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.
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.
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.
Undergraduate degrees are becoming a stronger signal just not in the same way.
It’s even more obvious with high school degrees. Most people cross that threshold, so the people who didn’t now represent a usual group of under achievers. The threshold is far below what FAANG’s are looking for, but requiring a HS/collage degree can effectively presort applicants for jobs with lower thresholds.
Unfortunately, such methods consistently exclude many worthwhile applicants from a wide range of jobs the same way asking for a criminal background check. But that then sets up a stronger feedback loop as people have stronger incentives to cross that threshold.
Paradoxically, if you have an undergraduate degree but don’t have a high school degree, it can be even stronger signal than having both.
“I actually dropped out of high school and went straight to college.”, sounds impressive.
Of course you have to omit the part about taking a gap year and being a community college transfer student.
I can’t even imagine being asked about this part of my life in a career context. I’m 35 and for the better part of a decade I’ve just been asked about my previous roles. Seems like most organisations simply couldn’t care less where I’ve come from. Maybe it’s an Australian cultural thing.
The only time people who are more than a few years into their career are asked about degrees (and grades) in an interview is at very bureaucratic organizations or when being interviewed by someone themselves barely out of school who lacks awareness.
Seeing as this career is a golden ticket with a guaranteed job for life if you’re half competent, I’d spin the complaints from some about these practices around: if an organisation is so detached from the realities of commercial software delivery and what makes a good hire that they’re asking about high school or your degree (and you do have experience), you’ve just received a boon of you all the information you needed. They’re not worth your time and don’t have their eyes on the ball. I’d just be thankful to have dodged a bullet!
I'm assuming it's a typo but "collage degree" is great as either a baseline inapplicable bachelor's for a tech job or a cynical view of the value a high school diploma.
Thinking about it I bet someone somewhere has a MA focusing on collage and produces incredible art, so no hard feelings here.
One is that they put the Internet in everybody's hands, literally.
The other, though, is that by virtue of the interface, both display (tiny) and input (shitty, to put it mildly), the effective IQ of those participating, regardless of whatever it was initially, is severely penalised.
When I'm typing at a keyboard, I can look at the words I'm typing, or the source I'm typing from, or just off into space as I'm thinking my thoughts ... and be reasonably assured that what I think I'm typing is what's actually appearing on screen. And if not, editing to correct and fix issues is reasonably straightforward. If necessary I'll switch to a Real Editor (that is, vim, Vale Bram Moolenaar) which is another quantum leap beyond in-browser textbox editing.
When I'm typing at a virtual touchscreen keyboard, I am staring at the keys themselves and trying to hit the the keys I'm actually intending to hit. I'm not monitoring the output (which invariably has errors), I'm not looking at source text, I'm not thinking and composing my thoughts.
And then editing what I've written is also painful.
The resulting typos, losses of thought, and general incoherence in my own writing absolutely pains me to look at. From what I can tell, other people seem to suffer similarly.
I've given up using mobile devices for input (unless I can use a hardware keyboard, and even that rarely), and ... frankly it's a much improved situation.
I write much longer comments on my laptop and desktop computers than on my phone. The pains you mention make me write less even when I want to write more. Do not confuse this with “I have made this longer than usual because I have not time to make it shorter.” (Pascal, 1657, though others have said something similar and folklore attributes the idea to many more) - I do often revise long comments on my computer to be shorter, but they are still much longer than what I'd write on my phone. If I spent more time on them on my computer I'd write them even shorter, but still much longer because what I want to say is normally long and complex and a phone just makes the complexity too hard to write.
You won't be surprised I've never got the point of limited space places like twitter...
Have you ever heard about the MessagEase keyboard? It's a pretty radical departure from the usual touch qwerty. Once you get the muscle memory down, you can even disable the letters completely. Right now I'm typing on a featureless black 3x3 grid (save for a purple dot in the center). It's a great conversation starter too, cause folks see me typing and are universally like "wtf how are you typing".
I never thought of it, but now that you mention it, yeah my eyes are on the text, not on the typing.
I switched to messagease in the first place because I make far less mistakes and it's faster to fix a one-letter goof than redo a whole word with swype (sometimes several times, also the gestures fail on unusual or jargon words).
Everything you said + progressing hypermetropia for the last 25 years. When mobile screens got half decent sizes, I already hated the medium.
When people said that those text pages, around 2000, what was the name? WAP? were going to get everybody online, I was very skeptical. But of course, that was pre-iPhone.
I remember WAP, and had an early-phase smartphone with limited Web support (Palm Treo/Centro) which ... remains one of the better phones that I've had (hard keyboard among other features). You wouldn't want to read much on that, but as a quick on-the-go reference, particularly when travelling, it was handy.
One of my daily drivers is a large (13.3") e-ink tablet. Reading on that is actually a pleasure, though it's led me to another conclusion: scrolling sucks.
