OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
jonmillward.com
jonmillward.com
I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.
This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them. If you went to a singles bar, you'd find that all drinks bought for strangers were purchased by men for women.
As others have pointed out, the choice of different cities interferes with what you were trying to demonstrate, though the effect size was so huge it was difficult to not confirm it despite the confounding factor.
OKCupid did an auto-match for someone I didn't find during my own searches. I thought I looked at everything. We apparently thought each other were attractive enough, and thats what spawned the initial prod from OKCupid.
The similarities didn't stop there. This was 4 years ago and now I have an amazing wife, the perfect wife. She makes me a better person.
It is fairly easy for me to say I would have never met this woman without OKCupid (the site, and the science that drives it). Your service has literally changed my life permanently, for the better. And you did it without charging me a thing. So thank you, and hopefully you guys keep your spirit and innovation as part of a larger match.com portfolio!
It's like saying I'm so grateful to Muni for introducing me to my gf because I met her waiting for the bus. The bus had nothing to do with it.
But good luck to both of you, regardless.
If you wouldn't mind, could you poke whoever is in charge of the blog and get them to start assigning some posts. I'm sure your employees would love a short respite from their current work to run some interesting stats.
1st, what is the purpose of the green/yellow/red dot? To me, if I see a women with a yellow or green dot I rarely if ever contact them. Also, the percentage of women with red dots is ridiculous compared with the other colors. It basically seems like a worthless indicator of anything and may even be harmful since it causes people to select the red over the yellow etc.
As a guy, if I get messages from women and they are someone I may or may not have contacted, I never respond to get my color back up to yellow. I can’t keep it there long, and have to check using a fake profile, but feel like the gamesmanship is worth it.
2nd, why say exactly when someone was online last? This encourages me to not login random times since I don’t want people seeing that I am always checking in. Even if I am bored somewhere, have nothing else to look at, I purposely don’t go to the site to let it sit. You would generate more ad revenue, at least from me if the site said, visited in last 48 hours or whatever.
FYI, for those trying the site, 2 things really surprised me. 1, the photo selection tool, I can’t remember the name, was really useful as it let me pick better photos of myself. 2, focusing on having a profile that was more about stuff I was doing was better than a profile about who I am. (that may be me specific).
I don't know OKCs reasoning behind it but I can think of a bunch of arguments. For example say you've messaged someone to rearrange a date and you want to make sure they've logged in since you sent it, or say you want to catch them online and want to know the best time, etc.
While that information doesn’t really matter, I noticed that I sort of laugh about it to myself and make assumptions about the person. If I am making assumptions, women are making assumptions and if the environment is as highly competitive as described, you really don’t want anything against you.
In the beginning I would just message women right away, but after a few dates that I could have avoided I decided to be more careful since there is no reason to go out with someone you know will not work.
[by the way] I saw a comment you posted a few weeks ago and liked it so I went to your old blog imranontech.com and read through a bunch of your articles. Really good stuff.
2. Because if they haven't been online in 3 months I don't want to waste my time emailing them.
2. That is why it could say... "online in the last 48 hours"
I am curious: Are there any variables which, after you control for them, make this go away or diminish? i.e., high income, feminist leanings, political beliefs, etc. ?
The "message" is not the beginning of the story. The women selected her photos and wrote her profile, which was really her way of instating the process.
Basic human behavior is the women presents her availability, men respond with courtship rituals - that vary from culture to culture and the online culture is no different, but the basic pattern is the same.
Women, however, instigate the process with variables like the ones you mention (high income, feminist leanings etc) factored into her photos/profile. This is the same as in real life, for example, going out in SF is selecting for a certain type - you wont find many christian fundamentalist, creationist, poor people hanging out in the Marina. Again the woman has made the first move, but the next step is up to the guys to respond. So think of every okcupid profile as an opening message and you'll be closer to understanding the dynamics of dating.
Based on everything I've seen about OkCupid, there's no shortage of integrity, but independent verification is still valuable.
Also, I'm curious: I've read a couple of articles online proposing different methods for OkCupid handling Mandatory answers to questions. One in particular involves treating Mandatory answers as only negative, so that agreeing with someone about the size of the sun (for example) doesn't mean you're a better match, it just means you're a worse match if you disagree. What are your thoughts on that? (Not the company's thoughts, of course.)
I don't think this is quite true. In a bar or club women invite specific men to hit on them with positioning, proximity, and eye contact. She'll steal glances and stand nearby. The solid majority of flirting is subtley initiated by women in the real world and internet dating breaks that.
The experiment fails to account for the reason why people are on the site in the first place, it assumes the reasons are gender-agnostic, which is not the case.
