I'm not putting down anyone who uses such a site, in this day and age I certainly would if I was single, but I am not sure the sexual habits of single people who use a dating site is really a good subset of data for this.
Personally, I'm using the site because I frequently find myself hanging out with friends. Most are male, but there are a few females who are either in relationships or are longtime friends who aren't sexually interested in me. I'm just hoping to meet a few women to go out on casual dates with and to bring into our "friend group." As a 26-year-old who is out of college and whose coworkers are all 35 or older, a dating site seems like a good way to meaningfully meet people.
I think your assumptions of the types of people on dating sites are way off. Based on my chats with women on the site, they seem to be in a similar position to me. With dating sites, not only do you get to meet someone outside the context of a bar, you also know that you're talking to someone else who is looking to meet people. It completely removes the awkwardness of trying to figure out if someone is in a relationship, if they have at all similar interests, or if they're going to just be totally bitchy for no reason.
That aside, the real question seems to be if the site is representative. I would argue that for the age group of 18-35, the site is highly representative.
It's reasonable to assume that the subset of people who use OKCupid is not representative of society as a whole. Now im not sure exactly what biases this might introduce, but one should always be aware, especially considering that the OKCupid users are a self selected sample (not a random sample) of society.
Absolutely, but that's not what DirtyAndy was getting at - he's assigning his own stereotype of an OKCupid user, which he has little data to back up.
It's perfectly valid to be suspicious of population bias in a website - any website for that matter - but to extrapolate and pretend to know just how that bias is tilted (without data) is doing yourself a disservice.
As for no data, I did write my comment with no data to back it up. I would imagine less than 10% of comments I see on HN are made with solid information to backup someones thoughts. Most people on here are smart people that can make up their own minds and provide information from the world they see around them.
Did you have any data to back your comment up? Here's a start, OKCupid claim the median number of partners for both men and women, gays and straights is 6. I've just gone out and googled for such numbers, and whilst I didn't find anything definitive, I didn't find one median or average as low as 6, in fact looking at 18-35 as another commentator points out as OKCupid being representative of, 9 would appear more likely (my guess would have been 8). So that probably supports my assumption that there is a bias to some degree - OKCupid users appear to be getting less than the average. I have no idea where OKCupid falls in the spectrum of dating sites, I have no idea how many active users there are in the world of dating websites, but I would be staggered to see statistics that extrapolate to the user base of a singles website being indicative of overall society. In 10 years time, maybe, but at this point in time I doubt it. This article is trying to claim it has real facts, all I am saying is take those facts with a grain of salt.
What does one have to do with the other? They will meet in the flesh at some point, you know.
I've known my wife for 10 years since meeting on Yahoo! I still remember vividly the first time we saw each other. If it wasn't love at first sight, it was certainly love that first night.