I appreciate that they added in options to be discrete, by excluding people at your employer or friends on facebook. Not that that kind of discretion was necessary, or worth the price.
As for results, well, imho they have been no better than tinder. Lots of flakes, and seemingly random matches. Funnily enough I met my current partner on OkCupid, which seems antiquated by modern dating app standards.
There's a bit of demographic selection here (people who are likely to use OkCupid may be more of your type), but OkCupid's whole proposition, early on, was gathering a boatload of information about you, via personality tests and data experiments, and hopefully presenting people who are at least likely to keep a conversation going.
As teirce points out, the see picture, swipe dynamic of mobile-native apps is more conducive to casual encounters. It certainly puts more weight on physical appearance and status signals.
OkCupid used to publish detailed posts about their experiments, but I can't recall what ratio they found of "people who are contacted frequently" to "people who mostly initiate contact", but I'd hazard a guess that it's much higher on Tinder. Such an app tends to be winner-takes-all, with a long tail of people who are mostly ignored.
I'm curious about your experience. Do you feel that anything in particular made OkCupid more successful for you? I feel that the level of information / detail in profiles might help for a more successful match, but I haven't put in any time on the platform myself.
I used to be a part of a social network which had more of an open-world policy, and I miss it.
I think the more detailed profile of OKC has always been very helpful conversationally, but really that's about it. I think the greater fraction of successful OKC dates is simply a result of it being around longer.