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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 on
by 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 agoHe 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 agoIt 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 agoOkCupid 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 agoHere'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 agoIt'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.