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"OkCupid getting bought by Match Group was horrible" OkCupid was seriously excellent at its job, and a unique jewel in the landscape. There was nothing like i

"OkCupid getting bought by Match Group was horrible" OkCupid was seriously excellent at its job, and a unique jewel in the landscape. There was nothing like it before, and as far as I know there has been nothing like it since its destruction under match.com. I think what OkCupid did was quite profound, even if they stumbled across the social mechanisms by accident at first. It's ability to find uncannily good matches for friendship and conversation unexpectedly via free-form attitude common ground discovery, driven by people who joined curious about romance or sex, touches on something so much more important than mere romance and dating. It was like an electronic assist for what people instinctively do in the offline world in a healthy community. Partnering instincts driving the interest, but emergent behaviour if you were up for it was friendship networks with light flirting and sometimes decent conversation. Not at all like the gate-keeping, manipulation and unhappy stress seen on other sites. With people so affected by and dependent on social sites these days, and the apparent ever-increasing polarisation, we might need to reinvent aspects of OkCupid again.

bradlys 5y ago
We must've been on a different website. Outside of the forums (which were mostly full of trolls), I don't see how you could've been making friends on that website in the way you convey. I certainly wasn't and neither were any of the people I knew who used it either. Hell - even getting a date on it was quite difficult (I never got one but I know my female counterparts were getting 50+ messages/day and never complained for a lack of suitors). The stats they released backed that up too. After all it wasn't just an effortless swipe to see if you were physically compatible with one another before moving forward... You had to craft a message and pray whatever attempt you used worked. (And then do that a lot) I never saw friendly messages going between same-sex people or anything of that sort.
- jlokier 5y ago
  Could have been different experiences, or could have been different timeframes. It has changed a lot. Last time I looked a few years ago, it was very offputting and not at all interesting. But I gather they do keep changing it, so who knows what it's like now. In my experience, which was pre-2007, OkCupid is the only social media site where I've ended up meeting people and where I first encounted people who would become new friends. It was uncanny how it also ranked me very highly with people I already knew though. I had many chats on there with both males and females. It's true that most didn't reply, and I did receive some unsavoury approaches, but some were interesting conversations, and as I said, I met a few people IRL. Nothing sexual though. By comparison, Facebook is supposed to be social media, but I don't thikn I've ever struck up a decent conversation or friendship on Facebook with someone I didn't already know from elsewhere.

bradlys 5y ago

We must've been on a different website. Outside of the forums (which were mostly full of trolls), I don't see how you could've been making friends on that website in the way you convey. I certainly wasn't and neither were any of the people I knew who used it either. Hell - even getting a date on it was quite difficult (I never got one but I know my female counterparts were getting 50+ messages/day and never complained for a lack of suitors). The stats they released backed that up too. After all it wasn't just an effortless swipe to see if you were physically compatible with one another before moving forward... You had to craft a message and pray whatever attempt you used worked. (And then do that a lot) I never saw friendly messages going between same-sex people or anything of that sort.

jlokier 5y ago
Could have been different experiences, or could have been different timeframes. It has changed a lot. Last time I looked a few years ago, it was very offputting and not at all interesting. But I gather they do keep changing it, so who knows what it's like now. In my experience, which was pre-2007, OkCupid is the only social media site where I've ended up meeting people and where I first encounted people who would become new friends. It was uncanny how it also ranked me very highly with people I already knew though. I had many chats on there with both males and females. It's true that most didn't reply, and I did receive some unsavoury approaches, but some were interesting conversations, and as I said, I met a few people IRL. Nothing sexual though. By comparison, Facebook is supposed to be social media, but I don't thikn I've ever struck up a decent conversation or friendship on Facebook with someone I didn't already know from elsewhere.