OkCupid has less-than-OK policies. Especially if you're "ugly."
bitchmagazine.org
bitchmagazine.org
It could very well be that every active account falls within the top 50% of all accounts.
Besides, ugly users are probably a lot more profitable than good-looking ones.
We know they run statistics all the time from their blog, so they probably saw something like 90% of active users are in the top 50% and saw it as a way to flatter them and keep them engaged with the site.
To elaborate a little further on this point from a guy's perspective (this might sound controversial)..
1. You risk scaring off attractive girls if they are bombarded by mail from a wider range of less attractive guys
2. The less attractive girls will get less attention as the guys will try their chances with the hotter girls
3. And all the girls would have a worse experience, ugly or hot, which might result in them leaving.
Although the article is not completely accurate ("Those in the dreaded bottom 50% presumably do not have access to potential matches in the top 50%" -- not true from what was in the email), it does bring up valid points. How much should physical attractiveness play a role in relationships? Is it smart to isolate a part of your user base with such an email?
And who is Okcupid to make judgement calls on who I may find attractive?
It matters as much as nature intended it to. Regardless of what the womyn at Bitchmagazine think about it.
People are also much more likely to date someone of their own race. Should OkCupid segregate by race as well? Oh wait, that's a social taboo, whereas discriminating against the ugly is considered perfectly acceptable.
[edit] People are taking this far too personally. You didn't get rejected as unattractive, your profile got rejected as unattractive. There are more ways than one to rectify this. Remember, these people don't know you, they can only view a tiny slice of you via your profile - one that you are in 100% control of. Perhaps your failure is not that you're irredeemably ugly, but rather that your profile inspires no attraction. Conversely, if you "won" the profile attractiveness game, it may not mean you're nearly as attractive in real life as your profile suggests.
This reminds of the PUA mantra as it has been related to me: "she didn't reject you, she rejected your approach"
The "YourBestFace" feature would help you with that.
Most interesting thing I found out? Pictures with my grandma: awesome. Pictures with my grandfather: horrible.
It makes me wonder why these people are running something as small-time as a dating website. I haven't seen so much useful creativity and cool new ideas and openness since Google got bigger.
I'm not insulting their business. It is pretty perfect for collecting some of the data they have found.
Heaven forbid people are rewarded for being liked! Shouldn't a bad photo or a misspelling count against you?
The policy reinforces the notion that hot people deserve love and happiness and "ugly" people should just get used to being alone.
What does attractiveness mean if not that people like to look at you more? It would be weird for a dating site not to respond to this dynamic.
...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.
Interesting. I wonder if HotOrNot can tell you what the correlation among user ratings is (i.e. whether an 8 is more likely to be seen as an 8 or a 2). I would be pretty surprised if the 8's were just as likely to be seen as 2's by a random viewer.
OkCupid is segregating the groups, which seems counter-productive to, you know, DATING.
Really? If you're in a dating mood, you don't look for specific kinds of people? I doubt this. If you're actively looking for mates, you'll still write off >90% of the people you see on a daily basis (count how many people you walk past who are within 10 years of your age, a member of the sex you're attracted to, and not--by your guess--currently romantically attached).
I used to think that the problem with calling prejudice "discrimination" was that it rid us of a serviceable word. But it's worse than that: now, we're rid of a serviceable concept, too. Suddenly, discrimination--making judgments about how things differ--is also a problem.
"this policy is a bunch of discriminatory, attractiveness-norm-reinforcing"
"why are they falling prey to the same arbitrary attractiveness standards as your local meat market-y douchebar?"
This is what reading too much sociology will do to you. I just spent a year with it as a major, it won't happen again.
Reading this, I expected the author to be a trollish blob, but clicking on her name reveals she's nothing awful: http://bitchmagazine.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/prof...
I suppose that makes sense: if she were completely hideous she'd know about it, but if she's so-so in appearance then she's more likely to be offended by her non-inclusion in the top half.
There may be some ethical considerations here of course.
> There may be some ethical considerations here of course.
Reading OkTrends, I'm pretty sure they're not worried about it.
Other than that, yeah. Those guys pretty much do statistics for the lulz. I would not be surprised at all if wzdd turns out to have been correct...
You think you're making an informed choice - that this person is clearly incompatible with you (or you with them), but consider the relationships you have/had, and ones around you... how would many of those profiles look on a dating site? How many perfectly fine relationships would have been written off by either side if they had a profile to read about the other person beforehand?
Which isn't to say that filtering is bad, but rather that the "scan profile, decide if you want to contact" idea is by its nature encouraging users to set bars that are too high for their own good.
If their match algorithm was good enough, I'd be interested in seeing a dating site where you don't get to view the other person's profile. It will only give you the absolute most bare-bones information about this person, and put you two in contact. This is, after all, how most relationships blossom (i.e., in a general void of information about each other).
The people behind OKC actually started a site exactly as you describe. It's currently being renovated or something though.
But then I was like, "damn, how come I didn't get that email too?"
(I guess I chose an extremely favourable profile picture! Definitely didn't expect it)
I can confirm it contains the text described. I was also surprised, as I didn't know OkCupid did any kind of segregation.
Amusingly, it came just at the time I went "off the market" :P
I think this is a welcome to the future moment: more and more we're going to be seeing consequential evidence-based judgments being made on people by computers. They're going to be called unfair. And they're going to work really, really, really well at optimizing for the desired goals.