I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than ePub) both because the same material stays in the same place on the same page regardless of other settings (I have a strongly spatial memory), and because the layout is usually just simply much better than what fluid-layouts achieve.
What really drives me nuts though is having to scroll on webpages. It's imprecise, half the time I'm clicking on something I'd not intended to, and it's much harder and less pleasing to read.
But size and print clarity alone make this a huge improvement over smartphone displays.
The eyesight I wouldn't complain at all. Until recently I didn't need glasses, except for reading. Hypermetropia is also called far-sightness for a reason. Worst period is when I only used glasses for the screen. Someone would come to interrupt and talk, I took the glasses off, then we were commenting on the screen contents, I put it on again, then back to talk and glasses off...
At home I use a 27'' screen with the regular glasses. I fear that if for a next job at some office they don't provide a similar one, the situation will repeat, now with regular glasses vs reading glasses :-m
I much prefer reading paginated media, and if at all possible, fixed-layout media (e.g., PDFs rather than ePub)
ePub didn't grow on me and I couldn't put my finger on why, I guess that's the reason.
About WAP phones, this was the one the company provided:
On desktop, I have the option of scrolling via spacebar or page-up/down keys.
This is reasonably determinative (the scroll distance is the same in each case), convenient (it's easy to hit those keys), and not confusable with other intent actions. That last point is key as very often when I'm attempting a scroll action on a touchscreen interface I instead commit a click action (usually navigating off-page). Which is maddening.
On touchscreens, not only can I not scroll by a prescribed amount, not only is input through an onscreen keyboard completely crippled, but there's an ever-present drag/click ambiguity which on Android at least (and from my limited experience with iPhones suggests there too) is everpresent.
Add in e-ink, and there are the additional levels that refresh rates drop low enough that following scrolling is tedious, and the display technology makes the many, many paints of a long scroll expensive in terms of battery life. Web browsing drains battery at 10x the rate of my e-book reader.
Einkbro at least mitigates some of that. Going back to Firefox or Onyx's Chrome-based browser is excruciating.
But OKCupid joining the race to the bottom was a choice. They decided to drop the high-IQ / literary customers.
They could have remained as the high-end of dating. 90% of men don’t enjoy using Tinder, and for women it’s just a utility service when being bachelor.
Check out the Flynn Effect. It is possible that all of us online idiots and the cohorts coming after are getting stupider every generation. I wouldn't be so hasty with the "things aren't getting worse" part just yet. It could get much worse!
All the idiots already were, unless bikeshedding category theory in IRC while m$ and friends pulled the rug under general computing was The Thinking Man's Choice.
Sure, just make something that has a barrier to entry that will filter out non-nerds. From what I can tell Ham radio is basically just a chatroom with an entrance exam, for instance. Anything done in a constructed language like Esperanto would be another filter.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a website duplicating the original OKCupid method. It's just that it requires someone willing to say "no" to the Marginal User and stay niche.
And from what I can tell, Mastodon is duplicating the original, pre-value-extraction Twitter experience. But the main filter it has at the moment is the network effects from Twitter and Facebook; as it grows that filter effect will be reduced.
Can we use separate root DNS server as technical barrier to entry? Or NNTP protocol. Or client side SSL certificate, which must be won in a complex game.
There are plenty of options to separate smart people from regular crowd. IMHO, a separate DNS server, which unlocks alternative Internet, is the easiest way to move away from regular people, because it's a bit complicated to switch DNS on a mobile device.
The thing is, that won't duplicate the original Internet, because the Internet exists. This new filtered internet won't contain all the smart tech people; it will contain all the smart tech people who wanted to join an alternate internet of smart tech people. Those are different sets of people.
Early Internet was place for people with similar background, which were small part of all smart people.
IMHO, we need a bait. Something, that will bring in smart people, and only smart people. HN detracts regular people, because it looks boring and doesn't help to continue discussions. This is good for HN, but bad for discussions (and spamers).
I'm thinking about mix of a court and wikipedia. Something, where we can play our game (who is right? who is the smarter?) on steroids, something where we can layout our arguments, facts, ideas, and then discuss them (flame all night long), until someone else, an arbiter, will read all that and declare a winner. IMHO, a topic and number of win/lost/unfinished discussions will be a good indication of smartiness and expertise in a domain.
Even if it becomes successful there will be someone that will decide to make something that gives it easy access to the luddites.
> I'm thinking about mix of a court and wikipedia. Something, where we can play our game (who is right? who is the smarter?) on steroids, something where we can layout our arguments, facts, ideas, and then discuss them (flame all night long), until someone else, an arbiter, will read all that and declare a winner. IMHO, a topic and number of win/lost/unfinished discussions will be a good indication of smartiness and expertise in a domain.
