DailyDirt: Online Dating, FTW?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some folks look at online dating services as a tool for meeting like-minded people (with potentially romantic engagements). But as with almost anything on the internet, there are also people out there trying to game the system and figure out how the algorithms behind the date matching systems work. (Though, sometimes the process is a bit simpler.) Just to gear up for Valentine's Day later this week, here are just a few examples of people taking online dating to an extreme.

• Chris McKinlay used his PhD-level math skills to improve his dating experience on OkCupid. Using 12 fake OkCupid accounts and some Python scripts, he scraped millions of responses from 20,000 women... and after 88 first dates with women he found with his own algorithms, he's in a serious relationship. [url]
• About 40 million people in the US are using online dating services like eHarmony, Match.com, etc. And if those dating site users are anything like their counterparts in China, people aren't as fussy about their dates as their profiles might imply -- based on a study of hundreds of thousands of dating interactions on baihe.com (which has 60 million registered users). [url]
• Alli Reed performed her own experiment on OkCupid, trying to determine how awful a woman's profile could be before men would stop messaging her. The one part of her fake profile that wasn't awful was the very attractive profile picture, so the answer should be somewhat obvious. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: algorithm, alli reed, chris mckinlay, dating, fake profiles, math, relationships, romance
Companies: baihe, eharmony, match.com, okcupid