By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://theblog.okcupid.com/why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-...
They've completely obliterated the way messaging works. You will never see a message from someone unless you're either looking at their profile or you've "liked" them.
It's an interesting model. But it's also essentially driving interaction through the matching bottleneck, which is at odds with the substance-over-selfie slogan, since it turns incentives towards profile enhancement rather than investment in messaging. And it's also the kind of change you can't just blog-post explain away and expect to keep your existing users, just like the name change. It would be better suited for a new product than an existing one.
Then again, maybe dating sites work best with massive turnover in userbase anyway. And even if not, that doesn't mean this isn't some of the sharpest possible product management out there. At least in the sense of responding to the incentives for people who want to develop their product careers, not necessarily in terms of actually improving the product.
I've read people on /r/okcupid say it's a bad thing, but quite honestly I consider that a good thing.
There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and basically get very few if any replies. One of my best friends is like myself, a person of colour, and his response rates are putrid despite putting good efforts in writing interesting opening messages that relate to the persons profile. He and I probably interacted with as many profiles in a two year period, except he had to put way more effort into his endeavors just to get marginal gains in the number of actual women he got minimum first dates from.
When I use apps that have a model where you can't unlock messaging unless you have mutual interest, it still results in low response rates but the amount of investment is far, far lower than when I used the traditional model of having to initiate with messages and hope to God that they're okay with dating an Asian dude. The newer model actually encouraged me to use the app because I only had to spend a minute or two a day just to navigate through a select number of profiles.
Going into online dating, I used to believe in the whole substance over selfie idea, that putting your best foot forward and having a good personality could make up for some differences, but after analyzing my stats of online dating over the last two years and seeing the disparity in terms of reply rates by ethnicity(https://i.imgur.com/UTfGthn.png), I'm particularly skeptical of the idea that putting efforts in messaging and profile writeups really make that much of a difference.
As a really quick point, dating sites are quite explicitly not built for men. They acquire men at a far higher rate than women, and men ~tend~ to be the ones approaching women, and so pretty much every feature should (from an objective point of view) be designed to filter out men that women aren't interested in, so women receive fewer attempts at interaction from them.
The bias against PoC on dating sites is a serious problem, though. And tbh, the whole mess that is the online dating experience in general is a cultural one that dating sites aren't going to solve - it's a system which allows people to much more closely follow their biases, with essentially no risk of anything bad happening.
To be honest, as a woman, I don't know anyone of any gender who's had a good experience with dating sites (aside from using Tinder to find sex partners). My experience has been that I find most of my partners almost by accident through hobby/social meetups, or in the IRC social channels where I spend a lot of my time.
> As a really quick point, dating sites are quite explicitly not built for men. They acquire men at a far higher rate than women, and men ~tend~ to be the ones approaching women, and so pretty much every feature should (from an objective point of view) be designed to filter out men that women aren't interested in, so women receive fewer attempts at interaction from them.
Your dismissal of the importance of not wasting the time of men doesn't work if higher quality men have more of their time wasted. That is, if the men who write detailed messages get worse results than the men who write a thousand identical one-liners (or who swipe right on everything, etc.), then the former type of men will leave the site and women will be left with the latter type.
More generally, I've talked to many women who decline to actively seek out good men in real life, and who explicitly justify this based on their observations that there is a deluge of men trying to get their attention. So they decide they'll just passively filter the seemingly-unlimited supply of men who approach them. The key flaw is the assumption that the pool of men is unchanged compared to an active strategy.
Exactly.
And this change makes the value of a "like" and the value of sending an interesting message the same when it comes to the prospect of getting someone's attention. Incentives matter, people who get it will shift attention to improving their profile pictures and deploying likes over messages.
Or shift their attention outside the service, as both you and the GP have said, either to another service or IRL activity.
Yeah, that's not what makes a man "high quality" by the data and revealed preferences online. Attractiveness does. The men any woman wants to see on a dating site online don't have their time wasted, because they get responses to whatever they write.
Why is it a problem? Is the bias against eating kale a serious problem? Is this bias against bungee jumping something that needs to be solved?
Dating apps are simply not going to be able to change people's deep seated preferences and biases. Better and more realistic goals are just (1) to avoid wasting people's time when preferences make a match impossible and (2) allow people who would like to match based in part on non-superficial features (longer, more detailed profiles) to do so. I'm worried that we're moving toward an equilibrium where (2) is not available on any dating app.
1. Names can be faked. I don't see any long term and practical way for OKC to enforce real names (as FB and G+ showed in the past). So this is really a non-issue.
2. Photos are much more problematic because it's assumed that one cannot search based on a photo. A 5 second Google Image search on profile pictures from OKC however shows that a lot of people re-use photos they post on various social sites. It takes one of those places to have your real name next to your photo and you're identified! Google Image search is just the tip of the iceberg. It's getting easier and faster every day to compile database of photos and run a AI algo on it to recognize faces.
