No, OkCupid, we don't want to "talk"

Connaissance 13 years ago |

Honestly this felt like a very arrogant post. OKCupid may not be perfect, but it's far and away the best site out there, and loved by most of its users.

Furthermore the founder wasn't a dick to you in his comment. So all in all, I'm not sure trashtalking him/OKC is going to help you.

EvanKelly 13 years ago | |

I think OP could have used some "BloggingWithFriends". Maybe his friends could have helped proofread and tone down the perceived arrogance.

Notice how PG always thanks his proofreaders, even for seemingly short and pointed blog posts.

draftable 13 years ago |

Wow. I was iffy on the OP to begin with after he basically proclaimed that he had reinvented online dating by essentially cloning www.mysinglefriend.com, and this just confirms it.

This whole post smacks of arrogance. Essentially you want us to pat you on the back for giving a big, public “F you” to a competitor because you ASSUME that him wanting to chat means they want to acquire you? If this is how you act in casual online encounters then I’m starting to understand why online dating hasn’t worked out for you.

scarmig 13 years ago | |

Well, online dating really is a gigantic clusterfuck. I'm not in the market (found my partner, of three years, on OkC), but I despised the process while I was doing it.

I read the initial post and thread about it and was skeptical, but my thought was mostly along the lines of "go for it! There must be a way to significantly improve online dating, and I certainly don't have any better ideas."

Now I just think he's a dick, though, and emotionally root for his failure. Why the hell be nasty to someone for no reason except free PR?

spizzo 13 years ago | |

It's very hard for someone to know they're acting in a creepy or inappropriate way, so people blame the tools they're using very often. Also the founder here probably feels it's a great disadvantage to them to give any credit to okcupid.

Frankly the post confused me at first because when I used okcupid a year or two ago I found it to be easily the best tool available for what it does, and the post claimed there was a consensus that okcupid was terrible.

scarmig 13 years ago |

tldr Engineer from OkC invites company founder to coffee to chat about online dating, founder picks fight for page views

Connaissance 13 years ago | |

Ahah...pretty much.

radiusq 13 years ago | |

Add to that Engineer thinks an invite to talk from OkC is an indicator of acquisition interest. Please.

alxbrun 13 years ago |

"Why do you think OkCupid messages exist? It's not actually for 'connecting', because who's on there looking for a penpal? "

My friend, to start with you should learn a little bit about women psychology...

Online dating != Picking up items in an online store

SilentStump 13 years ago |

I will stake my reputation that the girl two up from the bottom left corner of blendr is "Good Girl Gina," but the image is flipped or something. For most of the dating apps it's pretty obvious how many accounts are fake.

EvanKelly 13 years ago | |

That screenshot looks like it's full of professional photos. Either I need to get some better headshots or that's a mock-up made by Blendr.

scarmig 13 years ago | | |

You do need some better headshots most likely, but that's because any given person on OkCupid likely has terrible, terrible profile pictures.

Good resolution, good lighting, and bright colors. Fixing that can immediately significantly improve response rates (or give a response rate, as the case may be).

EvanKelly 13 years ago | | |

I don't have a profile, but i do remember reading a pretty interesting OKCupid blog post correlating response rate to the quality of the camera taking the photo.

Here it is: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

mistercow 13 years ago | | |

I don't think you can infer much from that beyond the fairly obvious fact that expensiveness of camera is correlated with interest (and by extension skill) in photography. Unless you control for that, any connection you draw between camera price and perceived attractiveness is bound to be spurious.

InternalRun 13 years ago | |

That was my exact reaction when I looked at that photo.

Connaissance 13 years ago | | |

If you guys are talking about the pic in his post, that's not the author, that's the actual Elon Musk.

http://media.aerosociety.com/aerospace-insight/2012/11/23/vi...

SilentStump 13 years ago | | |

Not that one, if you go down to the blendr there are shots of their "users." I think he was just showing what Elon Musk looked like to give context to the person he quoted.

el_cuadrado 13 years ago |

What is the point of responding to a casual HN comment with a blog post, besides PR opportunity?

alxbrun 13 years ago | |

PR opportunity.

runT1ME 13 years ago |

What fascinates me about the online dating market is that the optimal user experience is indirectly proportional to a customer's lifetime revenue in any site that is ad based or subscription based.

If a company was purely motivated by profit, I imagine that some clever use of ML would reveal an optimal ($ wise) timeframe for matching a user with their eventual mate (assuming their matching algorithm was perfect), and it wouldn't be 'as soon as possible'.

Too soon and you're missing valuable revenue, too late and the user gets frustrated and quits. Do companies do this? Probably not. As matching algorithms become more advanced and more people use online dating though...

goodside 13 years ago | |

Nobody at OkCupid thinks like this. We want people to enjoy the site so they're inclined to pay for premium membership, which they won't do if it sucks. We want people to return to the site if they're single in the future, and to recommend it to their single friends. Optimizing for ad impressions over user experience isn't a road we want to go down.

gonehome 13 years ago | | |

This reminds me of a conversation Larry and Sergey had when they had first come up with page rank and were trying to sell it to existing search engines.

The companies complained that their algorithm was too good and that users would leave the search portal too quickly without seeing any advertising.

It was obvious to Page and Brin that this was stupid - pushing them to start Google.

thwest 13 years ago |

Is any serious scammer going to be deterred by needing to obtain a facebook account with 50 friends?

lnanek2 13 years ago | |

Meh, it's a numbers thing. If they go from 99% fakes like many sites to 50% fakes, it is still the difference between a useless site and useful site.

I use AdultFriendFinder myself, and if I only go by profiles and messages and MSN/Yahoo/etc. chat, then it's easy to get 50 out of 50 girls in a week not actually be willing to meet and only be after getting me to register on a site for their kickback.

I've never been asked to do that on AFF's internal chat/webcam option, however. So even though profiles and messages and mainstream chat are a heck of a lot easier, I never do them any more. If a site can cut out the spam accounts, they could have that easier service in a workable form.

pimeys 13 years ago |

Are they trying to get some bigger company to buy them? Facebook and Twitter are a bit scary already having so much data about everybody. Even though I'm pretty open how and who I date, it still feels more comfortable to keep it in my circle of friends and family.

Although I see the potential for this.

SilentStump 13 years ago | |

Well, if you take him for his word, he said he doesn't want to be bought out.

unfed 13 years ago |

33.000 members in 4 days. Seems legit.

leephillips 13 years ago |

I stopped after one screen. It was completely incoherent. Do you have to be following this person's recent life story to know what this is supposed to be about?

intellegacy 13 years ago |

Anyone interested in building an alternative to cupidwithfriends?

Email me.

mbetter 13 years ago |

Wow, I love how casually you exclude about half of the world from your little site.