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Dating website OKCupid has revealed that it experimented on its users, including putting the "wrong" people together to see if they would connect. It revealed the tests after the uproar over Facebook manipulating the feeds of its users. As well as allowing users to upload pictures and set up dating profiles, OKCupid asks users questions and matches them with potential partners based on the answers. Further experiments suggested that "when we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are.
How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA's math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods. While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.
McKinlay, a lanky year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match. He'd sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid's algorithms. Most were ignored; he'd gone on a total of six first dates. On that early morning in June , his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong.
He'd been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician. OkCupid was founded by Harvard math majors in , and it first caught daters' attention because of its computational approach to matchmaking. Members answer droves of multiple-choice survey questions on everything from politics, religion, and family to love, sex, and smartphones. The closer to percent—mathematical soul mate—the better.
But mathematically, McKinlay's compatibility with women in Los Angeles was abysmal. OkCupid's algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen—more or less at random—had proven unpopular.
When he scrolled through his matches, fewer than women would appear above the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in a city containing some 2 million women approximately 80, of them on OkCupid. On a site where compatibility equals visibility, he was practically a ghost.
He realized he'd have to boost that number. If, through statistical sampling, McKinlay could ascertain which questions mattered to the kind of women he liked, he could construct a new profile that honestly answered those questions and ignored the rest. He could match every woman in LA who might be right for him, and none that weren't. He then sorted female daters into seven clusters, like "Diverse" and "Mindful," each with distinct characteristics.
Maurico Alejo. Even for a mathematician, McKinlay is unusual. Raised in a Boston suburb, he graduated from Middlebury College in with a degree in Chinese. In August of that year he took a part-time job in New York translating Chinese into English for a company on the 91st floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. The towers fell five weeks later. McKinlay wasn't due at the office until 2 o'clock that day. He was asleep when the first plane hit the north tower at am.
The experience kindled his interest in applied math, ultimately inspiring him to earn a master's and then a PhD in the field. Now he'd do the same for love. First he'd need data. While his dissertation work continued to run on the side, he set up 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a Python script to manage them. To find the survey answers, he had to do a bit of extra sleuthing.
OkCupid lets users see the responses of others, but only to questions they've answered themselves. McKinlay watched with satisfaction as his bots purred along. Then, after about a thousand profiles were collected, he hit his first roadblock.
OkCupid has a system in place to prevent exactly this kind of data harvesting: It can spot rapid-fire use easily. One by one, his bots started getting banned.
He turned to his friend Sam Torrisi, a neuroscientist who'd recently taught McKinlay music theory in exchange for advanced math lessons. Torrisi was also on OkCupid, and he agreed to install spyware on his computer to monitor his use of the site. With the data in hand, McKinlay programmed his bots to simulate Torrisi's click-rates and typing speed.
He brought in a second computer from home and plugged it into the math department's broadband line so it could run uninterrupted 24 hours a day. After three weeks he'd harvested 6 million questions and answers from 20, women all over the country. McKinlay's dissertation was relegated to a side project as he dove into the data. He was already sleeping in his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.
For McKinlay's plan to work, he'd have to find a pattern in the survey data—a way to roughly group the women according to their similarities. The breakthrough came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First used in to analyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single, solid glob.
He played with the dial and found a natural resting point where the 20, women clumped into seven statistically distinct clusters based on their questions and answers. He retasked his bots to gather another sample: 5, women in Los Angeles and San Francisco who'd logged on to OkCupid in the past month.
Another pass through K-Modes confirmed that they clustered in a similar way. His statistical sampling had worked. Now he just had to decide which cluster best suited him. He checked out some profiles from each. One cluster was too young, two were too old, another was too Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists.
This was the golden cluster. The haystack in which he'd find his needle. Somewhere within, he'd find true love. Actually, a neighboring cluster looked pretty cool too—slightly older women who held professional creative jobs, like editors and designers. He decided to go for both. He'd set up two profiles and optimize one for the A group and one for the B group.
He text-mined the two clusters to learn what interested them; teaching turned out to be a popular topic, so he wrote a bio that emphasized his work as a math professor. The important part, though, would be the survey. He picked out the questions that were most popular with both clusters. He'd already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn't want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he'd let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.
With that, he created two profiles, one with a photo of him rock climbing and the other of him playing guitar at a music gig. Sex or love? Answer: Love, obviously. But for the younger A cluster, he followed his computer's direction and rated the question "very important. When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent.
He scrolled down Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s. He needed one more step to get noticed. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some a day. And messages began to roll in.
