I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It's not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.
OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.
I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.
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.
I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I see things about how OKC got crappy.
Not that long before the acquisition a certain jackass brought in as a consultant (ahem) happened to point to OkC as the leading competitor against the acquiring company's properties specifically for mobile.
Sorry everyone...
If it makes it any better, I've had to use the product since then too, and suffered alongside all the rest of you.
The perfect matching service would lose 2 new users every login. No different to selling an everlasting lightbulb. The only salvation of such a perfect product would be a "de-networking effect" whereby newly-happy couples would auto-evangelize the site for bringing them together in the first place, but that wouldn't grow the site much.
The success of the "nightclub app" is that people feel they are a match only as long as they "drink", and by morning they are thirsty for more. Growth comes from the heartache of loneliness, failed relationships, and divorce. A worse product (poor matching, and stifled communication) is the actual goal of a more profitable dating app, not simply being a consequence of having more users.
I wouldn't blame the people who sold out. That team created a strong and delightful product.
To me, blame goes to the people who took over and started to make bad decisions.
Mobile onboarded a different demographic of user. Pre-mobile, not many people really used computers or the internet outside of work or gaming. I grew up in a poor part of the US and lots of people did not have desktop computers at home; most kids begged their parents for access to computers for gaming. Parents in our area could never figure me out. I liked using computers (I would dumpster dive for parts since as a poor kid, I had much more time than money) but I didn't game much, and I'm a kid so I'm definitely not doing work. (I learned to code as a kid because I wanted to make games and then I found the coding part much more fun than the gaming part.) My parents were flummoxed how a kid who liked spending so much time reading was also so weird about wanting to use something as expensive as a computer.
That's the root of this blog post, the rise of Tinder, and the big shift to mobile in general. Nerds aren't the only people on the internet anymore. The average person is now on the internet. OKCupid was very much the dating site of us thoughtful nerds, those who thought text and personality tests would help them find a better match. Most singles in the West at the time just went to the bar, got intoxicated, then made base conversation with whomever engaged their base interests. That demographic moved to Tinder.
Unless you're specifically targeting a nerd-heavy demographic (e.g. academics, devs, hackers, etc) with a high margin product, if the goal is to create a mass appeal product then making nerds happy just isn't profitable. We're too small in number and too picky.
This is very true. And now think of all the people who's only Internet experience is on mobile. They exist entirely within that sub-par writing universe.
I actually feel really bad for the younger generation, actually. There's a whole bunch of teenagers who have no idea how good and useful computers can actually be, because all they ever have known is the shitty watered down mobile version of computing. Even desktops aren't as good as they used to be (thanks, Electron), but they're still a damn sight better than mobile. But if one grew up thinking that a phone/tablet is the end-all of computing, they have no idea what they're even missing.
This is a ridiculous out of touch take. Of course young people know what desktop computing is like: they use it at school for class and use it at home for gaming. Have you considered that people might prefer mobile is preferable because it’s, well, mobile and you don’t have to lug a big ol’ machine around?
I'm skeptical of your claim that young people are actually using desktops in those situations. As far as I've seen, young people are primarily gaming on consoles and are using stripped down devices like Chromebooks at school. It's also been noted that computer skills have gotten markedly worse among young people in recent years, which suggests they are not in fact being exposed to desktops regularly.
And I definitely think you're off base about mobile devices being popular because they're mobile. People will sit at home and use a phone that is an incredibly worse experience than using an actual computer, and think it's an adequate substitute. They don't need the mobility in that situation, but they really think there's nothing wrong with the user experience.
Yeah, 90% of the time when I’m using my phone (e.g. right now), I’m at home, on my couch. I could be using my laptop or desktop which are both close within reach, but I like being able to read HN while my partner plays Zelda.
I’m not exactly the demographic of “only uses mobile” - I am very much a “pre-mobile internet user” (coding, games, music all required me to pick up some desktop skills) but can attest to the fact that I don’t hate the experience in a way that’s commensurate with how much I’d hate having a hot laptop on my stomach or sitting in some other room typing this out.
Most schools use tablets or Chromebooks, especially in the early years. Neither gives access to a system which has desktop level capabilities. Both are locked down consumption platforms.
I did not get my own laptop until I started at my university. I am now doing a Ph.D. in informatics (European meaning of the term). I had access to my dad's workstation at home, but just to play around on and I certainly did not have root or the ability to install my own software. There were computers in my computer lab at high school, but I rarely used them. They were locked down as much as any smartphone I have ever had.
At what age does someone need root access to become interested in a career in CS/IT/web dev/whatever?
Or, if not root access, like what kind of "desktop level capabilities" should I have had that I did not have, given that I did not have a desktop as a teenager or younger?