Men join okcupid to get laid, sure there are some outliers, (usually the most vocal,) and some of them are genuine, but many claim that wasn't that motivation for reasons easily explained by cognitive dissonance.
Women join okcupid to get attention. Sure, a few are actually looking to find dates, but mostly, as my girlfriend says "okcupid is facebook for attention whores". For her, and any girl that grew up cute, she is used to getting a lot of attention, and this is just the online equivalent of wearing a miniskirt to a club. She loves it when guys spend ages writing creative messages, their fawning just plays right into her need for attention. She also loves the control, having the ability to just ignore someone who has spent so long trying to get her attention. okcupid addresses many human needs, but dating is very likely far down the list, past more involuntary needs.
just because the world has gone digital, doesn't mean human psychology changes. Women have been adorning themselves for attention since we first started painting in caves, and men, well, men are just men, it's why there are nearly 7 billion of us on the planet. there'd be 8B if it wasn't for the xbox.
The psychology of relationships really isn't that hard, it just seems like it when you're in one.
It hasn't been updated in over a year. Downer. Getting bought by match.com has clearly had an effect. I have the extremely dubious honour of having had my profile featured on there once as being of "average attractiveness". People still visit my profile to this day, despite me not used it in a few years. Now that's good long tail traffic.
Anecdotal evidence: all the girls I know on OkCupid have said that they are harassed the second they turn on the IM system, so they have it turned off. Not that it makes a huge difference- they get flooded with messages, varying from the inane ("hey baby, what's up?") to the creepy.
Given the sheer amount of crap they have to deal with, I don't think for a second that online dating is "easier" for women. Having to reject hundreds of suitors might sound preferable to having to approach tens, but I doubt that it really is.
Very interesting use of statistics by these guys.
There seems to be a mirror here http://interestingreads.posterous.com/why-you-should-never-p...
1. Race and gender data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...
2. Attractiveness data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...
What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city.
In Perth, Australia, for profiles above a 90% match to mine, there were 8 male profiles for every female profile.
For profiles averaging five stars, there were 8.5 male profiles for every female profile.
Supply and demand means that the females on the site can really hold out for more. I suspect that this means that the distribution of actual dating activity will be wildly uneven -- the 1% or 2% of males who are really very attractive will clean up almost the entire female pool's attention. And the 50% of females who are above average will have their pick of the top 25% of the male pool.
Perth is not necessarily a good sample, as this town already has a lopsided male:female ratio. But every city I looked at had the same phenomenon. If I turned attractiveness up to maximum and only went to high matches, males always greatly outnumbered females.
I've given consideration to setting up a dating website in a niche market, but that particular niche market will have an even more lopsided male-centric demographic. I've been seriously wondering about just letting men and women know up front what the current ratios are. The theory being that it will deter some men and encourage some women. Alternatively I might try bar tactics: men pay at the door, women drink for free. Again to deter male users and encourage female users.
Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.
I can't speak for alcoholism here in Poland, but after moving to Warsaw from London, I was quite surprised at the number of young, single ladies. I've wondered if a seeming small difference in the age 15-64 sex ratio[1] of 0.99 vs 1.03 could be responsible, but really have no idea.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
Google also advertised me a site: "Meet men online. Want to marry a foreigner?"
1. Your assumption is false (it's the same as saying "due to obesity and other problems in the US quality men outnumber quality women").
2. Your conclusion is definitely false. The situation is exactly the same as elsewhere: the demand from men is many times higher than the supply of women.
I kinda sorta already knew that.
It's not an escort site...honest.
I have no idea what the breakdown between those two populations is though!
"Men are more promiscuous, so will be on these sites even if they're already in a relationship"
or
"Women are ashamed to be a on a dating website"
But so far as I am aware, nobody knows.
If there are fewer women than men on dating sites, that just shows that online dating is biased towards the casual.
Lots of men are jerks to women. There's this movement called feminism…
Now if you're saying there are more jerks online than offline, that would be a valid point, but it has little to do with feminism.
If anything, women seem to benefit from sexism in online dating - they take advantage of the fact that men are expected to initiate by rarely doing so themselves. It's much easier and faster to sit back and read personalized messages than to write them.
Correction: There are more men using the site who happen to be similar to you than there are women. Filtering your pool to people with a 90%+ match percentage is like showing up at a comic book convention and saying "Damn, this city is a sausagefest!" There could simultaneously be lots of Perth women with stereotypically female tastes and interests complaining that those with 90%+ matches are all women.
Plus if I turned down the match % I literally never reached the end of the men.
Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game. This conclusion seems like a white lie the author created for women.
