Comment by panda2009 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panda2009 | Hacker News Reader

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TL/DR: bring back the old OKCupid features. There’s a lot of pent-up demand for it.

I’m surprised none of the existing comments contrast the unproductive on-line dating of today with the very successful OKCupid model of the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s. Practically everyone I know ( myself, siblings, and more college friends than I can count on one hand) met their spouse on OKCupid during this time period. The old OKCupid where people filled out quizzes and the software just gave them a compatibility score ( based on their answers ) worked exceedingly well.

OKCupid got sold to the match group around this time, and they started aggressively removing features, such as search and messaging. This made it effectively a tinder clone, which works for nobody.

Exactly. There's a really good article about the problem by the founder of OKCupid from 2010. This is not a human problem, it IS a tech problem that can be solved. I couldn't find the original but here's a copy:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...

I've felt this way for a while, and have heard others say that as well - after OKC got bought by match group they gated all of the useful features and turned it into a swiping-based tinder clone.

While I agree with this sentiment, there was a lot of harassment and toxicity with the old version. It made it too easy to find someone's profile if you knew them in real life. This reminds me of the "old facebook" too, which I miss, but stalking was a problem and it's probably for the best that things changed.

My memory of okcupid was all the features gave people anxiety, i.e. the heavy users spent all their time on personality quizzes not going out. I also matched 100% with someone I knew who wasn't my type.

I think a better feature would've been teaching people how to take better selfies with 2000s cameras.

I didn't hear anyone say personality tests gave them anxiety. People said Tinder was better because you didn't have to fill out a profile.

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