Any company who boasts protecting privacy of its users ought to find a way to protect against facial recognition.
Some might misinterpret the sign-up process, thinking the name will only be used in special situations, others might think that they're thought of as weirdo, if they don't use their real name, when everyone else supposedly is.
And the last group simply does not understand, or does not think of the consequences of entering their real name. It's simply irresponsible to leave privacy and security entirely up to your users. Especially without any reason.
Pictures being potentially worse does not have anything to do with this being shit as well. Many potential stalkers don't know reverse image search either.
I've already written and spoken at length about how misguided, stupid, and harmful these policies are. So has the EFF. For years. There really is no excuse for a company to even consider adopting one of these now, assuming they adopt policies based on evidence and reason, which seems increasingly unlikely.
This one is particularly egregious because of all the abuse it opens people up to, especially women. If you have a photo and a legal first name, all someone has to do is match the photo against Facebook or flickr, match your first name, get a last name, and the address comes along shortly after that. Because of the nature of okcupid, I could actually see someone sending a woman a few messages, taking it personally that she doesn't respond, looking her up, finding her physical address, and then she shows up as a news tragedy.
If OKCupid moves forward with this, there might actually be blood on their hands in the future.
The OkCupid website hardly changed since 2006. The only big changes I've seen is making their messaging someone dependent on first liking / starring them. Now this name change...
I'm surprised by the sudden change -- I was prompted when I opened the app. I did change my profile name to my real first name. I'm already easily identifiable on the internet (for example through an image reverse search), but my first name and city usually suffice to find me on your favorite search engine. While this puts me at risk (which I can personally manage), it does make others more comfortable. In fact, I want people who are motivated to be able to verify that I am a real person.
That being said I'm glad that OkCupid (now; perhaps a policy update) is not forcing real names to be used. It would be better if they altered their prompt and asked for an online nickname that is not a username and need not be unique.
I doubt OkCupid will let users search by real name. The username still seems to be an internal identifier for the time being. The profile URLs are of the form https://www.okcupid.com/profile/<username>
If you knew my username you could still directly jump to my profile despite my real name update.
Just for fun -- compared to the OkCupid population I'm apparently:
* More Organized * More Polite * More Scientific * More Nerdy * More Mathematical * Less Spiritual * More Confident * More Athletic * More Trusting * Less Suave * More Indie * Less Friendly
There is definitely some bias since OkCupid users mostly come from a US culture background I believe. I come from a certain European country that would be well described by the above ;)
I came to the US for college and have been here 12+ years. But once a German always a German ;)
I do not use Facebook because it is impossible for me to change my legal name due to restrictions of my birth state. What the government insists on calling me is a legal name, it is not my "real name". This is far from exclusively a trans issue: Facebook even harassed Salman Rushdie over it, because that's only his pen name.
When I saw the real name request I only thought to myself -- "this isn't the OKC I know, why would they abandon their quirky usernames... but ok, here is my real name."
I never thought about their definition of "real name" or whether noncompliance would result in accounts being banned. I still recall the "real name" discussions when Facebook first adopted that policy. So of course I should have known that this little change could hurt others.
I was under the impression that the 14th amendment guarantees the right of Americans to change their name, are you saying that this is not the case? In which state(s) is this happening?
Spain. Greece. Northrhine-Westphalia.
That's a big misunderstanding from Facebook. In the UK you don't have a legal name. Your name is whatever you wish it to be. You can use whatever name you like, so long as you're not doing it with the intent to defraud.
Salman Rushdie would be able to get a passport in either his pen name, or his other name.
As someone who used okcupid, it seems like a good move. A lot of people chose very silly usernames. Okcupid would even recommend at some point to suffix names already taken, so I would see a lot of "foo_taco".
You seriously think this is consequence free for men? Thats... pretty amazingly unimaginative.
Frankly, it's a bad idea to supply ANY personal information to random strangers (like on a dating website.) If you have an unusual first name, it's almost trivial to search Facebook to find someone.
There are certain communities (such as people who are genderqueer and transsexual) who experience targeted harassment. Asking users to expose additional personally identifying information is a really shitty thing to do.
How about your photos? Those are as PII as it gets. If you're not careful (and majority of people aren't), and upload the same photo you use for your linkedin or twitter account, a 5 second Google Image search can easily reveal your true identity.
In fact, I have, in the past, emailed OKC and others and asked them to put measures in place so when a user uploads a photo, it's checked against various sources online and if it's a match, the user would be warned that it's potentially revealing their identity. I'm not sure if they took note of that.
