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I met my wife on OkCupid. The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited th

I met my wife on OkCupid. The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that's a real shame.

switchbak 3y ago
As did I! OkCupid was a shining star of a product that treated its users with respect and provided a really valuable service. I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect, you don't realize when the golden years are!
- raisedbyninjas 3y ago
  Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-minded userbase.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    Particularly the one that was a tare-down of why paid dating sites like match.com where a mug's game for almost everyone. That somehow went AWOL fairly soon after the match.com take-over…
    - lolinder 3y ago
      This one, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating: http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...
      - dspillett 3y ago
        Very much sounds like the one. Can't double-check ATM as network I'm on blocks archive.org.
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution, and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway, whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.
      - slashdev 3y ago
        You’re being downvoted, but that’s pretty well supported with data. In fact it’s more skewed than 20/80. Closer to 10/90.
        deanCommie 3y ago
        They're being downvoted because the very comment they're replying to contradicts it: "but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose. OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but message them anyway.
      - tspike 3y ago
        Isn’t the parent comment saying the opposite of this? That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn’t affect their messaging behavior nearly as much?
        friendzis 3y ago
  - astrange 3y ago
    The main effect of those data posts seems to have been to cause people to spread a lot of misinfo like "women aren't attracted to 80% of men". (What they actually said was that women rate men much lower than men rate women, but the women still respond the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't mean anything.)
  - Noumenon72 3y ago
    Information has gotten harder and harder to come by as the Internet has matured. Think how much Tinder, Twitter, and Hinge know about human flirting and attraction. I believe it's just too black pilled to see the light of day.
  - isolli 3y ago
    This was a good one [0]: > When men message women, women tend to respond most often to men around their own ages. But when women message men, they’re actually more likely to get a response from younger men than they are from older ones. A 40-year-old woman will have better luck messaging a 25-year-old man than a 55-year-old one, according to the data. And a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to a message from a 50-year-old woman than a message from any other age group. When women make the first move, the age gap dating norm is reversed. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-the-age-gap-in-relationships-3143a2ca5178 https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-th...
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us their are.
  - dghughes 3y ago
    I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had any luck on OKCupid.
    - astrange 3y ago
      That height fetish stuff is the domain of 5'0" white women. Basically message taller women and it doesn't matter.
      - seoulmetro 3y ago
        Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not specific to their race. The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person. It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.
        astrange 3y ago
        > It's not specific to their height Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you don't. > and obviously not specific to their race. It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If you're in a country where the men in a specific age are short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're not all single because their women aren't attracted to them. And depending on culture and economic class, it matters more what impresses their parents, which is being a doctor-lawyer-astronaut who owns a house.
        seoulmetro 3y ago
        No it's not. There is always a taller person and shorter people. Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong. You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.
sneak 3y ago
A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn't just OKC's userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated/more basic. When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today. Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.
- johntiger1 3y ago
  The internet really took a turn for the worse once they let people like me on to it. /s
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    to paraphrase a director: "any club that would let me be in it is a club that I probably shouldn't be in"
    - trelane 3y ago
      It's never gauche to quote Marx.[1] Especially Groucho. He wasn't a director, though, as far as I can tell.[2] [1] https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx
      - ctchocula 3y ago
        "director" is probably a reference to Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx in Annie Hall [1]. It's a great movie btw. Comes highly recommended from Roger Ebert [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnp589JuL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnp589JuL0 [2] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-annie-hall-1977 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-annie-hall-19...
- User23 3y ago
  When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100. Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about. That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.
crazygringo 3y ago
Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad students, for Brooklyn grad students. Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad students and don't love writing (or reading) essays. The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.
- garciasn 3y ago
  The great thing was that women saw men (and vv) who aren’t only a handful of Gram-worthy photos and a couple of stolen clever pickup lines. It allowed folks a direct avenue to those they found attractive and could use skills other than paying, stellar photography, and quotes from highly upvoted r/Tinder comments as a way to convince others to go on dates. People have been either really successful with the way dating apps operate now (they’re incredibly attractive males or just about all females) or they’re incredibly frustrated because the algorithms have taken so much control away. It’s a sad reality. RIP OKC.
- carabiner 3y ago
  Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like many "only in New York!" things it was really something that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that was actually widespread in our generation. "New Yorkers will say 'only in New York!' and it's the most normal shit ever."
  - a-dub 3y ago
    > And the backend was a DARPA project. the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?
    - fader 3y ago
      I think they're referring to the Internet.
bboygravity 3y ago
The best dates I ever had came from a language exchange site that doesn't exist anymore. Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter OKC seems to once have had.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Crazy idea: dating site that forces all users to communicate through a second language. How to ascertain it's legitimately a second language, and not their native language, would be the tricky part.
  - smrq 3y ago
    Well, as long as we're talking crazy, might as well make the language Toki Pona or similar. (Now that would be a really self-selecting dating pool.)
  - bookofjoe 3y ago
    Especially now that there's this: https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-translation-of-speaking-including-mouth-movements https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-translation-of...
Roark66 3y ago
These were different times... I met my partner of 25+ years on my town's IRC channel. Imagine that happening now.
tanepiper 3y ago
Same here (second wife) and the thing is once OKCupid did it's job you didn't need it anymore - and that was a good thing. The problem is that when you choose eternally needing customers you have to switch to the types of people who will never have a long term relationship - which Tinder style apps work better for. But those kind of people also drive away the ones looking for a long-term partner. Really sounds like poisoning the well.
bookofjoe 3y ago
OT: My daughter (40 next month, just celebrated 10th wedding anniversary) met her husband on JDate in 2008. One day I reminded her that in the late 1990s when she was in high school, she asked me if I was doing online dating (in fact I was: Yahoo Personals, though I never met anyone of interest). She told me NOT to sign up for it because "It's for losers." Nevertheless, I persisted in stealth mode.
superbiome 3y ago
I would agree. I too met my wife on OkCupid and she happens to be the smartest woman I know. Her whole family is incredibly smart. I had another OKC date from that era where the woman had a very high IQ, her father was a prolific author and her late 20’s brother was VP of ask.com at the time. I had just assumed it was the Silicon Valley bubble clientele (and still just might’ve been). But only 3 years later I recall younger male coworkers describing how much dating apps declined and how terrible the dating scene had become with “swipe culture”.

