The whole top vs bottom 50% attractiveness bit was a gag thing. It's such a common outraged-post topic that the okcupid subreddit has a FAQ about it in the sidebar.
OKCupid used to be substantially weirder than it was before it was swallowed up by IAC. I mean really fucking weird. One of many examples: the signout page had a clipart photo of an airport firefighter (ie silver suit head to toe) in a veeeeery suggestive pose with a firehose.
However, dating sites absolutely engage in the same techniques to hook users and reduce "churn" that free-to-play / cosmetic-sale-funded games do. Tinder is basically ELO applied to matchmaking coupled with the same psychological tricks (like initially showing your profile to much more attractive people / showing you much more attractive people, before dropping the liklihood of your profile appearing in anyone's stacks, and periodically re-boosting your profile just a tad to keep you from deleting your account.)
Edit just to say I forgot: why on earth is okcupid allowing links at all? Seems ripe for abuse. I guess it would encourage people to switch to off-site messaging quicker...
The FAQ used to say the message was more common than you think.[1] But the message said you're among the most attractive people on OkCupid. Not just above median.
The article implied the message should say interesting not attractive maybe. But it implied the segmentation is real.
I have no idea if it's a gag now, but they definitely used to actually do this. If you were around from the beginning, which I was (joined January 2004), you were very likely to end up in the top half when this first began. And you could trivially create a new account with otherwise identical details in the same location and see that your matches and search results were not the same people. After a few years, your new account would not just see different people, but noticeably uglier people.
OkCupid used to have real social features. You got a personal journal and could follow the journals of other users, and this clustered the sort of "power users" into cliques. This was actually how I met my wife, way back in 2007 though we didn't even live in the same state at the time and didn't physically meet until much later after discovering we'd both moved to Texas. Match axed the feature and we all moved to a Facebook group, but I've since quit Facebook, so only keep in touch with a limited number of people I had real contact details for whenever I happen to visit their cities for some reason.
This quite visibly split us. Knowing who in the group was top half and who in the group was bottom half was fodder for a whole lot of flame wars. And, of course, being it was a dating site, mate selection and the question of to what extent attractiveness can be objectively quantified was always a huge topic of contention. It's interesting to see so many years later how the split between the people taking distinct sides of that has evolved. Back then, those on the "objectively attractive" side of the coin were super into evo-psych, Austrian economics, and libertarianism. Those on the other side were quite a bit more varied, but I guess at least universally against the war in Iraq. 16 years later, the same people I still know have now segmented in extremely predictable ways, like anyone who really cared about Austrian school economics back then is now firmly red-pilled, anti-immigrant, super pro western-culture, into scientific racism and "human biodiversity" and somehow all migrated from libertarianism to backing classic right-wing nationalism complete with strong-man dictatorial leadership. The other side used to have a huge diversity of opinions on most things, but now all seem to universally be super into anti-racism, anti-fascism, and trans rights activism.
It's like the entire trajectory of what a person would ever come to believe as guiding principles upon which to base their lives was decided by a single trivial controversy with bad evidence in either direction that they nonetheless decided to take a hardline stance on decades ago.
With respect to the dating site techniques, I think it's important to distinguish between the OkCupid of today owned by IAC and the original OkCupid owned by Humor Rainbow. Match and IAC monetize using the same normal strategies of free to play games. But Humor Rainbow's strategy was to be the first to use fledgling big data techniques to fine-tune algorithmic matchmaking (in contrast to eHarmony's attempt to use conventional wisdom from the existing body of psychology knowledge), and then sell that technology to the highest bidder and cash out. The incentives of the current ownership and the incentives of the founders were quite different.
OKCupid used to be substantially weirder than it was before it was swallowed up by IAC. I mean really fucking weird. One of many examples: the signout page had a clipart photo of an airport firefighter (ie silver suit head to toe) in a veeeeery suggestive pose with a firehose.
However, dating sites absolutely engage in the same techniques to hook users and reduce "churn" that free-to-play / cosmetic-sale-funded games do. Tinder is basically ELO applied to matchmaking coupled with the same psychological tricks (like initially showing your profile to much more attractive people / showing you much more attractive people, before dropping the liklihood of your profile appearing in anyone's stacks, and periodically re-boosting your profile just a tad to keep you from deleting your account.)
Edit just to say I forgot: why on earth is okcupid allowing links at all? Seems ripe for abuse. I guess it would encourage people to switch to off-site messaging quicker...