No one is looking for perfect mate. Both men and women choose their partners from whoever is available. If women got 20 times more messages than men do, then women's pool of mates to select is 20 times larger than that of men.
And even if some people happen to hold the notion of perfect mate, women still has a better chance of finding the perfect mate than men do.
With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.
But the distribution of objectives matter. Let's say 13 of the women are looking long-term committed relationships and 2 are looking for something casual. This is a gross oversimplification but bear with me. If 25 men are looking for something more casual and 5 are in it for something more long-term, all of the sudden you have a system with 45 people where only 7 of them "have it easy" if you go by numbers - 2 of whom are women.
Now these aren't real figures but anecdotally I would say I'm in the right ballpark. At any rate, it sufficiently illustrates that "easiness" has nothing to do with relative size of the gender pools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
It's been proven that the algorithm is optimal for the initiators of proposals, i.e. men in contemporary Western culture, although women can hack this by asking guys out themselves.
The confusion is because you've artificially restricted the universe to a subset of its true size. Women's pool of mates to select from isn't 20 times larger than men, because men have already done a round of selection in deciding who to message. You don't actually message every single girl you see on OKCupid, do you? If you're fat or ugly as a woman, you're basically screwed (or rather, not screwed) in the mating game, because you become invisible to most men.
That's why I tell girls on the OKCupid Reddit that messaging guys can only help them. Once in a blue moon (as in once every month or two), I get an unsolicited message on OKC. A majority of the time, I don't reply. The thing is, I would never have messaged these girls to begin with, while occasionally I'll take a chance on a first date if their personality seems interesting, so they've only helped themselves.
It's also worth remembering that there are subsequent rounds of selection too. If women receive (on average) 20x more messages than men, it must mean that men send (on average) 20x more messages than women, since each message has exactly one sender and recipient. They're only going to end up with one girlfriend. So if those girls respond to their favorite guys, many of them will be culled out after the first date, third date, whenever. I've been on I think 16 first dates off OKCupid. I asked only about 3 of them out for a second date. Some (several?) of the remaining 13 probably were not interested in me anyway, but that's still a sizeable number of girls who did not get who they want.
I agree with your theory that women messaging men doesn't hurt but helps their chances.
Reality doesn't have this constraint.
In a real life discrete time instant (e.g., an evening at the bar), most women will choose to go home alone rather than accept a second best partner. In the stable marriage algorithm, not a single woman will.
I.e., the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality.
However, come to think of it, I guess a prerequisite would be that there are an equal amount of men and women in the pool; which I think is so, I seem to remember from one of the okcupid analysis posts that the majority of profiles are male. Then again, on the whole, there are roughly the same amount of both, so I'm not so sure about your statement that "the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality"; maybe for dating sites, but on the whole?
This is a significant factor. If you run a stable marriage algorithm with 400 men and 200 women:
Men less attractive than the median will remain ummatched.
A 50th percentile man will be matched to a 0th percentile woman.
A 60th percentile man will be matched to a 20th percentile woman.
A 70th percentile man will be matched to a 40th percentile woman.
An 80th percentile man will be matched to a 60th percentile woman.
A 90th percentile man will be matched to an 80th percentile woman.
In other words, all men below the 100th percentile will end up dating way below their "league".
I think this is a myth. I wish years ago someone had told me all I needed to do was walk up to someone I found attractive and say "Hi, my name's Tom, how're you?" The day I started doing so, my dating life was revolutionised.
Actually, this applies to most situations: parties; conferences; seeing a new face at work.
With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.
Again, I disagree; just like hiring someone, how do you sort through the cruft to find the jewel in X number of applications? I'm not talking about seeking perfection, just someone whose quirks - and we all have them - you can tolerate enough to enjoy a successful relationship.
I'd be interested to know your race and your height.
At the end of the day, women still have deal breakers regardless of your personality, boldness, income, skills, etc.
The reason why I think women have it easier is that they can both wait for someone to approach AND take the initiative and go up to a guy if they so choose. Whereas guys not named Ryan Gosling almost always must take the initiative.
Pasty white with a beer gut that shrinks and grows according to the season, and somewhere around 5'10" or 5'11".
At the end of the day, women still have deal breakers regardless of your personality, boldness, income, skills, etc.
Are you saying that men don't? I think it's fair to say that everyone has deal breakers. Personally, I'm put off by people who judge others according to their income - or lack thereof.
The reason why I think women have it easier is that they can both wait for someone to approach AND take the initiative
You're right in that women are approached by guys far more often than the other way around. Given the number of unhappily single women out there though, sitting back and hoping doesn't seem to be a successful strategy.