Any system based on voting will be overwhelmed by clueless people upvoting "wrong" thing, just look at reddit.
Only moderation works but that brings all kinds of problems with who is moderator and who chooses them, and what they are allowed to do etc.
Amateur radio, public (by law - unencrypted, anyone can listen) long-distance communications over certain bands where people are allowed to transmit after a certain barrier of entry of licensing and equipment.
> for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean. Specifically, no more than 1/k^2 of the distribution's values can be k or more standard deviations away from the mean.
IQ is (if I recall correctly) normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15. So for a distance of 1.3... standard deviation (i.e. a distance of 20), you can't have more than 1/1.3...^2 = 56.25% of the population so far from the mean (below 80 or above 120), or 28.125% _above_ 120.
Just imagine how high it must have been when there were only hundreds of users? =;-}
Bitnet Relay in 1992 had some, not even all universities connected and I know of marriages that originated in the IRL(!) relay parties. We actually drove across Europe to meet our online friends.
"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].
OKC even early on had lots of new users that didn't necessarily fit well in the site culture (/formed different subcultures). Those people had more visually-oriented profiles, focused less on funny writing, would largely not use the quizzes, and if they did they'd answer quizzes very differently from you, and you'd still get your great >90% match dates filtering them out, and it didn't really matter! The filter worked!
(I found my literal 99% match before OKCupid went too wrong, so I don't really know how it fell. I'm assuming overt monetization poisoned the well.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot about redpill culture that is inexcusably execrable, but it does offer a true and practical answer to the question you have posed: do everything in your power to make yourself more attractive. Work out, get a good haircut, improve your wardrobe, develop your career, improve your social/conversation skills, have interesting hobbies. Become the best version of yourself and you will get more attention from others.
Tinder's data shows "chance of approach", which is brutal for men who are not too good looking.
IIRC, OkCupid's data shows a bit different thing. The distribution of ratings determines chance of messages/likes - the larger stddev the better chances. IIRC, the most messaged men were ones with ratings characterized by bimodal distribution. Therefore, the most messaged men were not the ones with highest visual rating. I do not recall the distribution of messages, so can't comment much on that.
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.
Nope, not really, not only it makes zero sense from evolutionary perspective (especially that of humans), but it also is very specific to one specific platform, and very much determined on the way it is structured and its target audience, business model, etc.
Online dating is skewed because you have no way to know what someone is really like. All you get is a picture (which may have been photoshopped), and profile data (they might be lieing. If you do date someone you want them to look good because at least if the night was a bust you got to look at someone hot.
I remember reading that analysis at the time and thinking it was flawed.
What it didn't seem to account for was if you rated someone high enough (I can't remember if it required 4 or 5 stars), OKCupid would notify the person in question that you had done so. If you didn't want these notifications being fired off you had to adjust your ratings accordingly - now 3 stars is the highest rating you are going to give.
I think the stats really just ended up reflecting that men were generally more comfortable having their ratings broadcast than women were.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I have literally not once in my entire life heard a woman in real life say 'oh he's so tall, that's so attractive'. That's only an internet thing. Or an outside-Western Europe thing, maybe.
I remember hearing the founder of The League dating app talk about her platform, back when she was first starting out. She said it was made so that women could be assured they were dating men who were verifiably (1) well-educated (the name is a nod to the Ivy League), (2) made good money, and (3) were tall. The way she talked about the latter sounded a bit anti-Asian, to be honest.
As a short man, I have heard height directly or indirectly referenced as a point of attraction more times than I can count. I’ve even had women say literally to my face I wasn’t tall enough for them.
I’m glad you haven’t had that experience. Doesn’t discount that it’s a real thing.
Have you never heard "he has nice teeth and his arm pit doesn't stink" too? Because that's also another reason women find men attractive, they smell nice and have good teeth. Obviously we don't announce all our instincts.
How people act is often different from how they say they act. Women can be attracted to taller men without knowing that is a factor much less admitting it.
I have no idea if women really are attracted to taller men, but I know what you hear people say isn't the whole truth either.
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.
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.
Look at us here on HN - we're discussing an essay we read about the decline of online dating. We're a self-selecting group too. Tonight's top story: a group of people who like reading essays decry that online dating no longer involves reading essays.
I was nodding my head very hard at this essay, but this has given me something to chew on.
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."
Not sure if it was DARPA, but the web server used Tame, a custom event-driven framework at a time where the thread vs. events debate was all the rage in the academic community. (I did a PhD on the topic and that's how I learned about Ok Cupid!)
I think there was a happy medium somewhere along the way. The minimum word counts on the bios were just high enough to filter people that had no sincerity for the approach. You had to pantomime something of yourself to have a presence. What exists now is just a gallery of faces that could be the result of stable diffusion algorithms.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.