Thought I'd say hi. The math portion of McKinlay's search was done. Only one thing remained. He'd have to leave his cubicle and take his research into the field. He'd have to go on dates. Sheila was a web designer from the A cluster of young artist types.
They met for lunch at a cafe in Echo Park. By the end of his date with Sheila, it was clear to both that the attraction wasn't there. He went on his second date the next day—an attractive blog editor from the B cluster. He'd planned a romantic walk around Echo Park Lake but found it was being dredged. She'd been reading Proust and feeling down about her life.
Date three was also from the B group. He met Alison at a bar in Koreatown. She was a screenwriting student with a tattoo of a Fibonacci spiral on her shoulder. McKinlay got drunk on Korean beer and woke up in his cubicle the next day with a painful hangover.
He sent Alison a follow- up message on OkCupid, but she didn't write back. The rejection stung, but he was still getting 20 messages a day. Dating with his computer-endowed profiles was a completely different game. He could ignore messages consisting of bad one-liners.
OkCupid is an American-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and social networking website that features multiple-choice questions in order to match members. It is supported by advertisements, by paying users who do not see. OkCupid: Online Dating App 17+. Meet new people & find dates. OkCupid. #64 in Social Networking.
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Love is not blind, as it turns out. But opposites attract when people think they are similar.
Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA's math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods. While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.
OKCupid Plays With Love in User Experiments
Get the best dating app for singles and find a match based on who you really are and what you love. Online dating should focus on what makes you, well, you - because you deserve it. OkCupid is the perfect wingman. Gay dating, lesbian dating and more - you can even set your pronouns at registration! Meet people, build connections and have great dates with OkCupid -- download now! Your account will be charged for renewal within hours prior to the end of the current 1, 3, 6, or 12 month periods.
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OkCupid sometimes abbreviated as OKC [2] , but officially OkC is an American-based, internationally operating online dating , friendship, and social networking website that features multiple-choice questions in order to match members. It is supported by advertisements, by paying users who do not see ads, and by selling user data for data mining. The site supports multiple modes of communication, including instant messages and emails. OkCupid was listed in Time magazine's Top 10 dating websites. OkCupid is owned by Humor Rainbow, Inc. Among other things, TheSpark. SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later renamed OkCupid. Since August , an "A-list" account option is available to users of OkCupid and provides additional services for a monthly fee. In November , OkCupid launched the social discovery service Tallygram, [13] but retired the service in April
A reader contacted TechCrunch after his account was hacked. The reader, who did not want to be named, said the hacker broke in and changed his password, locking him out of his account.
Online-dating behemoth OkCupid is adding a feature tailor-made for polyamorous people. It will be rolled out to all users on Friday.
OkCupid unapologetic about mismatching users in dating experiment
TL;DR: OkCupid took what young people hate about basic swiping apps and corny dating sites and rebranded into a hip middle ground. Its multi-faceted matchmaking, spotlight on social justice, and low price point make it stand out from competitors. Let's cut the mushy bullshit and get straight to the point: Online dating gets old real fast. Connecting with people you likely wouldn't have met before sounds amazing at first, but the steps preceding that potential success story can be cumbersome. What's the point of answering questions that everyone lies about anyway if a site's algorithm ignores your filters regardless? All it gets you is weirdos terrorizing your inbox, people who are about to retire , or someone who just wants to bang , even if you requested to only see users who marked that they're ready to get monogamous. OkCupid may be able to change your mind. Everyone knows the name, but what tons of people especially young people may not realize is that it's not just another eharmony or Match. OkCupid is the perfect happy medium that you might have thought didn't exist. It's ideal for people who don't want anything to do with mindless swiping apps, but who also don't want to feel like they're desperately looking for marriage.
Users complain of account hacks, but OkCupid denies a data breach
I n mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love. In , Rudder started OKTrends, an in-house blog for OKCupid, as a way to attract new members to a site that was nearly out of money. The posts covered such topics as the best camera angle for a profile picture and how people lie on their profiles — the mysteries online daters wonder about. All of a sudden, Rudder, a one-time indie actor and rock star, had transformed himself into a dating laureate for the data age. Savvy book publishers took note. In Rudder proposed a book based on his blog, and Crown outlasted nine other publishers with a seven-figure bid. Accompanied by a slideshow, he brought up a chart 1 of how straight women rate the men on OKCupid based on their age. The crowd lost it — groans, hoots, hollers, total, uproarious laughter. Rudder demurred. The questioner interrupted.