Then with height, you are about average, which is a good thing. You have your pick of women who are short or average height.
I realize everyone has deal-breakers but height and to some extent race for women are almost universal. It is extremely rare that a taller women will marry a shorter guy. I've travelled around the world many times, and count the one and only time I've seen a tall woman (6 ft) go out with a short guy (< 5'8): once in New York City. And statistically, white women are the least likely to date outside of their race.
Though I don't see how choosing a person based on their income is any less 'offensive' than visual superficialities. At least the former is somewhat based on merit. The fact that I worked my tail off in university and on the side to build up my skills so that I could earn a great living should be more of an attraction than say the fact that I inherited certain genes from my parents.
if only that were true - good genes almost always trumph hardworking mentality. Wealth can trumphs genes (but only if its vast amounts). In other words, good looks (which is an indication of good genes, not just good clothes etc), is highly desired. And rightly so, for the biological requirement of reproduction demands such selection.
Benefits here seem slight - we relearn that women, and pretty women in particular, get more messages than men.
Costs are non-trivial - about 1000 people deceived. Admittedly a minor deception, but experimental subjects normally get some protection, and a minute of time wasted by each translates to 16 hours overall. I'm presuming he got consent to use all the photos in his experiment and on the site, but he's silent on that. At least we have a thousand small disappointments.
Experiments involving deceiving people can be useful (e.g. ones investigating whether employers / landlords discriminate), but this one doesn't seem to rise to that level.
Way to erase a minority.
It also slightly feeds into the idea that "women have it easy!". I'd be interested if a straight female were to conduct a similar experiement and write it up. What would her perspectives be?
In the first four months I was on OKCupid, I got unsolicited messages from about 115 guys. In the same period, I sent unsolicited messages to about 10 guys, of which 7 elicited responses. My sense is that my numbers are higher than if I were a straight guy, but I have no idea how they compare to "typical" for gay guys.
From what I've casually observed (which lines up with your guess) is that it is relatively easier for gay men to find others to meet/hookup with on almost any website (OkCupid, Grinder, Manhunt, etc) and also in real life.
One of my friends, who was not exceptionally attractive, witty or any other specific characteristic (let's say he's a 5/10) was able to get guys over to his apartment using Manhunt faster than I was able to get a pizza delivered. Not exaggerating a bit.
I have to wonder however, if the primary thing here is that its more equal 2-way attention. Men are actively looking for men, and men are actively looking for me. Whereas for heterosexual relationships it appears to be men looking for women, and women not looking for men.
If I remember right, OkCupid did some stuff on non-heterosexual relationships and it was interesting. I'll have to dig for that.
I then herded our collection of fake people...to five different US cities, where they would be allocated in pairs. The best looking man and woman in one city, second best boy and girl in another, and so on.
So the control is lost, even though care was taken to give them similar usernames.
In my experience OkCupid is drastically different in different cities. I feel that the attractiveness scale is completely useless when the profile gender pairs were seeded into different cities.
I actually stopped reading at that point though, so perhaps there was more to learn, but that was kind of an ender for me.
And any variation in answers or questions answered would have matched different personalities, throwing off stats.
Had to be done.
I wondered why.
Most men stop contacting the most attractive female profiles because they never hear back.
Some men are great at hacking the system and ignoring a woman's physical attractiveness, thus scoring really desirable mates. Others instead implicitly follow the rules of thumb that psychology discovered a while ago, according to which an attractive person is much more likely to be with another attractive person.
In this case I think it just indicates that the initial judges did a poor job of judging who the most attractive one was. Or perhaps that the black and white picture used by the most attractive woman is a turn-off.
As for the "most attractive" man, he has a nice smile and nice eyes but his baldness and undefinable ethnicity might be a turnoff for the average woman.
there's an okcupid blog post about this very observation: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
I have no idea why the author didn't realize what a terrible idea splitting them up across cities was...
There was a video on Youtube on dating and game theory where 5 women and 5 men were given a number which corresponded to their attractiveness. Basically, those who were 5's, when accepted into the 8's group were made more attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex, even if they were still 5's physically. Conversely, those who were 10's got the pick of the litter and had to do the least work to find a mate.
e.g. I can see a thought process happening along the lines of "she is too good looking for me, I won't try, rejection sucks. I'll try this slightly less attractive woman who probably isn't hit up as often because my chances will be better, because everyone is hitting up the really good looking woman". Of course if most men follow this, you get the discrepancy I noted.
Or else men don't like it when the only photo is a black and white close-up from an odd angle -- makes it look like you're hiding something.
They should of been located in the same city. How do we not know that LA girls and guys are more loose, and Boston women don't even use online dating.
The algorithm.