8 ms·

Poll: OkCupid stories

• eof 16y ago
  This poll kind of sucks? I am a member of okcupid and a pay dating site and not in a relationship. It doesn't capture the fact that I have met and dated off of okcupid and pof, and not off of pay sites.
  • abraham 16y ago
    Welcome to the world of multiple choice. Choose the one you most identify with.
  • noodle 16y ago
    can't you select multiple answers?
    • dkarl 16y ago
      There's no way to tell the difference between one person selecting three choices and three people selecting one each. A running tally of the number of users who have upvoted at least one answer would be helpful.
      • noodle 16y ago
        its fair that you do lose some data when you aren't able to see who has multivoted, but it does provide you more information than if you were funneled into one choice alone which didn't represent you
• justinchen 16y ago
  My brother is dating someone he found on okcupid.
• ojilles 16y ago
  Other: not a member of any dating site, but love the statistics articles coming out of OkCupid. They are insightful and funny at the same time.
• bradlane 16y ago
  Other: Married to someone I met online, but not through a dating site.
• vaksel 16y ago
  personally I find all these dating sites to be completely useless for guys...too much competition. when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week. with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
  • maxawaytoolong 16y ago
    You are doing it wrong. The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile. Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
    • keefe 16y ago
      I think you're both doing it wrong. Women tend to approach men less than the reverse, I presume that if you approached more then you'd end up with higher values in the qualities you care about. It's also only important to note you are not just "competing" with the other guys she saw this week, but the whole online/offline pool of available males attractive females invariably have. It's about leveraging the speed of the internet to find another human being that is ACTUALLY a good match, so one would expect to beat out other people to get to a 1 in 100 match. > SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier... wow at this whole set of sentences... I rarely care but this kind of misogynistic, antiquated nonsense is mildly offensive even to me. I personally try not to treat other human beings like disposable hump dolls and look for some kind of a real connection, but maybe I'm just some kind of crazy hippie. To avoid the apparent but incorrect inference, I am not into monogamy now either.
• mike_esspe 16y ago
  I can't tell for OkCupid (they are not covering my country well), but i was inspired by it and built a similar app for Russian social network and it worked very well for me.
• bgutierrez 16y ago
  For a long time I expected to marry someone that I met online, since I was meeting lots of friends that way. I finally found love at the bookstore I worked at.
• omarchowdhury 16y ago
  When it comes to online dating, a majority of females maintain profiles for ego boosting purposes. The same girls that are approachable on the street will not give you attention online as they have a large range of choice and are looking for something specific, usually something that doesn't exist (only in their heads). For best results, exploit superficiality: put up interesting pictures.
• twymer 16y ago
  What about an option for people who are a member but did not meet the person they are with through the site.
  • thenduks 16y ago
    You can check off more than 1 option...
    • twymer 16y ago
      There's no combo of options which matches that. The "member of" options all have specific text such as being "not in relationship" or "in a relationship with someone from the site".
• ghurlman 16y ago
  Had to go to match.com to meet the girl four blocks down 88th street. Married for 3 years, together for 5 so far. Only in NYC
• dkarl 16y ago
  I am a paying member of Match.com but currently dating someone I met playing Lexulous (a Scrabble clone) on Facebook. I was reasonably happy with Match.com and got several dates, most of which were with reasonable matches I was happy to go out with. I met my last long-term girlfriend on Match.com. When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though. Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others. If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
• 51Cards 16y ago
  I answered for two people. My friend (not on HN) is married to an OK Cupid match. I have been with someone I met online for over 6 years.
• julesbravo 16y ago
  Married to someone met on OkCupid.
• Halathas 16y ago
  I met my wife through OkCupid. :)
• liedra 16y ago
  Other: joined OkCupid for the silly quizzes they had way back when they first started, kept it around as a social networking thing before facebook. All the time I've been with someone I didn't meet online (same person), but without the internet we would never have gotten together ;). As a woman, I get a very large number of messages & woots or winks or w/e they're called these days, all I can say is that the ones I bother to read are the ones that aren't just "hey baby" or weird soppy poetry. Though I'm not looking, so that could skew my opinion ;P
• binarymax 16y ago
  I had a small stint with online dating, even met and had a relationship through one. But it didnt work out long term and I never went back to the site afterwards (was using plentyoffish at the time). A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
• moskie 16y ago
  I'm married to a girl who was friends with a girl I met through OkCupid. Does that count as "Married to someone met through OkCupid?"
