they personally feel about your profile.
Their users more or less agree about what's hot and what's not, and the real problem isn't that they're offering a "collective wisdom" assessment of attractiveness but that they're doing it in the wrong way.
Let me point out that there are profile questions that are effectively math or logic tests. Where's the post arguing that this discriminates against people with learning disorders? What about the ability to search by race, or whether someone lists that they're looking for casual sex on their profile, or whether they use drugs or alcohol? If you want to let people express their horrible, awful preferences in partners then - what a surprise - this ends up requiring horrible, awful filtering options.
The policy is kept secret unless you're attractive! Here is what they DO tell people about their matching process:. Did you think about the implications of what you cited? It's based on you - your opinions, your beliefs, whatever. Depending on what you consider part of the "matching system", it also was based on how often you responded to people or how often people contacted you - that's someone's "you" interacting with your "you".
Now it's based on your appearance, too, which is the same: a large amount of other "you"s rating your "you". This doesn't conflict with their promotional materials or TOS at all. Because pretty people can't have their pretty eyes scarred by regular people?
It actually doesn't limit the number of potential matches. It just makes it more likely that, if you're rated as attractive, you'll run across other people rated as attractive. But you'll still run across people rated as unattractive, and given enough time, you'll still eventually run across everyone on the site. So in closing I think the way you're framing this is really silly.
This move is problematic, but not at all for some of the reasons you're claiming it is. To be honest, though? Maybe they want to know if people can get over the "evilness" factor of making that automatic, if it helps them find better matches.
I'm kind of expecting them to reveal it some time in the next few months, actually.
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