They're trying their hardest to turn it into a Tinder clone, presumably there's an internal bonus scheme bending their minds. The fact that being a clone of another service with > 10x as users is radiantly idiotic when your only hope of survival is creating a distinct niche is probably not lost on them. It just doesn't matter. Someone's bonus this year is riding on numbers that kill it next year.
My guess is that OkCupid isn't raking in enough money compared to it's siblings, and it was given a directive: make more, or die. And right now its management is thrashing about trying to find a formula to survive.
It is designed for an era when going on the Internet was an activity. You were in front of your computer or you were not, and you had screen names that were not your real name.
I'm betting all of that is alien to the current generation of single people, and for the young women who are the bread and butter of any dating site, seeing men with in-joke names is off-putting in ways it wasn't a decade ago.
Some single people are over 30 and remember using the internet on screens larger than a 3x5 card. (Sorry, is it assuming too much to expect that the audience here knows what a 3x5 card is? It's a bit like a paper version of Trello. Don't want to alienate the youths.)
I think it's credible that any dating site that wants itself to remain au courant (sorry, that's French, maybe too far outside the properly targeted cultural comfort zone? Heaven knows one must be careful to avoid this kind of faux pax in order to keep from alienating one's audience) is going to have to make sure it's keeping women in their 20s/30s. But are women in that demographic really universally (a) put off by usernames (b) prefer "always-on" dating apps (c) prefer photos and short text blurbs to photos+essays+match questions?
I hope not, because if so, I'm screwed (sorry -- is that too mild/anachronistic? It means "fucked", but it's a little more polite, just in case the audience here isn't familiar). Or rather, not screwed. Services like OKC work an order of magnitude better for me than swipe-apps, I'd guess because I'm better with words than I am photogenic or handsome. But maybe I'm wrong and women universally much prefer the swipe model?
Why do men have such a hard time accepting that women have it harder?
Any proof of that?
> Focusing mostly on women ... would solve most of the problem
Any proof of that?
Everything you wrote is simply sexist to the core.
Why does there need to be a focus on a specific gender to address a problem?
Because everything is broken and we are mere mortals with limited attention and ability to improve the world and shortcuts are always tempting.
This particular problem probably varies by nation, but it is only bad to stereotype like this when you either assume that the partial solution is a total solution, or when your perspective fails and you cause more harm than good with your solution.
Both of those failure modes happen. Yet, all the evidence I have seen says men are more likely to harass than women are. Same effort should provide a greater benefit by focusing on male harassment… except that this is online, so “does this text look harassing?” is probably how this should be handled specifically by OKC, but now I’m definitely guessing.
When we look at online harassment we see more male than female perpetrators, and more female than male victims, especially when we look at the most serious offences.
No one credible disputes these figures.
For violence, most victims are male, with proportions similar to that of sexual violence for women but with an total higher occurrence rate.
If we go closer to crimes that happens online, here is some exact numbers for related crimes (using Swedish data):
Threat of violence: 5.3%M 5.9%F.
Harassment: 4.8% M 6.1% F.
Stalking: Of the total, 75% F, 25% M.
But we can also go deeper. Reported death threats directed at men are 700% more common than threats of sexual violence directed at women (2015). Death threats is the single most common reported type of threat, covering 39% of all reports. The most common reported threat directed at women is to unlawful publish photos, 10% of all reported cases. Practically all threat directed at men or women was made online or via SMS. The report notes that men is more likely to receive threats from strangers, while women are more likely to receive threats from past sexual relationships (40%).
Online harassment is complex, and Scandinavian countries has a strong reputation in social science of having large and good data.
https://www.bra.se/download/18.5e2a4a6b14ab166759985c/142261...
While I agree that anonymity may allow for bad behaviour, it also allows for good behaviour and focusing on the message rather than the messenger. Our conversation here on HN is an example, where draugadrotten and seattle_spring doesn't really reveal which one of us has two PhDs and a couple of million dollars in the bank. Our comments are judged based on what we write, not who we are. When it comes to sex, politics and religion, people are sometimes harassed or killed for what they say under their real name, so anonymity is very important. Transgenders have been mentioned as an example on OkC. And on dating sites, relationships benefit from being judged on the content of the message, rather than the cover photo and cv. There are many women on LinkedIn who thinks otherwise and court men with a good job, but OkC was always a good alternative. With a real name policy, this is no more.
People behave terribly on Facebook, even (especially?) when using real names. Go hang out in some Facebook groups on controversial topics. It's really terrible over there. I've even felt like leaving my own Facebook groups there, because the behavior can be so bad. I've seen one user who was very well behaved on my own site under a pseudonym for years, but when a discussion moved to a Facebook group, I had to block him for behavior problems.
On my own sites, I encourage people to use pseudonyms and even to create extra accounts if they want to post something anonymously.
Color me unconvinced.
If they aren't requiring using your legal name, then doesn't this just really mean that instead of making up a handle like "bigasslectroid" I need to make up something like "John Bigboote" instead that looks like it could be an actual name?