• earlyriser 16y ago
  Practically married with someone met online (mIRC)
  • Pent 16y ago
    Coincidentally, so am I
• msluyter 16y ago
  I really liked OKC when I was using it and think it's one of the best dating sites, but I have something of an anti-OKCupid story: I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious. Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
  • JeffL 16y ago
    I always searched for "atheist only" in my online searches. Then a Muslim girl wrote me and told me I had good bone structure. 3 years later, we're engaged. (She's also very moderate in her beliefs.)
    • gastlygem 16y ago
      Does she have issues with, say, pork?
      • JeffL 16y ago
        No. You wouldn't know she is a Muslim in any way except that she says she is.
  • rue 16y ago
    > I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined. The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
  • dkarl 16y ago
• jhancock 16y ago
  somewhat off-topic: I read somewhere recently that 35% of date site users are married. Can anyone confirm this stat or find a source for a more accurate estimate?
• paulv 16y ago
  Engaged to someone I met on OkCupid, but that wasn't an option, so I picked married to someone I met on OkCupid.
• strlen 16y ago
  Have been dating somebody I've met on OKCupid for a year and a half now. Couldn't be happier. One tip, however: if you're a straight male and in Silicon Valley / South Bay, consider setting your search radius to also include San Francisco.
• truebosko 16y ago
  Dating a girl 3 (almost 4) years strong I met on OKCupid. She messaged me back then, after I kind of gave up on the site (Some bad experiences on in-person dates, yikes). I liked her message, replied, conversation led to MSN, then finally we met up for a dinner and movie night. I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
• danilocampos 16y ago
  I met the best woman ever on OkCupid. Three years on and it's better than ever. Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people. Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
  • MistyKaye 16y ago
    I have to disagree with your tip. When someone IMs me out of the blue without any prior contact I think it's a little too eager. I prefer to start with a message or two and then move into more real-time interaction.
    • danilocampos 16y ago
      Well, protip for MistyKaye is to email. I could see how it might put you off, but if you introduce yourself with a bit of fun, don't come off as a weirdo, it can work. By and large, for me this generated much more reliable results than the email method. As good as 1 in 3, versus 1 in 12 for emails. (Yeah, I kept rough stats. I was an SEM nerd in those days, shudder, and looked at it like a campaign to be optimized.)
      • whimsy 16y ago
        Are your "successes" here "responses" or "dates?"
• takameyer 16y ago
  I tried it, and it generally just depressed me that all my compatible matches were over 100 miles away. Guess I should get out of South Dakota if I ever want this service to do any good for me. It would probably be good for my sanity and career if I did.
  • chadgeidel 16y ago
    Wow, another hn'er from SD (grew up in Rapid City). I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up. Haven't tried in the new area (Colorado Springs).
• babul 16y ago
  Generally found that most Caucasian dating sites work if you are Caucasian (or want to date Caucasian people), which in hindsight seems obvious really. The "popular" ethnic sites (e.g. shaadi.com) are geared more towards "marriage" than "dating", but surprisingly most ethnic people on them want to "get to know you first" for a long time (in most Indo society this is usually done in a family context i.e. with others around, and for a relatively short period of time before a marriage decision is made, the short time frame being there to protect the individuals i.e. modesty of girls, and prevent "undesirable" behaviour, all this being counter balanced by the families getting involved to ensure matches are good and process does not take excessively long), which is basically "dating" by another name (but seems more socially/culturally acceptable, especially in Indo cultures, due to the "marriage" pretext/context). Perhaps many people are on them as there is no major ethnic alternative, hence I think an ethnic OKCupid (or clone) would do well. I may even try to build (an albeit rubbish) one for Show HN November, lol. Of course this is a single view garnered through anecdotal evidence, observation of many others (over the years), lots of general discussion on the topic with people from all walks of life, and based on a small sample size, so totally unscientific, but yet remarkably true.
  • blahedo 16y ago
    I guess the question there would be, why reinvent the wheel and lose any network effects by making an "ethnic OkCupid"? If you can successfully identify whatever it is that makes OKC not "ethnic" enough, wouldn't it be better to get OKC to basically put on a different skin and rebrand, but keep the secret sauce under the hood that makes it awesome?
