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.
Flash panic (Score:5, Insightful)
World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on
Re:Flash panic (Score:5, Insightful)
World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on
When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about. Of course that happens every day in the business world (and even did before computer scientists rediscovered basic experiments and called it A/B testing), but in some of these cases it does start to look like an academic psychology experiment. Perhaps use of OK Cupid implies consent to be experimented on but I doubt that consent is collected in a transparent way.
Your grocery store experiments on you ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also consent by action. The casino does A/B testing by offering some a $40 steak dinner plus $40 in chips while it offers others $80 in chips. You clicked on the advertisement/offer, or you opened the envelope that arrived in your postal mail, etc.
Similarly the coupons a grocery store offers you are often part of an experiment. Hell, changing the items on the isle end caps are sometimes part of an experiment.
My marketing processor thought that grocery store loyalty cards were the greatest invention ever in the history of marketing. The data collected and opportunity for experiments enormous.
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"There is also consent by action. The casino does A/B testing by offering some a $40 steak dinner plus $40 in chips while it offers others $80 in chips. You clicked on the advertisement/offer, or you opened the envelope that arrived in your postal mail, etc."
Well I think this is the difference, when you sign up to OKCupid you're signing up to a service that's explicitly designed to optimise your chance of meeting someone, so almost by definition you're going to expect them to play around with your profile,
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That probably depends upon whether you consider the terms of use
I use depends, you insensitive clod.
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That probably depends upon whether you consider the terms of use
I use depends, you insensitive clod.
We know, we have your supermarket data. :-)
Re:Your grocery store experiments on you ... (Score:4, Insightful)
One of those standards involves informed consent.
Which instantly makes any kind of unbiassed behavioral research impossible.
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... and your testing is useless, because you've just tainted the results by revealing far too much about the scenario. All of your subjects now act differently knowing they're being judged on their responses.
In other words, academics are jealous that real companies get to do more science than they do.
Ha! Actually yes I am jealous that Google has better health data than we do and seems to be allowed to use it in ways that would not be 'ethical' or even legal for academic health scientists.
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The operative word being "usually", which implies there exist cases where you don't. The discomfort come from people not grasping the existence of the "usually", and that businesses are not academics and product testing is not held to the same standard.
Facebook evil, OKC less bad experiments (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook's experiments bother me more than OKCupid's. They're deliberately manipulating which news stories their readers see in order to affect their mood, and seeing how that affects the readers' behavior. That seems mean and dishonest. (Of course, I didn't know Facebook had news, so I'm not in their target market anyway, but it still seems mean.)
OKCupid's a dating site, which means that all their "compatibility" scores are pretty much guesswork anyway, assisted by a lot of measurement, so an occasional suggestion of "maybe you two should see if you want to date" to people they normally wouldn't match up isn't that much perturbation of their approach anyway, and "whoops, pictures are broken, why don't you try talking first instead of just looking at pictures" is just fine, and both of them give them a bit of data outside the ranges they'd normally be collecting from - perhaps there are people that would get along well who they haven't been matching up. (I'm not in their market either, fortunately.)
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Facebook's experiments bother me more than OKCupid's. They're deliberately manipulating which news stories their readers see in order to affect their mood, and seeing how that affects the readers' behavior. That seems mean and dishonest. (Of course, I didn't know Facebook had news, so I'm not in their target market anyway, but it still seems mean.)
I agree that the Facebook incident is much more worrying than what OKCupid is doing.
OKCupid's a dating site, which means that all their "compatibility" scores are pretty much guesswork anyway, assisted by a lot of measurement, so an occasional suggestion of "maybe you two should see if you want to date" to people they normally wouldn't match up isn't that much perturbation of their approach anyway, and "whoops, pictures are broken, why don't you try talking first instead of just looking at pictures" is just fine, and both of them give them a bit of data outside the ranges they'd normally be collecting from - perhaps there are people that would get along well who they haven't been matching up. (I'm not in their market either, fortunately.)
Your post raises another interesting (and IMO ridiculous) issue though, which is that just because providing either of two different services (either pictures or no pictures) to all of your clients is perfectly fine - randomizing people to receiving one or the other is often considered not to be ethically sound.
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When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc.
Academic experiments have external results, publishing findings as scientific research. Business experiments have internal results, data mining with the goal of increasing profits (via providing better value to the consumer, at least in capitalist theory).