It will be like credit scores. "Its not fair, I was only late that one time!" "Its not fair, I needed surgery!" "Its not fair, I am basically a good person!" Credit scores ROFLstomp all over human judgement as a predictor of default risk for many, many classes of debt.
Then again, this is an outlier group and the actual problem with the system is that while it's massively efficient and accurate nearly all the time, we're so dependent on them that there is no mechanism to override the system when it's appropriate.
You can build credit history fairly fast this way. (Starting today with no history, you can have FICO 800 in about two years without paying a penny in interest, if that really matters to you.)
Everything in finance is negotiable, but you've generally got to work for it. You can convince a bank officer to override the computer and grant you credit -- this is a matter of routine. It isn't as easy as filling in a web form at 3 AM in the morning and having a decision in 15 seconds, but for minor credit lines it shouldn't take much more than a branch visit if you have history with the bank. (I know we're all wonderful snowflakes, but a bank with hundreds of thousands of customers may have run into someone who dislikes debt before.)
Think about it; if someone who hasn't taken loans their whole life suddenly wants a loan, isn't that a bad sign for their fiscal situation? Why shouldn't they have a lower score than someone who has proven they will pay back loans by actually doing it many times?
I would bet that the system a sliding scale, not a hot or not situation. More than likely users are being shown matches that the system deems to have similar "attractiveness" levels, based on that click-through metric mentioned in the email. The email we see in this article would then just be a notification letting the user know that he or she has cross into the top 50% of click throughs. As their click through has been increasing slowly over the length of their membership they would have been seeing more and more other "attractive" people as their rank increased.
Also, college students disproportionately grew up in middle and upper class households so they generally had access to good food, good healthcare, good dental care (including cosmetic dental care), not to mention better clothes and (where appropriate) makeup.
Furthermore, tying in to their age, college students tend to care more about their appearance than the average population. They often consider dating and even looking for a spouse to be a major activity of college. They often have more time to care about it than working professionals. They often have more social pressures to care about it. So, compared to the average population, they put more effort into looking good and that effort often has at least some results.
So, while there are certainly less physically attractive people in college, the student body of most colleges is on average noticeably more physically attractive than the average population.
(http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/02/16/the-case-for-an... )
(Full disclosure: I have an OKC profile, and on My 28th, I received the e-mail mentioned in the article.)
Members on OkCupid answer questions about lifestyles, dating, sex, etc. (e.g., "Do you think it is appropriate for parents to choose their children's religion or a lack of religion for them?") and then state how their ideal match would respond, as well as how important it is that a partner have similar views.
Your set of responses is compared to every other profile's set of responses, and the intersection between each pair is used to calculate a "match percentage," which is a pretty good predictor of how folks will get on, or at least have compatible views. [0,1]
Almost any displayed link to another profile is accompanied by your match percentage with that individual. It's a major component of the site.
Now, when searching for people to message, most folks set up basic filters -- gender, orientation, age, kids, distance, etc. You have to order the result set somehow, and that's often either just the match percentage, or you can elect to sort by "Match & Distance," "Match & Last Online," etc.
As far as I know, searching is the primary means through which people find each other on the site, and this change will not impact that at all.
There are a few places where OkCupid will show you somewhat random collections of profiles: On the homepage when you log in, in the sidebar on every page, and in two features: Quickmatch and Quiver.
Quickmatch is just a procession of profiles that you're asked to rate from one to five stars. If two people rate each other highly (or poorly), the site notifies them. Your "quiver" holds a rotating set of three profiles that their algorithms think are particularly good matches which you can choose to message or explicitly ignore.
In all but one of these cases, the candidate profiles are displayed with little or no additional information beyond a picture. On Quickmatch, the user's entire profile is displayed, but you must rate them before their account name is revealed and you're able to communicate with them.
The email indicates that OkCupid is using click-through data from these sources ferret out which profiles are the most appealing to its users. The only change that results from being one of those profiles is that when OkCupid shows you a random profile, it is more likely to pick from the set of more appealing profiles.
That's it.
If your profile is not within the upper half of all profiles, then you'll still get the same distribution of recommendations as before. And your profile will still show up in OkCupid's recommendations to more appealing users, albeit slightly less often.
But again, that's only for places where OkCupid itself recommends profiles -- on the front page, in the sidebar, on Quickmatch, and in Quivers. Search ranking remains absolutely unchanged.
Contrary to the author's assertion that "the dreaded bottom 50% presumably do not have access to potential matches in the top 50%," the bottom 50% still has exactly the same access to the top 50% as before. They're just less likely to be randomly suggested to the top 50%.
I'd also challenge the assertion that "the policy reinforces the notion that hot people deserve love and happiness and "ugly" people should just get used to being alone." Rather, I think this may be designed to reward users who take the time to craft engaging profiles by showing them other profiles that have been vetted by the community.
The policy assuredly does not "[make] dating decisions on the users' behalf without considering personal preferences" since match percentages and search rankings are completely unaltered.
While the policy is indeed "kept secret," and the language is offensive, I find it hard to accept that the policy is segregational or that it has a significant impact on the site's operations. I'm not even sure it's "attractiveness-norm-reinforcing," since they're tracking click-through rates, which is not necessarily attractiveness.
Links about match percentages:
[0]: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/29/how-races-and-r...