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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

and OKCupid engages in price discrimination too, and has done for many years. The price you'll see for OKCupids premium service ("A-list") is based on a variety of factors: attractiveness, age, location, gender... an attractive woman will pay ~$3.99 per month whereas an unattractive middle aged man will pay ~$20.

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Seriously? That's just the kind of guy who will be summarily ignored, too. What a waste of twenty bucks.

OKCupid is smart about that too, based on how attractive you are you'll see -- and be visible to -- people in a similar "league" to you. You're not going to be seeing beautiful women who could model if you're an unattractive male. This is pretty good for people who are unattractive, because they can focus on people they're more likely to have success with.

https://www.quora.com/Is-being-one-of-the-most-attractive-pe...

If you're an ugly middle aged man and you're willing to date ugly middle aged women there's no need for a dating site. Women have lost most of their power in the dating market by that point.

I was surprised at this so I looked it up. Anecdata: http://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/28oeo6/alist_subscr...

If this is true, it's pretty cruel. Yeah yeah supply and demand, but that doesn't make it any less harsh.

How do they do the attractiveness rating? Is it an internal eval or some kind of crowdsourced bayesian inferential hotornot?

okcupid is now very similar to tinder in that users can rate each other on a 0-1 scale. (It used to be 1-5).

The rating algorithm is probably a lot like pagerank. Ratings by users that are rated highly matter more.

The potential signals are:

* swipes yes or no

* messages received

* length of conversations

* number of unmatches/blocks received

It's the latter (using things like click through rates). I'm not sure if any one blog sums up their methods, but they write about this topic a lot. In one post I read, they specifically mention that having a high quality camera correlates with their attractiveness ratings and so do different types of poses. So "attractiveness" might be better thought of as popularity, not beauty (though, that's the approximation).

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