4 ms·

An Interview with Tom Quisel, Former CTO of OkCupid (2017)

52 points by imartin2k 9y ago

sundarurfriend 9y ago
This is quite interesting. > You might provide answers for how you feel that night, which may not be reflective of your larger perspective. [...] So that’s one of the big challenges: understanding what someone is really trying to say when they’re answering questions about their preferences. > There could be two different interpretations for the question, and you just answered one of them. [...] Knowing this can happen, we use the algorithms to help us understand the statistics behind each question, and we’ll try to identify questions that are the most likely to be mistaken in this way so that we can remove them. These are both issues with the question system that users have raised concerns about, and generally assume that the question-matching data is just going to be messed up by these. So, to learn that they were actually addressing these issues in code with statistics and analyses, makes the whole system seem a lot more sensible. He also talks a lot about ethics and fairness and grassroots ideals - and with OkC it did seem like those were more than just corporate talk, they realy were a user-focused, transparent company for a long time. He seems to have left before the Match.com acquisition (I'm assuming) though, and unfortunately there have been complaints after that that the company is gradually moving away from those ideals.
- e40 9y ago
  He seems to have left before the Match.com acquisition Oh, I didn't know that. Never used match.com but I've heard such terrible things. Does this mean OkC has jumped the shark?
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    It seems to be in mid-jump. There were two major changes recently: mandatory real first names and you now need to "like" someome before you can write a message. This like generated a notification for the other user, but with the liking user anonymized for non-paying user. The latter change seems to be designed to create more pressure to pay.
    - filoeleven 9y ago
      “Likes” have always been anonymized for non-paying users. You’re right that this shift will cause more notifications, but they made other changes to messaging that I think make the service better for its popular users (mostly women). The way it works now is that a message you send to someone who hasn’t liked you back appears on your profile page (if they they view it) instead of their inbox. In addition, I believe once you’ve sent a message, that user’s profile is hidden from you unless they choose to respond. So for the receiving user, they don’t have to take any action to pass on a mountain of “sup girl”s, and their inbox will only contain the people they’re actively messaging. I don’t know if there’s an indicator that someone has sent you a message which you can see from the profile thumbnails, but if there is it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s for paying users only. They could have skipped the “like” requirement and just implemented the other messaging changes, but I think it’s a pretty good balance of free vs paid features overall.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    OkCupid in their OkTrends blog where they discussed interesting findings on their data once had a post about how the data showed that paid online dating was a losing proposition for the customer. That post was quietly taken down after the match.com acquisition.
    - purerandomness 9y ago
      Here's the cached article: http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat... "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating". A very interesting read, and one of two articles that were removed as part of the Match.com acquisition. Does anyone remember the other one?
  - BuildTheRobots 9y ago
    It's recently changed a handful of features (messaging, swiping) which has felt extremely anti-user. Finding out they've been acquired, makes the recent changes make sense.
rowyourboat 9y ago
> And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate. > But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature. I don't understand. What other side? And why are Filipinos special? How is that fundamentally different from any other race-based selection?
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  I'm guessing that Filipinos aren't obviously "white" or "black", and thus get to dodge all of the baggage that Americans have about the topic of race. Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.
- kurthr 9y ago
  Yeah, they could have allowed filtering by language like Tagalog (something learned) rather than race or "nationality", which would have been just as easy. The other place I can see them doing this is Brazil, and there I'd admit that European vs South American Portuguese would be different. People like to segregate though...
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't get it. Is Pilipino a race? Isn't it a search by country of origin, or ethnicity or whatever, not race per se?
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Filipino is not a race, but nationality.
- ianai 9y ago
  In Las Vegas I knew several Filipinos. Most were immigrants but also native born as well. They have a local subculture akin to any of the others that employ specific dating sites.
- 9y ago
stevehiehn 9y ago
Interesting. I often ponder how to approach creating a training set for a match making AI. It seems like the most difficult part is getting long term feedback. Analytics on first date compatibility would be easy, but metrics on long term relationship success would be very difficult.
mynameishere 9y ago
I guess. But it seems like a lot of pretending. Maybe I'm too cynical, but men have a pretty basic algorithm for choosing a mate: 1. Is she acceptably attractive? 2. Is she acceptably not crazy? Match those two things and you are 99 percent of the way to the chapel. Women have more complicated criteria mainly because what they really want (someone at the top of social pyramid) is ineluctably scarce.
- ianai 9y ago
  That’s unfair to both men and women.
  - Udik 9y ago
    It's rather exaggerated, but it's true that men are immediately attracted by looks and women by social status (or promise thereof). And that the craziness factor is a turn off, for both. It's also true that we tend to judge rather harshly those who don't appear to have an interest that goes beyond these immediate and basic factors.
    - ianai 9y ago
      Yep if you add in what OP left out it sounds less crude.
    - kelukelugames 9y ago
      I don't know if women value social status as much as they did twenty years ago. And men now care more about earning power of their partners.. In tech, I've met a lot of co-workers with husbands in less prestigious jobs.
- Udik 9y ago
  Well, let's say that those factors are the most immediate ones for attraction. This doesn't translate much to "the chapel". I've been thinking a bit about online dating (heh) and dating in general. My latest idea is that a successful match is not much a matter of state, but rather a matter of process. Two people might be well suited for each other but to get beyond the most superficial attraction you need time spent together and meaningful experiences. They could create a dating website that encourages "matches" to go through a set of random activities, that would be fun (and, I guess, successful).
lumberjack 9y ago
>But in general, we focus on making it an experience that doesn’t discriminate and encourages people to be their best selves. Well, you failed miserably. Not just OkCupid but online dating in general. I think it is one of the few aspects of 21st century life where the Internet/technology made us more close minded instead of more open minded. If you are at a party and meet five different people, you will immediately notice something that you don't like about them, but you will give them the benefit of doubt and engage them in conversation for at least five minutes and allow them the chance to show you their best selves. No such thing in online dating.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  But that sort of behavior makes sense in those two contexts. At a typical party you have a finite number of people to interact with. So you might as well work with who's available. Online, the number of people available to us is practically infinite so we can afford to discriminate.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    This paradox/abundance of choice is artificial though. Dating apps could throw up a counter of the total number of people you will be permitted to interact with over a window of time, which creates scarcity that forces the user to increase their efforts accordingly. It’s entirely possible to encourage positive social behavior with technology.
    - meri_dian 9y ago
      Would that make sense to implement from the perspective of a dating app though? Users could just move to another platform without artificial scarcity and... stay there, because there is no scarcity. I'm not sure that coercing people to settle is positive behavior, but regardless, enforcing artificial scarcity isn't a feasible strategy for a dating app.
      - snakeboy 9y ago
aurelianito 9y ago
How to use OKC matching questions in your favor: 1. Answer a lot of them. Always answer very abruptly (all the questions are very important). 2. Look for interesting potential partners. 3. Remove the questions where you disagree. 4. Enjoy your 99% match and message him/her.