switchbak 3y ago

As did I! OkCupid was a shining star of a product that treated its users with respect and provided a really valuable service. I didn't realize that it's no longer. I feel old pining for the internet of yesteryear. As is obvious only in retrospect, you don't realize when the golden years are!

raisedbyninjas 3y ago
Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-minded userbase.
- dspillett 3y ago
  Particularly the one that was a tare-down of why paid dating sites like match.com where a mug's game for almost everyone. That somehow went AWOL fairly soon after the match.com take-over…
  - lolinder 3y ago
    This one, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating: http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...
    - dspillett 3y ago
      Very much sounds like the one. Can't double-check ATM as network I'm on blocks archive.org.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution, and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway, whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.
    - slashdev 3y ago
      You’re being downvoted, but that’s pretty well supported with data. In fact it’s more skewed than 20/80. Closer to 10/90.
      - deanCommie 3y ago
        They're being downvoted because the very comment they're replying to contradicts it: "but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose. OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but message them anyway.
    - tspike 3y ago
      Isn’t the parent comment saying the opposite of this? That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn’t affect their messaging behavior nearly as much?
      - friendzis 3y ago
- astrange 3y ago
  The main effect of those data posts seems to have been to cause people to spread a lot of misinfo like "women aren't attracted to 80% of men". (What they actually said was that women rate men much lower than men rate women, but the women still respond the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't mean anything.)
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  Information has gotten harder and harder to come by as the Internet has matured. Think how much Tinder, Twitter, and Hinge know about human flirting and attraction. I believe it's just too black pilled to see the light of day.
- isolli 3y ago
  This was a good one [0]: > When men message women, women tend to respond most often to men around their own ages. But when women message men, they’re actually more likely to get a response from younger men than they are from older ones. A 40-year-old woman will have better luck messaging a 25-year-old man than a 55-year-old one, according to the data. And a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to a message from a 50-year-old woman than a message from any other age group. When women make the first move, the age gap dating norm is reversed. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-the-age-gap-in-relationships-3143a2ca5178 https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-th...
geraldwhen 3y ago
I also met my wife on okcupid. I wonder how many of us their are.
- dghughes 3y ago
  I'd be curious if you're all over 6' tall. I never had any luck on OKCupid.
  - astrange 3y ago
    That height fetish stuff is the domain of 5'0" white women. Basically message taller women and it doesn't matter.
    - seoulmetro 3y ago
      Nope. It's not specific to their height and obviously not specific to their race. The same way men on average prefer big boobs, women on average will prefer taller men. Both can't really be changed by the person but exist as attractiveness scores against a person. It matters to people who it matters to. Not many in the grand scheme and definitely not related to race.
      - astrange 3y ago
        > It's not specific to their height Of course it is because it's relative to how tall they are. But taller women already don't expect you to tower over them, because that's hard to find, so it's ok if you don't. > and obviously not specific to their race. It is within a specific ethnicity and generation. If you're in a country where the men in a specific age are short because food was scarce 2-3 decades ago, they're not all single because their women aren't attracted to them. And depending on culture and economic class, it matters more what impresses their parents, which is being a doctor-lawyer-astronaut who owns a house.
        seoulmetro 3y ago
        No it's not. There is always a taller person and shorter people. Thinking someone thinks a certain way based on their height is weird and wrong. You are reading way too far into this and your take is incredibly wrong, not to mention racist.

