OKCupid
Article
OKCupid is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 14, 2023 and December 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “was informed by friends/matchmakers/our OKCupid match percentage”; “I found my wife on OKCupid before it become Tinderized”; “I propose an OKCupid of IATs”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, 23andme, Aella.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: February 14, 2023
- Last seen: December 05, 2023
Appears In
- 23
- Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences
- Quests And Requests
- Followup: Quests And Requests
- Links For November 2023
- 23
Related Pages
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- Twitter (5 shared issues)
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- 23andme (2 shared issues)
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- Aella (2 shared issues)
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- Alyssa (2 shared issues)
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- Art Nouveau (2 shared issues)
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- Austin (2 shared issues)
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- CCI (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- Japanese (2 shared issues)
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- John Green (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold.love (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
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
A well-written text profile that ticks all my marks? Now THAT'S where I get excited. I'm very lucky I found my wife on OKCupid before it become Tinderized, because I had zero success on Tinder. No woman ever matched me, and I had hard time forcing myself to "like" them. While I went on many interesting dates on OKC, so it's not that I'm exceptionally undateable - but Tinder-like sites don't work for me.
I don’t have a specific use case in mind so much as a vague sense that there must be more we can do with this. I propose an OKCupid of IATs, where anyone can make an IAT with a few clicks and share it with their friends (in the same sense that anyone could make and share personality tests on OKCupid). I’m not sure what people would do with this or what they would find, but I expect it to be fascinating.
6 (OKCupid-style dating site): Everyone seemed interested in this one. Two people say they’ve already been working on this for a while and collected teams: Shreeda Segan and Dendwrite. Shreeda is a friend of a friend and I can vouch for her; I don’t know Dendwrite but he also seems pretty committed. Read their comments to see what help they need and how to contact them if you can provide it.
Inline links: Shreeda Segan, Dendwrite
Another key feature that distinguished 2011 OKCupid from what followed is the thumbnail display of profiles, sorted by match percentage. It enabled you to "browse" instead of being pushed into making a binary decision one random profile at a time.
21: Insights From 2,961 First Dates - OKCupid style analysis from the founder of a (now failed) Internet dating startup. For example, “People care more about a possible partner’s politics (68%) than about their religion (59%) or their ethnicity (28%).”
Inline links: Insights From 2,961 First Dates
Manifold.love has also introduced OKCupid-style “compatibility questions”. They don’t seem to involve calculating a match percent yet AFAICT, but hopefully soon!