Well, at least, I can hope the results stay internal to the business. As with data mining in general, that's not always the case. But perhaps this becoming a mainstream topic will end with a framework on which to judge companies that release "experiment
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The problem with most 'commercial experimentation' is that it isn't about getting better value for the consumer, but about how to to best convince the consumer to pay more for something, or buy something, that they otherwise would not have.
Loyalty cards are a way for a business to encourage a customer to return whether or not it is really in their best interest. Phone contracts, transaction 'fees' and 'licensing' are other ways to get people coming back for more of a beating. If you make the fine print and
Re: Flash panic (Score:2)
Specifically regarding getting you to purchase something you wouldn't have, well, I don't see that as bad. You buy stuff because that stuff is worth more to you than the money is sitting in your wallet. That is what every honest transaction is...an exchange that favors both parties.
Shady practices like making it difficult to redeem a coupon are a different story, and frankly should be illegal.
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I have to agree that buying something useful that you otherwise would not necessarily have bought in the first place is not a bad thing for either yourself or the economy as a whole.
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It encourages you to sign up for a loyalty card in the first place, otherwise you pay 'full price'. Once you have the loyalty card you start thinking about going to one of the shops that you are 'loyal' to rather than the corner shop down the street. (This may not be individually true for everyone, but on average that is how it works.)
This sort of 'discounting' is kind of like in industries without loyalty programs where there is an RRP and a much lower 'street price'. The shops don't actually expect people
Re:Flash panic (Score:4)
It's hard to imagine how anyone could find this to be scientific experimentation, rather than some random crap done in hopes of finding a way to sell more advertising.
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The two are not mutually exclusive. Something doesn't become unscientific just because you happen to think it's trivial.
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You do realize that you yourself conduct such "experiments" on your friends every day? While making conversation in the lunch room you ask, "Hey, anyone wanna see Planet of the Apes tonight?" That elicits a lukewarm response, so you then ask "Well what about How to Train your Dragon?" You get a lot of in
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I think the dividing line between when you need to get informed consent is when the experiment begins to make people do things they wouldn't have done anyway. Tweaking how people get paired up for dates is fine if they were looking for a date anyway. Forcing them to go on a date when they weren't planning to would require informed consent (and probably compensation).
Not really - even purely observational academic studies need ethical approval and informed consent. I really am confused about where the diving line should be between academic and commercial work.
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even purely observational academic studies need ethical approval and informed consent.
In what jurisdiction?
That's interesting, because a lot of "purely observational academic studies" have been done with no informed consent at all.
Examples: - Robert Levine's experiments [google.co.uk] linking a city population's average walking speed with their degree of helpfulness and their health (actually, this is not merely observational - parts of those experiments involved getting people to pick up dropped pens, return lost letters, etc). That was done in many parts of the world including the USA.
- In a car, sitti
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You are right. I just checked my School's ethical research code, and there is an exemption under the 'exceptional circumstance' that taking informed consent is not possible because of a need for concealment. These studies still require ethical review though and the ethics panel will decide whether or not the concealment is justified. I had not encountered this before in my own work and I should not have generalized.
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Do academic demographers get "informed consent" before processing census data? What about crime statistics? Network security incidents?
Showing a page with and without images and then processing access_log is not the same as monitoring someone's eating habits and stress levels for a week. Just because you call something "an experiment" (a) doesn't mean it is one, and (b) doesn't mean it's the same as all other "experiments".
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Do academic demographers get "informed consent" before processing census data? What about crime statistics? Network security incidents?
You are talking about aggregated data which is a bit different. Its a current debate as to whether anonymous routine data should be available to researchers at the individual level without the explicit consent of the people involved. I would say it should be but many argue otherwise.
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I think you mean de-identified data, not necessarily aggregated data. But I understand your point. I am not sure that the outrage of the interwebs turns on that, though, as there are plenty of examples of data collection that cannot be tied to a real-life identity that gets their panties in a wad.
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According to TFA they correlated certain reactions with attractive photos, which means they must have looked at the photos to determine if they were attractive or not. It isn't clear how far they went into people's private profiles to do this. Maybe it was all innocent, but it seems creepy because they were not transparent about it and probably would have kept quiet if Facebook hadn't been caught.
I know what people will say, they uploaded their photos to a web site and have no expectation of privacy. Well,
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> which means they must have looked at the photos to determine if they were attractive or not
That is quite an assumption. I can think of a ton of ways they could have an attractiveness measure without themselves digging into people's personal profiles. In fact, I did 5 seconds of googling and found this, which clearly suggests that they are asking other members to rate attractiveness of profile pictures: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.... [okcupid.com]
> I know what people will say, they uploaded their photos to a we
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The problem is: usability testing is psychological testing.
