3 ms·
OkCupid stole my idea before I even thought of it
I recently became single and being a startup geek decided to try my luck in OkCupid's waters. Unsure of which profile pictures to use I decided to try an A/B test of sorts.
This is the plan I today hatched for my evening of hacking:
First.. Pull together potential candidates for the profile photo.
Then write scripts to:
1 - Upload them all to a photo hosting site.
2 - Register a 'throwaway' email for each photo.
3 - Create some MechTurk HITs to do the registration for on HotOrNot. One account per photo so that my testing happens in parallel.
4 - Once every few days run MechTurk HITs to harvest the # votes and avg rating for each photo, shove them into a spreadsheet.
It sounded like great fun until my RSS bleeps and I see OkCupid has added a new killer feature: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface
So.. cheers to OkCupid for saving me a night of coding (and dramatically improving on my idea besides)
- Goosey 16y agoClickable link: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface
- blahedo 16y agoNice. My first thought that it was Ponzi in nature (relying on increasing uptake to "staff" the judgements), but then I realised that if each uploader has to make several judgements themselves, that should be enough to fuel the operation.
- Goosey 16y agoCurrently they seem to be running into a bit of a supply issue. I keep 'running out of people to pick'. It looks like you need something along the lines of (number_of_pics * 20) votes to get your rating back, so they have a bit of an inflationary issue. It probably doesn't help that I am male and voting on female pics. My intuition is that more males are participating in uploading/voting, so there is a gap in female picture supply.
- ig1 16y agoThere's a lot of website analytic tools that like A/B that could be applied to dating. How about mouse tracking to figure out what turns off readers, or dynamic reordering of profiles based upon viewer,