52 points by imartin2k 9y ago

This is quite interesting. > You might provide answers for how you feel that night, which may not be reflective of your larger perspective. [...] So that’s one of the big challenges: understanding what someone is really trying to say when they’re answering questions about their preferences. > There could be two different interpretations for the question, and you just answered one of them. [...] Knowing this can happen, we use the algorithms to help us understand the statistics behind each question, and we’ll try to identify questions that are the most likely to be mistaken in this way so that we can remove them. These are both issues with the question system that users have raised concerns about, and generally assume that the question-matching data is just going to be messed up by these. So, to learn that they were actually addressing these issues in code with statistics and analyses, makes the whole system seem a lot more sensible. He also talks a lot about ethics and fairness and grassroots ideals - and with OkC it did seem like those were more than just corporate talk, they realy were a user-focused, transparent company for a long time. He seems to have left before the Match.com acquisition (I'm assuming) though, and unfortunately there have been complaints after that that the company is gradually moving away from those ideals.

e40 9y ago
He seems to have left before the Match.com acquisition Oh, I didn't know that. Never used match.com but I've heard such terrible things. Does this mean OkC has jumped the shark?
- gmueckl 9y ago
  It seems to be in mid-jump. There were two major changes recently: mandatory real first names and you now need to "like" someome before you can write a message. This like generated a notification for the other user, but with the liking user anonymized for non-paying user. The latter change seems to be designed to create more pressure to pay.
  - filoeleven 9y ago
    “Likes” have always been anonymized for non-paying users. You’re right that this shift will cause more notifications, but they made other changes to messaging that I think make the service better for its popular users (mostly women). The way it works now is that a message you send to someone who hasn’t liked you back appears on your profile page (if they they view it) instead of their inbox. In addition, I believe once you’ve sent a message, that user’s profile is hidden from you unless they choose to respond. So for the receiving user, they don’t have to take any action to pass on a mountain of “sup girl”s, and their inbox will only contain the people they’re actively messaging. I don’t know if there’s an indicator that someone has sent you a message which you can see from the profile thumbnails, but if there is it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s for paying users only. They could have skipped the “like” requirement and just implemented the other messaging changes, but I think it’s a pretty good balance of free vs paid features overall.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  OkCupid in their OkTrends blog where they discussed interesting findings on their data once had a post about how the data showed that paid online dating was a losing proposition for the customer. That post was quietly taken down after the match.com acquisition.
  - purerandomness 9y ago
    Here's the cached article: http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat... "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating". A very interesting read, and one of two articles that were removed as part of the Match.com acquisition. Does anyone remember the other one?
- BuildTheRobots 9y ago
  It's recently changed a handful of features (messaging, swiping) which has felt extremely anti-user. Finding out they've been acquired, makes the recent changes make sense.