With usability testing you are testing what people would do in different situations. That to me sounds like a psychological test.
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It's obvious you do not have a clue about what real "censorship" is. So a website rejects posts that do not meet their basic and usually very low standards you agree to when posting there, BFD. On the other hand under real censorship the site would not even exist in the first place and if you tried to start one in some countries you would have state security knocking on your door.
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Do you think the donation information was leaked accidentally? If you do, you probably think that the IRS also accidentally lost months worth of email that may have contained evidence pertaining to that agency's targeting of conservative groups during an election season. It won't be state security knocking on your door, but the feds are still going to arrange for someone to come after you.
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If someone is secretly manipulating or shaping information to push a preferred outcome it first needs to be secret to have any true effects. Without the secrecy you are free to evaluate the posted information with the knowledge that someone is trying to influence your opinion by excluding certain pieces of information or posts in this particular case. If you recognize this pattern you are free to go to another source for information. Unfortunately there are far to many news outlets or websites pushing their
A/B Testing (Score:4, Insightful)
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People being manipulated, even if the manipulation is only demonstrated by the experiment, without knowing they are being A/B tested, is not what A/B testing is about.
Knowingly participating in an A/B test is kinda part of A/B testing. Is this lens better, or worse? Which of these televisions side by side looks better to you?
You are looking for love, your soulmate, or someone who will put up with your desire to have cough medicine inserted into your rectum by someone dressed as a Teletubby.
You don't find
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Fuck me, I made the point using the wrong experiment. Otherwise, the argument still stands. People trust that the number is as correct as the website can be. Given that it doesn't know whether you like Teletubbies putting cough syrup in your ass.
Still, not A/B testing in any but the most ignorant sense of words.
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A/B testing, as a concept, is fine. The issue here is that A was "truth" and B was "deception", and that's something you shouldn't be A/B testing (at least not without getting ethics waivers signed). Facebook provided feeds that were not representative of what was actually going on and OKCupid flipped bad matches to good matches, both of which compromised their relevant services by misleading users or misrepresenting information. You can't do stuff like that in most (all?) ethical systems, and it may even o
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>OKCupid flipped bad matches to good matches
To be fair on this point is there any objective measure on what a good or bad match is? The entire system on OKCupid is made and defined by OKCupid, there is no objectivity. Therefore a good match == bad match == imaginary purple dinosaur. There are plenty of writeups online about just this subject. Human happiness in relationships is not as formulaic as OKC would like you to believe.
The FB thing is definitely more objectively definable. As in many bits of info
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You're correct that the matches are not objective, though that really doesn't matter in the end. If I say, "I'll make my best guess," and then knowingly provide you with the choice that is as far away from my actual best guess as possible, there's nothing subjective about the fact that I've intentionally misled you. My guesses may be subjective, but you were expecting my best one, and instead got my worst one. That's a lie.
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What OKCupid is doing: is checking if their algorithm works.
How else then changing variables do you check if it works ?
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There are ways to test the algorithm that don't involve flipping the results entirely. Suggesting, as you have, that this is the only means available to them to do so is a bit disingenuous. Moreover, if you are going to intentionally give people results that you believe to be incorrect, contrary to what you have promised them, you have an ethical responsibility to get their permission in advance via some form of opt-in release.
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I'm sure it's somewhere in the terms-of-service. ;-)
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As am I. :P
Even so, you get what I mean, and I doubt most people would consider it ethical to have a blanket ToS that covered all use, including experimental uses. Rather, they'd expect to have to do a separate opt-in to a beta or experimental version of the product, I'd wager.
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I honestly don't know.
They do say: opposites attract. :-)
Really: we don't know how well this online dating thing really works. Isn't really all that clear cut as people make it out to be. They are just guessing. And they know it this. So them trying out different approaches isn't as different as what they normally do as you think.
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My manipulation's as good as yours.
people are shallow (Score:2)
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"People are shallow and place too much value on appearances," said the fat, ugly nerd. "They should be like me, and value what's in peoples' souls. For instance, I can tell Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson are perfect for me, because they have such beautiful souls."
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Happens during vilifying too.
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They did not control for people thinking they were similar, and looking deeper than they would have otherwise. They made hypotheses and passed them off as conclusions.
Your conclusion is therefore based only on confirmation bias, not on fact.
