Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Ever Used OKCupid? You Need To Know The Dating Website Has Been Experimenting on You!

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For those looking for love on the internet through dating websites, I'm sorry to report that you're just a human guinea pig for the websites, as they experiment and test you for their own gains.

OKCupid, one of the world's most popular dating websites has just revealed that it has been experimenting on its users.

Their experiments have included putting the "wrong" people together to see if they would connect or hiding profile pictures or text and telling pairs of people who might have made great matches that they weren't actually good for each other.

This could explain why lots of people dating online complainoften about going on so many really awful dates even with the detailed profiles they put up.


In an OkCupid blog post called "We Experiment on Human Beings," the founder of the dating site yesterday defended using their members as human lab rats. He said users need to get used to the fact that human experiments are the reality of using the Internet.


Christian Rudder wrote that he and his engineers sometimes play around with people's accounts to figure out the best way to build the site.

"I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.

"We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook 'experimented' with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: 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."

As you can guess, lots of people are not very happy with his comments.

What do you think? Did you already know about this, and if you didn't does it make you want to go out and register with a dating website?




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