Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

If you think this is big, by the way, make sure you take a look at their post from December 11th:

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.

> 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.

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.

> There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and basically get very few if any replies.

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.

I and another couple I know of are married/engaged 5 years after meeting on OKC. Maybe it's more effective in rural environments? Social meetups don't really exist outside of major cities, and finding compatible partners is difficult in lower population areas.

Perhaps! I can't stand rural areas for that reason, tbh, I need things to do and be part of.

Oddly, I find much more community engagement in rural areas. While cities often feel more isolating,even with more people. In a city, people are always there, a nusiance or a boon. But in rural areas, human contact has a higher value, and is often treated as such. Just my observations from living all over the US.

> > There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and basically get very few if any replies.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> if higher quality men have more of their time wasted... 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.

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.

>The bias against PoC on dating sites is a serious problem

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?

Because people are people, not things to buy in a supermarket, obviously.

You can count me in if you want to, I had a good serious long-term relationship that originated on a dating site.

I agree that detailed initial messages are probably too time-expensive for the additional info communicated, especially given the high probability that the sender has some clear deal breakers from the recipient's point of view. But I'm not as pessimistic about detailed profiles as you are. In my experience, the emphasis on detailed profiles has been at least partially effective for OkC. My first-date signal-to-noise ratio has been much better there than on Tinder, Bumble, etc., to the extent that I rarely bother with the latter.

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.

I know several married couples that met on eHarmony. Folks tell me they like it because the fee is a barrier to entry that keeps out non-serious folks, and the detailed profiles help you cut down the crowd to something manageable. Seems to work.

Yep, filters can be effective. There are other sites (The League and the now-defunct Sparkology) that filter based on things like college pedigree.

My wife and I met on OKCupid as 98% matches. I'm not sure my life would be what it is if those rules had been in place. Also, OKCupid before the Match.com takeover was amazing. I hate to see what a paid dating company has done to ruin it.

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