sneak 3y ago

A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn't just OKC's userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated/more basic. When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today. Now that's just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.

johntiger1 3y ago
The internet really took a turn for the worse once they let people like me on to it. /s
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  to paraphrase a director: "any club that would let me be in it is a club that I probably shouldn't be in"
  - trelane 3y ago
    It's never gauche to quote Marx.[1] Especially Groucho. He wasn't a director, though, as far as I can tell.[2] [1] https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000050/quotes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx
    - ctchocula 3y ago
      "director" is probably a reference to Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx in Annie Hall [1]. It's a great movie btw. Comes highly recommended from Roger Ebert [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnp589JuL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnp589JuL0 [2] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-annie-hall-1977 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-annie-hall-19...
User23 3y ago
When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100. Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about. That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.

crazygringo 3y ago

Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad students, for Brooklyn grad students. Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren't grad students and don't love writing (or reading) essays. The trajectory to "just another dating app" was inevitable.

garciasn 3y ago
The great thing was that women saw men (and vv) who aren’t only a handful of Gram-worthy photos and a couple of stolen clever pickup lines. It allowed folks a direct avenue to those they found attractive and could use skills other than paying, stellar photography, and quotes from highly upvoted r/Tinder comments as a way to convince others to go on dates. People have been either really successful with the way dating apps operate now (they’re incredibly attractive males or just about all females) or they’re incredibly frustrated because the algorithms have taken so much control away. It’s a sad reality. RIP OKC.
carabiner 3y ago
Well they started off in Boston and were MIT/Harvard grad students. And the backend was a DARPA project. So not really Brooklyn at heart, though some millennial New Yorkers pretended it was. They even had a personality trait for how much a user reminded them of Harvard girls. Like many "only in New York!" things it was really something that had mass appeal and gave a sense of quirkiness that was actually widespread in our generation. "New Yorkers will say 'only in New York!' and it's the most normal shit ever."
- a-dub 3y ago
  > And the backend was a DARPA project. the similarity/CF stuff? what was the DARPA project? other than that it seemed a rather ordinary consumer webapp?
  - fader 3y ago
    I think they're referring to the Internet.

bboygravity 3y ago

The best dates I ever had came from a language exchange site that doesn't exist anymore. Seems to resonate with the "filter for brainy people" filter OKC seems to once have had.

jimbokun 3y ago
Crazy idea: dating site that forces all users to communicate through a second language. How to ascertain it's legitimately a second language, and not their native language, would be the tricky part.
- smrq 3y ago
  Well, as long as we're talking crazy, might as well make the language Toki Pona or similar. (Now that would be a really self-selecting dating pool.)
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  Especially now that there's this: https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-translation-of-speaking-including-mouth-movements https://kottke.org/23/09/ai-assisted-language-translation-of...

Roark66 3y ago

These were different times... I met my partner of 25+ years on my town's IRC channel. Imagine that happening now.

tanepiper 3y ago

Same here (second wife) and the thing is once OKCupid did it's job you didn't need it anymore - and that was a good thing. The problem is that when you choose eternally needing customers you have to switch to the types of people who will never have a long term relationship - which Tinder style apps work better for. But those kind of people also drive away the ones looking for a long-term partner. Really sounds like poisoning the well.

bookofjoe 3y ago

OT: My daughter (40 next month, just celebrated 10th wedding anniversary) met her husband on JDate in 2008. One day I reminded her that in the late 1990s when she was in high school, she asked me if I was doing online dating (in fact I was: Yahoo Personals, though I never met anyone of interest). She told me NOT to sign up for it because "It's for losers." Nevertheless, I persisted in stealth mode.

superbiome 3y ago

I would agree. I too met my wife on OkCupid and she happens to be the smartest woman I know. Her whole family is incredibly smart. I had another OKC date from that era where the woman had a very high IQ, her father was a prolific author and her late 20’s brother was VP of ask.com at the time. I had just assumed it was the Silicon Valley bubble clientele (and still just might’ve been). But only 3 years later I recall younger male coworkers describing how much dating apps declined and how terrible the dating scene had become with “swipe culture”.