• al3x 16y ago
  I met my wife on OkCupid. We weren't a highly-rated match (70-something percent, IIRC), and I was a bit outside the geographic area she was looking in. But we got to talking on the site, based in part on shared musical interests, and here we are. I think the lesson is: OkCupid is great, but don't assume that their system is going to do all the work for you. Most of the people I was better matched with, according to the site, weren't in the least bit interesting to me.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• GFischer 16y ago
  OkCupid doesn't have people in my country (basically 3 active girls for the whole country), but I did meet my current girlfriend (more than 6 months) through an online dating site (she's pretty shy about that, though, and prefers saying that we met through common interests on Facebook which is more socially acceptable than a dating site).
• stonerinsoma 16y ago
  OKCupid is awesome! I've probably had 50 dates through them over the last 4 years, in the 3 cities I've lived in. I just broke up with a girlfriend of 1.5 years who I met there. Seriously, if a guy like me can meet women on OKC anybody can.
  • oceanician 16y ago
    You should write up your tips. Sounds like you've had a great time via OKC.
• mxavier 16y ago
  I've been a member for about 3 or 4 months. I was in one short relationship from OKC during that time. I would say that my experience has been good so far. Surely I'm doing much better than I would have trying to meet women considering that I'm a hacker by trade, shy, and don't drink (thus excluding me from the bar scene). I've noticed that if you live anywhere remotely near a large metropolitan area but prefer not to date there for whatever reason (Seattle in my case, I hate navigating/being in large cities) you're kind of screwed. I'd estimate that 90% of the results/suggestions I get are from Seattle, regardless of any distance constraints I put in. Also, the woman I dated briefly from OKC next met some guy about 25 years her senior and wound up in the passenger seat of a car going 100+mph with a man heavily intoxicated with pills and alcohol pointing a gun at her. I'm sure that happens very infrequently but I'd argue that dating sites might make it a bit easier for nutjobs to control their appearance to potential victims. Aside from that, OKC is, as far as I know, the best-designed dating site out there.
• rabble 16y ago
  Married to somebody met online, but not through a dating site.
• rdl 16y ago
  When I was in SFBA, I met several (7?) girls from OkCupid. They were all seriously insane, in different and interesting ways, except for one, who was actually a pretty awesome engineer and decent human being (and who turned out to be friends with a lot of my other SFBA friends already). Guess which one I didn't actually date due to leaving the country a few weeks later :(
• smokey_the_bear 16y ago
  I met my fiance on craigslist, but there doesn't seem to be an option for non-pay sites.
• Sindrome 16y ago
  Maybe there should be an option for "Was in a long term relationship with someone from OKC". My last relationship was with someone that I met on OKC. I think it's definitely the best free dating site out there. I tried some other dating sites with minimal success over the past 4 years.
• The_Igor 16y ago
  Very encouraging to hear so many positive stories coming out from the usage of this site. Good for you folks! I am single for the first time since my early 20s (28 now) and completely overwhelmed by trying it all over again. I have had a few dates thorough OKc but nothing long term.
• starpilot 16y ago
  The poll options remind me of a badly written switch statement. Not only are the options overlapping to different degrees, but they're time-sensitive. Say I just broke up with someone from OkCupid. My answers would be different today than yesterday, even though the significant fact that OkCupid led to a relationship is unchanged. How about more humanized poll options: a. OkCupid worked for me b. OkCupid hasn't worked for me yet c. I've never used OkCupid At the moment, these poll results are useless. The poll tries to infer too much about general online dating instead of answering the real question: does the most popular free online dating service, OkCupid, work for HN readers? That's enough to investigate through one poll.
• hyad 16y ago
  Awful. I spent two years on that site, met 2 people in person, sent literally 100s upon 100s of messages. Giant waste of time - I'm thoroughly convinced online dating does not work. Have you seen the movie Catfish? Its kind of like that, no one is who they appear to be on the internet. Sorry if I'm ranting. OKCupid is "free", but it took away many, many hours that I'll never get back. I met a girl one time who said "You get a good relationship when you need it the least." I think that is the crux of why it doesn't work or can't work. It's like when you find something you've lost, but only after you stop searching for it.
• abraham 16y ago
  Sorry about all the typos. I originally submitted this from my phone.