I am Gen X. I can think of exactly 0 friends who had their own desktops as teenagers. (Their own, as in were not really their parents' work computer, did not have to share with the family, could do whatever they wanted with, etc.)
I'm at the lower end of the millennial range and have personally experienced people who were a couple of years younger than me having to have folder hierarchies explained to them because they haven't encountered them before. This was in an introductory R course at the beginning of a master's degree at university.
You do not need root access necessarily, but you do need to get familiarity with the platforms you will actually be using when working, ie. Windows and maybe macOS.
For Gen X and most of millennials, that platform was the only platform that existed. Using computers necessitated becoming familiar with "real" computers. That is no longer the case which is why gen Z are digital natives that have the digital literacy on a similar level to baby boomers.
Yes. Spot-on. The only thing I input on my phone is YouTube Shorts because it's much easier/faster than on a computer. Of course, that is inherent in its design.
Almost all internet algorithms seem to converge around maximising time spend on the app in question. A dating website simply doesn't want to be too effective, as you would lose two customers every successful match. Similar to the approach used in slot machines, you want to give the illusion of winning, but I'm reality only provide moderately succesful matches rather than perfect ones.
Of course there is a human element too. Dating sites give the illusion of choice, and a result a lot of potential matches aren't realised on, as the partner is good looking enough.
I always push back on this argument, because it came up a lot. As someone higher up at the company once put it, if people are sufficiently convinced that you can find them what they're looking for in a dating app, there's almost no amount of money they wouldn't spend. People churn after not getting what they want out of an app. And relationships end, and people will return to apps they felt they had success with. Word of mouth successes were the ultimate marketing tool, OkCupid didn't have really any ad spend for the first year or two I was there (and apparently the hadn't in the years past.)
Long lasting relationships are based on common values. However, you can have succesful medium term relationships based on common interests and good looks.
OkCupid, in its heydays, indeed managed to match people on common values by asking detailed questions. A lot of modern dating apps are far more focus on looks and common interests.
Yes they look cute, and love rock climbing too, but hate children, and never want any. It will result in a good match in your mid twenties, but likely going to result in irreconcilable differences when you approach 30. Unless of course you both hate children :-)
Well, the existing product already has critical mass, a new product - like the various Instagram clones, then the various Tiktok clones, then the various Twitter clones - all have to acquire their own customer base.
That said, other point: Why not just accept you're no longer growing? The company would've stayed solvent for years yet, with a steady group of users coming in and out over time as the brand becomes synonymous with thoughtful dating profiles instead of the rapid fire hot-or-not that is Tinder.
The endless pursuit of growth is incredibly destructive. A consistent profitable business is considered a failure.
Instragram was able to pull their users into Threads pretty easily without making Threads a direct part of Instragram. It is still it's own thing with it's own brand.
Because creating a new product is harder and more expensive than changing an existing one, even if it does destroy it.
Advertising, novel technical infrastructure, new branding, etc... all of this needs to be done for a new brand -- and then who knows if any one will come visit?
Or, you can just make whatever short-term changes to your existing successful product, juice the metric you're looking to juice, and (in theory) cashout before the long term repercussions take affect.
New branding isn't necessarily bad; it can make a new product seem fresh. Technical infrastructure, both hardware and software, can be reused. You don't have destroy one software product to make another.
Take this OkCupid example; they had their website model. They could have just created "OkCupid Nights" as a separate Tinder-like product reusing as much of their tech as possible.
The upside of dating app bootstrapping is that it's an inherently local phenomenon. People want to meet people near them, which means you can gain traction one locale at a time. Maybe some kind of promotion where you cut deals with some local bars or restaurants to get some kind of discount / freebie if you match with someone (with the implication being that they'll use it for the date). Still takes capital, just not "nation-wide aggressive advertising push" levels of capital.
Nationwide is much easier in countries with a large primacy index, for example Thailand where Bangkok has 9x the population of Thailand’s second largest city, and Moscow where it has 4x the population of St Petersburg.
Everybody is nearby when you have subway trains connecting half the people in your country together in under an hour.
You raise a really interesting point that I hadn't really thought about before - the possibility that the move to mobile first is directly responsible for making things worse, dumber, simpler with less functionality.
The best thing about OKCupid was the data-backed articles. It was our source of inspiration and data point to continue on a dating website we built. We started as a side project in 2006 but got shelved after my company was acquired. I returned to it in 2010-2011, and OKCupid was our constant fodder for data and inspiration.