Thing is, those silly usernames tell me something about who I'd be dating if I were a user; there's nothing wrong with someone having a cheesy name if it helps them find love with someone who has a similarly cheesy take.
Also, it's bizarre that a site like OK Cupid thinks words like sexy and lover are somehow 'dirty' (according to their own blog announcement).
Right now I’ve just surfaced links to user’s social profiles so that other users can verify if this is someone they may be able to trust
I think if we don't bother with a total score the way many rating systems do and instead show the count of good/bad reviews and show the reviews side by side, it should represent the depth of those reviews and a reader can then try to determine from the review contents whether the good or bad reviews are more likely to be true. It takes a lot more effort to write a compelling negative review than it does to simply rate someone/something poorly.
Given the horror stories she told, I'm not surprised they've fallen to pieces.
As soon as they start enforcing real names, I'm out of there. They claim to be "substance over selfies", but most of their recent changes are going in the opposite direction.
It was the one that had people with the least affinity with what I was looking for
Edit: older platforms don't attract people that are up with the latest trends
OKC tends to attract people who don't fit into other platforms, and are looking for longlasting relationships. There's even plugins to help with finding interesting people/avoiding red flags within certain subcommunities - trans people, poly people, and kinksters all use it to a large degree.
The author has absolutely no argument apart from a dubious anecdote by a reddit user. It also cleverly ignores every counter-example out there, e.g.: Tinder uses real names, Bumble uses real names, Hinge uses real names. I mean, by its own admission, the article is much ado about nothing: "Via email, a company spokesperson told The Verge that OKCupid won’t require legal names, but the shift is already unpopular with users."
What's the difference between a non-legal name and a web handle? That you can use underscores and numbers in the latter? Why are people getting mad, again?
People who are interested in kink, for example, are highly represented on OkCupid because they can advertise it without worrying about being identified by co-workers, family members, fellow church-goers and whatnot; similarly they typically don't want to be stalked by strangers either.
There's also the problem of uncommon names. This handle is my actual legal name, a decision I made years ago that I frequently think of as both profoundly liberating and incredibly stupid.
The name "Jacques" is quite uncommon in the USA and the Anglosphere generally. I'm aware of this because my name has been mispronounced and misspelled for my entire life. Even though it is a common western European name, I fully expect that I will be reported from time to time and occasionally removed.
At which point, what am I meant to do? Scan my passport?
If you upload pictures, you can be easily identified. If someone wants to stalk you, a reverse-image search is trivial to do. But even if we disagree on that point, you don't have to use your real name. So, again, what is the argument?
If it has your face, yes. Kink profiles don't, as a rule.
> If someone wants to stalk you, a reverse-image search is trivial to do.
Most folk use a photo specific to OkCupid for this reason.
> you don't have to use your real name
You have to use the one you'd prefer to be called by. I don't know about you, but that's the name my mother gave me. On top of which, it is already being "enforced" in a way that will pretty much guarantee that my actual name will be seen as an evasion of the policy.
If folk want to go by their name, the original policy allowed that. Or they could go to Bumble or Tinder or a billion other wannabe apps. What OkCupid allowed was choice to choose any name, even a dumb one, for any reason.
That they sneered and smarmed their way through the announcement just makes me angrier and less willing to take them seriously.
Edit: there are also people saying that they edited the blogpost and their FAQ after a backlash against a strict real-name policy: https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/7ljp4u/realname_ch...
Edit 2: There are multiple screenshots of "first name" and "real name" text from the app and website which predate the alleged change to the text of the blogpost and FAQ: https://imgur.com/LaYdmba, https://imgur.com/aOIKjKR
Also "first names" aren't unique, but usernames are. People have been using usernames on the site for years.
Why the change?
You can't search people on Tinder or Bumble. There's also way less personal information on Tinder or Bumble. (I don't know Hinge.)
There are people saying they saw the difference and screenshots of the initial website and app notifications clearly saying "real name" and "first name": https://imgur.com/aOIKjKR https://imgur.com/r/OkCupid/LaYdmba
It's a bad look.
In the end they're going to get users reporting people or even harassing people for having "obvious" fake names (and many of those reports will be against trans people using the name they actually use).
So either they're going to have to do something about fake names or they've just established a cultural norm for their site that will be toxic for many of their users.
Or you could just assume people are being hysterical as your first default assumption I suppose.
I mean, just think about it: why would people harass someone with a name of "xyz123" but not harass someone with a handle of "xyz123." The distinction is a non-distinction and, yes, people are being hysterical for no good reason.
Publications like The Verge (and Vox, and Kotaku, to name a few others) pander this kind of social hysteria as a means to get clicks, and by extension, ad revenue. I personally think it's disgusting.