Astral Codex Ten

OKCupid

5 min read

OKCupid

Article

OKCupid is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 18, 2021 and February 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted”; “I’m still mad about OKCupid”; “OKCupid managed it for a few years”. It most often appears alongside facebook, FDA, match.com.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 18, 2021
  • Last seen: February 14, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted. Tinder was always more of a mystery; usually just a photo plus a one-sentence cryptic description like “25, Aquarius, hit me up! <3” I sometimes considered lowering my standards enough to “swipe right” on one of these people, but was never actually able to sacrifice that amount of dignity. Then OKCupid became a much worse Tinder clone and my useful options collapsed to zero (don’t worry, I’ve since found someone great through my community). While in theory dating apps are a great solution to this problem, in practice they’re surprisingly terrible.
Highlights From The Comments On My California Ballot
November 05, 2022 · Original source
Apparently our incumbent representative on the Santa Clara Valley Water District is the founder of match.com?? I feel like I have to vote against him because I'm still mad about OKCupid.
23
February 14, 2023 · Original source
Presumably Aella will seriously look into the top few candidates, and try asking them out. Why is this good? Consider Aella’s perspective: she can log off for a few weeks, then check back and see a ranked list of who the Internet thinks she’s most compatible with. It’s kind of like asking your friends for dating recommendations, except with better incentives on your friends’ part to predict exactly how likely you are to get along with each candidate. The current leading candidate (in blue) is Steven Bonnell aka Destiny, a famous streamer. I don’t know if he is actually especially compatible with Aella, or if he just has a lot of fans on Manifold who like him and are rooting for him to date someone, or who think it would be funny to add his name in. It wouldn’t surprise me if this worked for Aella; she’s famous and probably dates other famous people; enough people know her and her potential partners that it’s worth crowdsourcing recommendations. What about the rest of us? I was able to find one non-famous person who made a market like this, apparently with good effect, but they seemed awkward enough about it that I’m not going to link it here or provide more details. Non-famous people realistically have easier ways to ask their friends, but I still think this provides value. Sadly, Porn talked about the “omniscient authority” - asking someone on a date is so scary that people want to pretend their normal human psychological needs had no input into the decision - “It’s … not like I … like you or anything, baka! I’m just doing this because I - a pure abstract intelligence who is not horny for you in any way - was informed by friends/matchmakers/our OKCupid match percentage/’the algorithm’/a dream, that asking you on a date was my duty, which I now dispassionately fulfilling.” A prediction market would make a great omniscient authority here. Also, consider the implications for romance stories. I’ve only thought about this for five minutes, so I definitely haven’t exhausted the space, but I imagine: Someone does some kind of complicated financial fraud to manipulate a prediction market into telling their crush to date them. Think Wolf Of Wall Street, but a rom-com.
Somehow this never happens. OKCupid managed it for a few years, and then Match.com bought it, murdered it, and gutted the corpse. Now it’s just a wasteland of Tinder clones, forever. Sure, Luna’s rectification of the financial incentives is clever, but it seems like there’s been some kind of more fundamental failure. Why can’t we have the normal low-tech version? Why are things so bad that the people I know have been reduced to manually making profiles on Google Docs and listing them on an online spreadsheet?
Inline links: and listing them on an online spreadsheet