OKC started as a science project (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who run OKC were a bunch of statistics nerds. It runs (ran, anyway) on a custom web server that performs a lot of real time analysis. Their blog is chock full of incredibly detailed information about their users. This shouldn't be news to anyone who has even the slightest clue as to how OKCupid actually works.
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.
SlashAd (Score:1)
Is that some sort of advertisement?
I see no other reason to "jump in" with that kind of information.
OKC's match algos suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Findings include that ... suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
All this means is that OKC's match algorithms suck: there's only a weak correlation between match scores and real-world compatibility (like with every other dating site).
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Findings include that ... suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
All this means is that OKC's match algorithms suck: there's only a weak correlation between match scores and real-world compatibility (like with every other dating site).
No, it means that:
1) People trust OKCupid's rating system enough to try harder when it suggests a good match
2) OKCupid has to take into account their stated match rating, not just length of conversation, when trying to use conversation length as data to improve their algorithm.
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edit: 1) Users of OKCupid trust OKCupid's rating system enough to try harder when it suggests a good match
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It's called the "tyrrany of dimensions". The more variables you have, the more data points you need exponentially to derive meaningful partitioning analysis from it, regardless of how clever your distance algorithms are.
And they have hundreds of questions when a dozen would be about all the entire population of Earth could support.
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It's called the "tyrrany of dimensions". The more variables you have, the more data points you need exponentially to derive meaningful partitioning analysis from it, regardless of how clever your distance algorithms are.
Indeed, but only if you insist on carrying along in your analysis all the irrelevant and correlated dimensions.
And they have hundreds of questions when a dozen would be about all the entire population of Earth could support.
So do surveys, for significantly smaller sample sizes. I wouldn't be surprised if a non-trivial percentage of those questions are intentionally redundant - you know, to check *ahem* consistency, improve accuracy, etc. If, say, you have 100 questions grouped into 10 categories with 10q/cat, you have just dropped the dimensionality significantly while at the same time having more confidence in your d
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Well, of course. They're digging too deep in that. In the real world, I believe that there is no such thing as "the one" or "the perfect match". Maybe it feels like it, but that's in part thanks to the "pink glasses" effect of being in love and because both parties tend to adopt to one another, especially when a relationship lasts long (years, decades).
People probably can form lasting romantic relationships with a large number of other people, after the following basic matches are followed (assuming heteros
Ok Cupid.... (Score:2)
That was STUPID!
Conduct your little experiment if you have to, just keep your mouth shut about it.... At least until you have notified ALL your users that such experiments *might* be taking place (Or if you intend to issue refunds from the resulting class action suit.)
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As opposed to just randomly matching people so as to not have to learn things about people in general nor their users in particular?
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The particularly stupid part was messing with their match algorithm. If they imply that their algorithm has any value, then their users will feel at least ripped off (since the algorithm doesn't seem to work well), and possibly angry because they were given incorrect information .
Blocking pictures was visible to users and I don't have any problem with that .
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>The particularly stupid part was messing with their match algorithm.
You are making a false assumption because you are dealing with a biological system.
If you made a screen to sift sand, that screen will reliably sift sand of a certain size because they sand has no choice in the matter and does not evolve.
On the other hand if you make an antibiotic that kills bacteria X you will quickly find out that in just a few generations almost all of bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic.
Culture evolves, religio
This is different from what Facebook did (Score:5, Interesting)
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FB's experiment was to see if they could alter the mood of their user.
They should have hired the DICE Beta department.
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Er, why? Facebook presumably wants users to feel happy when they visit their website - exploring how to do that doesn't seem substantially different to OKCupid wanting to make lots of successful relationships.
Huge differences (Score:2)
There's a huge difference between A/B testing, designed to optimize your website with the direct intent to improve sales, and performing experiments on how different news feeds affect your users' moods. A/B testing typically comprises changes in button size and color, website layout, font variations, etc; should we lead with the price, or with the benefits, or with something else? On the other hand, what FB and OKC are doing - admitting to, and proudly! - amounts to wholesale experimentation on their user
Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that the experiment they Facebook conducted was mild to what other corporations do every day under the umbrella of "marketing".
They use control groups and try every trick they can to manipulate your mood, feelings, impressions of their products. They carefully script interactions to take advantage of your feelings and social norms. Also take the recent example in the past few weeks of the scripts that Verizon's 'account retention' departments use to try and wedge people into keeping their account longer. Those weren't just thrown together, those were made with careful research and years of experiments on customers and focus groups.
