Poll: OkCupid stories
What has your experience been with OkCupid and online dating?
Bases off of the discussion from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557
Bases off of the discussion from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557
I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious.
Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.
Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
Women tend to approach men less than the reverse, I presume that if you approached more then you'd end up with higher values in the qualities you care about.
It's also only important to note you are not just "competing" with the other guys she saw this week, but the whole online/offline pool of available males attractive females invariably have. It's about leveraging the speed of the internet to find another human being that is ACTUALLY a good match, so one would expect to beat out other people to get to a 1 in 100 match.
> SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier...
wow at this whole set of sentences... I rarely care but this kind of misogynistic, antiquated nonsense is mildly offensive even to me. I personally try not to treat other human beings like disposable hump dolls and look for some kind of a real connection, but maybe I'm just some kind of crazy hippie. To avoid the apparent but incorrect inference, I am not into monogamy now either.
so like, you had these bad experiences after just letting the stereotypically passive sex chase you, maybe use a bit more selection and go after the really interesting ones and you'll have better experience
I mean if you put yourself in list for casual sex then yeah, you need to be super careful about the people that contact you because typically attractive sexually liberated females get enough attention they don't have to pursue males
Yeah, that's true. I've talked to girls on the site that didn't even know it had a search. How do they think they get all those messages? It's bizarre.
Also, my understanding is that using two condoms increases risk of breakage.
> put out on the first date [...] Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
you mean "don't bother practising safe sex", then are you nuts or am I missing something? Some STIs are for life and antibiotics aren't gonna cut it.
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
Of course one will have more success if women come to them, but I think it only works if you have the natural looks to pull it off. Some people, even when they're not ugly, don't have the looks required to entice women to message them no matter how they dress, pose, or how much they go to the gym.
Sounds obvious, but I used to check out men's ads just to see what I was up against, and I was definitely not impressed!
I know it's a stereotype of the marriage-obsessed woman, but my only concrete model for this fear is a woman I know whose husband feigned a lot of interests and personal characteristics that he dropped within a month of getting married, not to mention that he suddenly started nagging her to change a bunch of things about herself that he never seemed to mind before. So it's a fear I would expect women to have, too. It surprises me that anyone is on eHarmony at all!
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
Actually, I found it to be completely the opposite. Most of the guys messaging the girls either (sorted by frequency):
1) Send a picture of their privates
2) Send something incoherent e.g., "GURL UR SO HOT"
3) Send a long, creepy essay
4) Have zero compatibility with her, haven't read her profile (past the picture), etc... and are sending something generic.
So if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses.
In a dream world. I've done that on OKC and have gotten zero responses.
A lot of my good friends are photographers so most of my portraits are taken from them. Thus, I think my photos are well executed compared to self portraits taken via mirrors/cellphones.
My profile is pretty genuine. I don't aim to be pretentious or egotistical.
When I contact people, I usually start up with something that's related to their profile or something that's in common as to help talk about something interesting. Thus, no disrespectful pick-up lines or gratuitous photos.
Contacted about... 21 people over six months (people of different levels of attractiveness)? Received like... 1 reply.
So, congratulations on the site working very well for you. Really. But, not everyone has such fortunate results despite doing things that are civil and respectful. So when people say, "so if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses" well I can say it doesn't always work.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exact... may be relevant to your interests as well.
In a fit of experimentation, I created a female profile using a random photo from flickr (sorry, whoever you were).
As a female user you get a LOT of messages - no private parts yet, but most of the male messages are exactly as the parent post describes: pretty dumb, explicit and anonymous/generic.
It's reassuring for me. I know that I stand out from this crowd.
I am not sure it's a reason to be reassured. You're standing out from "population of men actively looking for a mate online", not from "population of men in general".
It's not all that different from the programming job interview situation. Amongst candidates that are actively on the market, there's a percentage that are _always_ on the market because they are either horrible or have unrealistic expectations.
When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though.
Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others.
If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
The "popular" ethnic sites (e.g. shaadi.com) are geared more towards "marriage" than "dating", but surprisingly most ethnic people on them want to "get to know you first" for a long time (in most Indo society this is usually done in a family context i.e. with others around, and for a relatively short period of time before a marriage decision is made, the short time frame being there to protect the individuals i.e. modesty of girls, and prevent "undesirable" behaviour, all this being counter balanced by the families getting involved to ensure matches are good and process does not take excessively long), which is basically "dating" by another name (but seems more socially/culturally acceptable, especially in Indo cultures, due to the "marriage" pretext/context).
Perhaps many people are on them as there is no major ethnic alternative, hence I think an ethnic OKCupid (or clone) would do well. I may even try to build (an albeit rubbish) one for Show HN November, lol.
Of course this is a single view garnered through anecdotal evidence, observation of many others (over the years), lots of general discussion on the topic with people from all walks of life, and based on a small sample size, so totally unscientific, but yet remarkably true.
I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
Only in NYC
I've noticed that if you live anywhere remotely near a large metropolitan area but prefer not to date there for whatever reason (Seattle in my case, I hate navigating/being in large cities) you're kind of screwed. I'd estimate that 90% of the results/suggestions I get are from Seattle, regardless of any distance constraints I put in.
Also, the woman I dated briefly from OKC next met some guy about 25 years her senior and wound up in the passenger seat of a car going 100+mph with a man heavily intoxicated with pills and alcohol pointing a gun at her. I'm sure that happens very infrequently but I'd argue that dating sites might make it a bit easier for nutjobs to control their appearance to potential victims.
Aside from that, OKC is, as far as I know, the best-designed dating site out there.
a. OkCupid worked for me
b. OkCupid hasn't worked for me yet
c. I've never used OkCupid
At the moment, these poll results are useless. The poll tries to infer too much about general online dating instead of answering the real question: does the most popular free online dating service, OkCupid, work for HN readers? That's enough to investigate through one poll.
One tip, however: if you're a straight male and in Silicon Valley / South Bay, consider setting your search radius to also include San Francisco.
A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.
Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
By and large, for me this generated much more reliable results than the email method. As good as 1 in 3, versus 1 in 12 for emails.
(Yeah, I kept rough stats. I was an SEM nerd in those days, shudder, and looked at it like a campaign to be optimized.)
I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up.
Haven't tried in the new area (Colorado Springs).
I met a girl one time who said "You get a good relationship when you need it the least." I think that is the crux of why it doesn't work or can't work. It's like when you find something you've lost, but only after you stop searching for it.
As a woman, I get a very large number of messages & woots or winks or w/e they're called these days, all I can say is that the ones I bother to read are the ones that aren't just "hey baby" or weird soppy poetry. Though I'm not looking, so that could skew my opinion ;P
I think the lesson is: OkCupid is great, but don't assume that their system is going to do all the work for you. Most of the people I was better matched with, according to the site, weren't in the least bit interesting to me.
For best results, exploit superficiality: put up interesting pictures.
I am single for the first time since my early 20s (28 now) and completely overwhelmed by trying it all over again.
I have had a few dates thorough OKc but nothing long term.
It doesn't capture the fact that I have met and dated off of okcupid and pof, and not off of pay sites.