OKCupid: We Didn't Censor Our Match.com-Bashing Blog Post | Hacker News Reader

OKCupid: We Didn't Censor Our Match.com-Bashing Blog Post

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47 pointshung24 comments

Yes, they censored it. It was censored by OkCupid, which is now owned by Match. This just shows how quickly and completely people assimilate to a new organization, and how thoroughly people identify their organization's interests with their own interests, and their own interests with what is right.

The point isn't to change history and remove it from the internets, the point is to not be a dick.

You can't delete things on the internet- content is mirrored, and popular posts like that are quoted, copied, and scraped across the internet. There's no risk of the post disappearing.

However, when they're in a meeting with the head of Match and their team, it'd be pretty dickish to keep the post up. It's rude. Removing it removes friction between the teams, is a nice peace offering, and in the end changes nothing- the post is instantly mirrored.

Squelching disagreement in the name of civility is not a good way to run a business, and they probably know that. Removing a widely-read criticism of Match.com before more people see it, however, does make commercial sense. It is not the kind of explosive secret that must be contained completely to be contained at all; taking it down from OkCupid's site means it will only be available on lower-profile, lower-traffic sites, and fewer people will read it in the future.

The post is from last April. If I click on any hyperlink to the post made between last April and last week, I instead get redirected to OKCupid's blog homepage, which does not have the article.

If removing the article "changed nothing", it would still be up. The idea was to make it harder for people to find the article. Sure, someone who realizes that the article was purposely removed and that there are a multitude of copies hosted on other sites will be able to find it, but others (perhaps with less technical acumen) will not.

Well, either way the post exists.

Now this way, it is getting attention for existing and for being squelched. Twice the press! Bravo.

"what is right"

How are you so confident what is "right" here? I believe I have a right to take my own blog posts down for whatever reason I choose, up to and including raw caprice. This isn't a moral wrong, this is just someone doing something you don't agree with. It's fine that you don't agree with it, but I in fact strongly disagree this is a wrong; that's a claim that nobody has a right to take their own material back off the internet, which I submit is just silly.

The more in-character response from OkCupid would have been to make a new OkTrends blog post that plainly analyzed the data underlying the removal of the original article.

Data Points:

  Dollars Received From match.com | Articles removed
  $0.00 | 0
  $1.00 | 0
  .. | 0
  $50,000,000 | 1

Followed by a witty analysis of how statistically, 50,000,000 influences the on goings of OkCupid.

Definitely and it would have been hilarious + turned a "have they gone evil?!?!" set of internet comments into a hilarious "ah that makes sense aren't they funny!" pat on the back.

Then again, they probably did their research, realised they didn't want to make a big deal about this, that the people who noticed probably aren't their biggest customer base, that they don't want to bring this to the attention of Match.com and that they don't want their customers freaking out about upcoming payments.

No, because that's too simple. It only has two variables (money and dollars received). The real-life case has tens of important variables

Surely it would have made more sense to at have, in big bold letters, "Update: we've since realised the data we've used is bogus" at the top of the post instead of flat-out removing the article, which is highly suspicious.

The problem with that approach is that search engines won't necessarily show that in their extract. A lot of times, a person searches for "X", and they get a page full of results, and they skim the extracts to decide which to read.

So, say someone is looking for information on the success rate of match.com. They see the OKCupid result, with an extract that says, say, you are 12 times more likely to get married if you don't use match.com, or something like that.

If they do NOT click the link to the blog post, but instead chose another result to read, they don't see the disclaimer at the top, but they do end up having that extract reinforce the view they might be getting from other results critical of match.com.

Overall, it is better to either delete the article, or to move it to a different URL that you've excluded from search engines, and replace the original page with an explanation and a link to that different URL for those who want to see the original article.

Even better, in my mind, would have been for them to use this new conveniently found data to create a rebuttal post: "Why you should (sometimes) pay for online dating"

We didn't censor it. We just removed it because it was "common sense" not to have it available anymore. Don't you get the distinction?

Well, to be fair, what he actually said is that Match didn't tell them to censor it - headline is misleading. So yeah, it was self-censorship rather than new-owner-censorship... which may well be bad too, just a different sort of bad.

what kind of "common sense" is that? Because I certainly lack it.

will you please make one of those blog post calculating exactly how many of your (former) users have it?

OP is not owner of OKCupid, post is satire.

Simply saying that they were wrong doesn't make it so. The original post had hard numbers. If you're going to say that those numbers were in error, I want to see the numbers that back it up.

He may not be allowed to publicly disclose the numbers.

It would be like extrapolating how many Android phones had been sold. And then Google buys you and says, "here's the real number, but its Google confidential". You may be allowed to say, "I screwed up, my data was wrong", but you may not be able to actually give the real data.

That's just the real world.

"the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com's public filings [..] were not completely accurate, he said, which he realized once he saw the real data"

Is he saying that Match.com has fraudulent filings?

No, he's saying that the data that OKCupid inferred from Match.com's public filings are not completely accurate.

Law 36

Disdain Things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best Revenge

By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

To me, the most interesting and exciting quote from the article is "When we put our next blog post next week", which I interpret to mean that they'll keep analyzing the data they have access to.

Oh, so you voluntarily took it down. I feel so much better now!

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