The only difference with what Facebook did and the rest do is that they shared their results with everyone. Was Facebook Unethical manipulating people the way they did? I think so, and I'm only less interested in the service after that scandal, but what they got them in trouble was sharing it with the rest of the world in a way that might have also done some honest good. Now they will learn from their mistakes, keep it to themselves, and use that research purely to manipulate people for higher profit and no one will say a thing.
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Dating sites simply lie. (Score:3, Interesting)
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That's not actually how okcupid works. You aren't charged for talking to your perfect match. You are charged if you go over the limit of 100 messages and don't want to delete any. And, you are charged if you want to remove advertisements. If you use adblocker their ads actually ask you to turn it off for their site because they get most of their revenue that way.
This is outrageous (Score:2)
I think Firefox should boycott the site.... display a message about it being possibly malicious/dangerous to all users attempting to visit OKCupid, showing a link to the article as a warning message in bright red... (Just kidding <EG>).
"That’s how websites work." (Score:1)
business is all about experimentation (Score:2)
very few successful businesses are doing what they were originally founded to do. business is all about experimentation. you tweak and reset and change and reset again until you see the numbers going in the right direction at the desired speed. unsuccessful businesses usually do the same thing, too; they just don't ever find a combination that works.
see also: "Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model" http://www.amazon.com/Getting-... [amazon.com]
"To succeed, you must change the plan in real time a
What next? (Score:1)
Experimentations or shady practices? (Score:2)
No, it isn't and they don't (Score:2)
The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.
No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.
To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc
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"No. It's what some unethical douche bags do."
There are ethical douche-bags?
Re: what? (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, they're divorce attorneys.
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There are ethical douche-bags?
Believe it or not, there are FDA approved douche-bags which are produced by ethical companies, and sold by ethical retailers.
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Since douching is harmful and not needed, I would disagree with your statement.
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Yes.
I know a physicist who is ethical, but when he speaks outside his expertise, he becomes a douche. Really irritating.
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I guess somebody who points out something that is technically correct but unnecessary to point out, could be called an "ethical douche-bag".
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Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.
Anyone who has ever:
a) taken any metrics about there site
a) altered their website in any way
b) measured whether or not it made any difference
Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...
Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.
Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.
Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".
The only change is the addition of the number 7.
The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.
The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.
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"congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users."
That's not experimenting. generic research on overall performance is not the same as selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.
You're definition is so loose it's useless.
Now, I need to experiment ans see if I can get home from work.
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selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.
How does changing something about your website to get them to spend more money not qualify as "selecting a sample of users, conduncting tests specifically to change their response"?
So what if the 'sample of users' is everyone, and the A/B test occurs over the same users in two non-overlapping timeframes? If I make the changes to my regionalized .CA website to test the impact on "Canada" before making it to the g
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it's not really beta stuff though.
what they do is serve a portion of the visitors version A.
then they serve a portion of the visitors version B. then they see in which one resulted in more sales/longer engagement.
neither one is technically beta, but more like an experiment about what works to get you to do the wanted outcome.
there's plenty of tracking/logging companies providing easy facilities this and if you work in startups you'll see it pushed on your face, even if the a and b versions don't have enough
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I see your point, but I can't equate a change of font or layout with lying about compatibility on a dating site.
Especially without any kind of warning to the users in question. Double especially when it's a potentially-paid service (a quuick google search says they OKCupid has both free and paid options... though I've never used the site myself)
On the flip side, if people knew that such shenanigans were afoot, we probably wouldn't get any decent results. Still, it seems like there should at least be a "we
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>lying about compatibility on a dating site.
Here's the gist of it, they already were lying about compatibility, or at least what you think of as compatibility. Different cultures have distinctly different criteria for selecting mates and it evolves over time. There is no golden rule, no algorithm, no magic. They throw a bunch of different shit at the wall and see what sticks. Why they look so good at finding matches is not actually finding matches but weeding the unmatchable out. Take them out, and most
Re:Shallow people will be shallow (Score:5, Insightful)
or perhaps all people are shallow.
Re:Shallow people will be shallow (Score:5, Funny)
"A walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet".
- Deteriorata
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So for your genes to survive, it is better that you find an attractive mate.
Over time the traits we find unattractive will disappear from the gene pool.
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So why are there still so many ugly people?
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Yeah, the good ol' times. When it was other users that trolled you, not the page owners themselves...
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You must not have been online during those times, as SYSOP I trolled the living shit out of people I didn't like.