This post reads like Eternal September[1], and I write that without any cynicism or snark. It makes good sense that text-heavy web apps would fall prey to image-heavy mobile apps. I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users. Most of the dominant apps today are mobile-first, largely visual, and disappointing for both sides. One idea: Could speech-to-text technology help to allow users to create OkCupid-style essays from a mobile phone? Maybe. Although, a few discussions here on HN said that speech-to-text is still a super hard problem in 2023.
I think that there is a reason that dating apps, dating sites and dating services all converge on a model which downranks intellect: the few humans who care about that characteristic are not enough to build a sustainable business.
Literally everyone says that they are different and want a smart partner, but when they actually hook up they aren't ranking high intellect.
I liked okcupids blogs. The maintakeaway I had from reading all of them was:
1. How much appearance played a role in being attractive.
2. 90+% of women attempted to hook up with the same 10% of men, while men were much more open to women not in the top 10%.
3. What people claimed they wanted in a partner had almost no relation to what they actually wanted, when looking at who they messaged, who they viewed, and who they responded to.
All apps now are very aggressively tracking everything, so they have a much better idea of what makes people open their wallets, and intellect apparently isn't one of those things.
I don't think you're characterizing the results accurately, particularly point #2. I don't think they really had a way to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true but doesn't add much.
> I don't think you're characterizing the results accurately, particularly point #2. I don't think they really had a way to measure #3. #1 is just obviously true but doesn't add much.
Maybe not, but #2 was from a blog that specifically looked at the data of messaging: how many men received messages, how many women received messages.
IIRC, nearly all the women received messages and sent messages, while only about 10% of the men received messages while all of the men sent messages. I don't really see any other way to interpret data showing that both men and women sent messages at about the same rate, but only about 10% of men received any messages.
Now I don't have the blog handy (and I rather wished I did), but my takeaway #3 was from reading all the blogs available, in basically one marathon sitting, not from one particular blog.
It strikes me that if women and men sent messages in exactly the same long-tail shape of distribution, and you had a knob that controlled how frequently each sent messages, you'd be able to turn each knob until 100% of women and 10% of men received messages.
This is not to say you're wrong or right, but I don't think the numbers tell us much without seeing the full distribution.
> I still think there is potential for dating apps that target higher intellect users.
Apps are not developed for the sake of the users. Apps are developed in order to make a profit.
If your higher intellect users are not ready to pay good money for your product, it can only be one of two things: either they are cheap, or your product is not that great. Considering that there is no correlation between intellect and cheapness, I would exclude the first hypothesis.
Then you end up with a crappy product (and it was your higher intellect users who voted it crappy) and a bunch of advertisers ready to pay you bread crumbs for your users' attention, and you suddenly realise that you need a lot of crumbles to get a sandwich.
In the case of OkCupid, I did buy the premium offer, and used the possibilities (mainly see the answers to the quizz, and filter people) to make a profile that would show 99% match score with the kind of women I was looking for.
At some point, it got close to a game, which was very fun and satisfying as I could meet nice girls as a result ;-)
you're in luck! OKCupid costs ~$44 a month, and you can add on "read receipts" for about $0.50 each, superboosts for $1-$3 each, the privacy (hidden) profile for $10/month. with some creativity you can have 0 real matches for ~$100!
The matches are real. It’s just that you have to get on an airplane and fly to a new country to meet them. I’ve met my matches in person. One of the girls paid for almost everything too.
Man, you can have a profitable thing and just..have that?
Like if you have the same let's say 20% profit in the world of business is not enough, you want the RATE of your return to go higher even if the product allowed you to stay stupidity rich.
Economically better is a good pair of words that leads to enshittification via greed
> 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.
I remember I was 14-15 on SparkMatch because I had to convince my mom to drive me 30 miles to a mall so I could meet a girl from SparkMatch. To this day I was the most out of my league girl I ever 'dated' (only kissed a few times). I soon acted too sweet and too lame and lost her. But it taught me a lot to always be cooler and I cleaned up in the coming OkCupid/PlentyofFish revolution, and doubly so by the time Tinder came around.
I still think about that girl sometimes, which makes sense, because she was somewhat unique to be online constantly back in 1999-2000.
I met my wife on OKC. (we initially dated for a year, then split up, then got back together many years later after we both did some growing up). I moved someplace that OKC had no userbase in the intervening time and tried to use tinder. It was an absolute dumpster fire. Just a miserable experience. I was so sad to see it consume market share at the expense of sites like OKC. Ultimately OKC pulled through for me in the end!
Anyway all of which is to say 1. OKC was great and thank you for working on it, and 2. your story resonates so much with my experience and observations from the other side of the equation.
>> The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions.
A voice interface might help. By default in the app of course, not a phone feature the user has to use to TTS into the app.
> OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth.
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes / no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.
I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.