rowyourboat 9y ago

> And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate. > But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature. I don't understand. What other side? And why are Filipinos special? How is that fundamentally different from any other race-based selection?

thehardsphere 9y ago
I'm guessing that Filipinos aren't obviously "white" or "black", and thus get to dodge all of the baggage that Americans have about the topic of race. Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.
kurthr 9y ago
Yeah, they could have allowed filtering by language like Tagalog (something learned) rather than race or "nationality", which would have been just as easy. The other place I can see them doing this is Brazil, and there I'd admit that European vs South American Portuguese would be different. People like to segregate though...
vasilipupkin 9y ago
Yeah, I don't get it. Is Pilipino a race? Isn't it a search by country of origin, or ethnicity or whatever, not race per se?
bufferoverflow 9y ago
Filipino is not a race, but nationality.
ianai 9y ago
In Las Vegas I knew several Filipinos. Most were immigrants but also native born as well. They have a local subculture akin to any of the others that employ specific dating sites.
9y ago

stevehiehn 9y ago

Interesting. I often ponder how to approach creating a training set for a match making AI. It seems like the most difficult part is getting long term feedback. Analytics on first date compatibility would be easy, but metrics on long term relationship success would be very difficult.

mynameishere 9y ago

I guess. But it seems like a lot of pretending. Maybe I'm too cynical, but men have a pretty basic algorithm for choosing a mate: 1. Is she acceptably attractive? 2. Is she acceptably not crazy? Match those two things and you are 99 percent of the way to the chapel. Women have more complicated criteria mainly because what they really want (someone at the top of social pyramid) is ineluctably scarce.

ianai 9y ago
That’s unfair to both men and women.
- Udik 9y ago
  It's rather exaggerated, but it's true that men are immediately attracted by looks and women by social status (or promise thereof). And that the craziness factor is a turn off, for both. It's also true that we tend to judge rather harshly those who don't appear to have an interest that goes beyond these immediate and basic factors.
  - ianai 9y ago
    Yep if you add in what OP left out it sounds less crude.
  - kelukelugames 9y ago
    I don't know if women value social status as much as they did twenty years ago. And men now care more about earning power of their partners.. In tech, I've met a lot of co-workers with husbands in less prestigious jobs.
Udik 9y ago
Well, let's say that those factors are the most immediate ones for attraction. This doesn't translate much to "the chapel". I've been thinking a bit about online dating (heh) and dating in general. My latest idea is that a successful match is not much a matter of state, but rather a matter of process. Two people might be well suited for each other but to get beyond the most superficial attraction you need time spent together and meaningful experiences. They could create a dating website that encourages "matches" to go through a set of random activities, that would be fun (and, I guess, successful).

lumberjack 9y ago

>But in general, we focus on making it an experience that doesn’t discriminate and encourages people to be their best selves. Well, you failed miserably. Not just OkCupid but online dating in general. I think it is one of the few aspects of 21st century life where the Internet/technology made us more close minded instead of more open minded. If you are at a party and meet five different people, you will immediately notice something that you don't like about them, but you will give them the benefit of doubt and engage them in conversation for at least five minutes and allow them the chance to show you their best selves. No such thing in online dating.

meri_dian 9y ago
But that sort of behavior makes sense in those two contexts. At a typical party you have a finite number of people to interact with. So you might as well work with who's available. Online, the number of people available to us is practically infinite so we can afford to discriminate.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  This paradox/abundance of choice is artificial though. Dating apps could throw up a counter of the total number of people you will be permitted to interact with over a window of time, which creates scarcity that forces the user to increase their efforts accordingly. It’s entirely possible to encourage positive social behavior with technology.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    Would that make sense to implement from the perspective of a dating app though? Users could just move to another platform without artificial scarcity and... stay there, because there is no scarcity. I'm not sure that coercing people to settle is positive behavior, but regardless, enforcing artificial scarcity isn't a feasible strategy for a dating app.
    - snakeboy 9y ago

aurelianito 9y ago

How to use OKC matching questions in your favor: 1. Answer a lot of them. Always answer very abruptly (all the questions are very important). 2. Look for interesting potential partners. 3. Remove the questions where you disagree. 4. Enjoy your 99% match and message him/her.