OKCupid Experiments on Users Too 161
With recent news that Facebook altered users' feeds as part of a psychology experiment, OKCupid has jumped in and noted that they too have altered their algorithms and experimented with their users (some unintentional) and "if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work." Findings include that removing pictures from profiles resulted in deeper conversations, but as soon as the pictures returned appearance took over; personality ratings are highly correlated with appearance ratings (profiles with attractive pictures and no other information still scored as having a great personality); and that suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
Re: OKC started as a science project (Score:4, Informative)
OKCupid was sold to the owners of match.com a long time ago. When that happened the best blog post that they wrote (Why you shouldn't pay for online dating) was taken down, and the blog itself hasn't been updated (not counting the entry this articles about) since April of 2011.
Re: OKC started as a science project (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go:
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Yeah the blog title sais everything: Communist Inc, which doesn't want to make money, gets swallowed by Monster money Corp, which makes money.