I really liked OKC when I was using it and think it's one of the best dating sites, but I have something of an anti-OKCupid story:
I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious.
Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
Unfortunately, unrestricted searches generate way more hits than you can process by hand. I worked around this by applying subsets of search criteria at a time. For instance, instead of searching for an Atheist/Agnostic 25-35 making over $50k with an Average or Athletic body type who likes backpacking, exercises 3-4 times per week, and has a graduate degree, I would search for athletic Atheist/Agnostics making over $50k, then search for women with graduate degrees who like backpacking, then maybe widen the age range to 20-40 but apply the rest of the criteria, and so on. The challenge was to be as inclusive as possible without generating more hits than I wanted to process in one sitting.
It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.
Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
I always searched for "atheist only" in my online searches. Then a Muslim girl wrote me and told me I had good bone structure. 3 years later, we're engaged. (She's also very moderate in her beliefs.)
> I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
personally I find all these dating sites to be completely useless for guys...too much competition.
when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
Women have to play a numbers game, too. If they go for the same guys the other girls go for, they won't get time with the guy, or they'll get time with a guy who is dating a bunch of other women. Women figure this out pretty quickly. Your model of how women behave would result in a lot of frustration for them unless they're happy being some generic stud's Tuesday night girl.
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
Think of it as business: improve your marketing. There are many women who ignore anyone who messages them because they want to be in control of the situation. Therefore they troll the male listings and respond to the ones they like.
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
I am a paying member of Match.com but currently dating someone I met playing Lexulous (a Scrabble clone) on Facebook. I was reasonably happy with Match.com and got several dates, most of which were with reasonable matches I was happy to go out with. I met my last long-term girlfriend on Match.com.
When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though.
Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others.
If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
Generally found that most Caucasian dating sites work if you are Caucasian (or want to date Caucasian people), which in hindsight seems obvious really.
The "popular" ethnic sites (e.g. shaadi.com) are geared more towards "marriage" than "dating", but surprisingly most ethnic people on them want to "get to know you first" for a long time (in most Indo society this is usually done in a family context i.e. with others around, and for a relatively short period of time before a marriage decision is made, the short time frame being there to protect the individuals i.e. modesty of girls, and prevent "undesirable" behaviour, all this being counter balanced by the families getting involved to ensure matches are good and process does not take excessively long), which is basically "dating" by another name (but seems more socially/culturally acceptable, especially in Indo cultures, due to the "marriage" pretext/context).
Perhaps many people are on them as there is no major ethnic alternative, hence I think an ethnic OKCupid (or clone) would do well. I may even try to build (an albeit rubbish) one for Show HN November, lol.
Of course this is a single view garnered through anecdotal evidence, observation of many others (over the years), lots of general discussion on the topic with people from all walks of life, and based on a small sample size, so totally unscientific, but yet remarkably true.
I guess the question there would be, why reinvent the wheel and lose any network effects by making an "ethnic OkCupid"? If you can successfully identify whatever it is that makes OKC not "ethnic" enough, wouldn't it be better to get OKC to basically put on a different skin and rebrand, but keep the secret sauce under the hood that makes it awesome?
Dating a girl 3 (almost 4) years strong I met on OKCupid. She messaged me back then, after I kind of gave up on the site (Some bad experiences on in-person dates, yikes). I liked her message, replied, conversation led to MSN, then finally we met up for a dinner and movie night.
I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
I've been a member for about 3 or 4 months. I was in one short relationship from OKC during that time. I would say that my experience has been good so far. Surely I'm doing much better than I would have trying to meet women considering that I'm a hacker by trade, shy, and don't drink (thus excluding me from the bar scene).
I've noticed that if you live anywhere remotely near a large metropolitan area but prefer not to date there for whatever reason (Seattle in my case, I hate navigating/being in large cities) you're kind of screwed. I'd estimate that 90% of the results/suggestions I get are from Seattle, regardless of any distance constraints I put in.
Also, the woman I dated briefly from OKC next met some guy about 25 years her senior and wound up in the passenger seat of a car going 100+mph with a man heavily intoxicated with pills and alcohol pointing a gun at her. I'm sure that happens very infrequently but I'd argue that dating sites might make it a bit easier for nutjobs to control their appearance to potential victims.
Aside from that, OKC is, as far as I know, the best-designed dating site out there.
I can't tell for OkCupid (they are not covering my country well), but i was inspired by it and built a similar app for Russian social network and it worked very well for me.
The poll options remind me of a badly written switch statement. Not only are the options overlapping to different degrees, but they're time-sensitive. Say I just broke up with someone from OkCupid. My answers would be different today than yesterday, even though the significant fact that OkCupid led to a relationship is unchanged. How about more humanized poll options:
a. OkCupid worked for me
b. OkCupid hasn't worked for me yet
c. I've never used OkCupid
At the moment, these poll results are useless. The poll tries to infer too much about general online dating instead of answering the real question: does the most popular free online dating service, OkCupid, work for HN readers? That's enough to investigate through one poll.
I had a small stint with online dating, even met and had a relationship through one. But it didnt work out long term and I never went back to the site afterwards (was using plentyoffish at the time).
A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
When I was in SFBA, I met several (7?) girls from OkCupid. They were all seriously insane, in different and interesting ways, except for one, who was actually a pretty awesome engineer and decent human being (and who turned out to be friends with a lot of my other SFBA friends already). Guess which one I didn't actually date due to leaving the country a few weeks later :(
I met the best woman ever on OkCupid. Three years on and it's better than ever.
Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.
Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
I have to disagree with your tip. When someone IMs me out of the blue without any prior contact I think it's a little too eager. I prefer to start with a message or two and then move into more real-time interaction.
somewhat off-topic: I read somewhere recently that 35% of date site users are married. Can anyone confirm this stat or find a source for a more accurate estimate?
I tried it, and it generally just depressed me that all my compatible matches were over 100 miles away. Guess I should get out of South Dakota if I ever want this service to do any good for me. It would probably be good for my sanity and career if I did.
Wow, another hn'er from SD (grew up in Rapid City).
I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up.
Awful. I spent two years on that site, met 2 people in person, sent literally 100s upon 100s of messages. Giant waste of time - I'm thoroughly convinced online dating does not work. Have you seen the movie Catfish? Its kind of like that, no one is who they appear to be on the internet. Sorry if I'm ranting. OKCupid is "free", but it took away many, many hours that I'll never get back.
I met a girl one time who said "You get a good relationship when you need it the least." I think that is the crux of why it doesn't work or can't work. It's like when you find something you've lost, but only after you stop searching for it.
[+] [-] msluyter|15 years ago|reply
I met my current SO in person, at a party. It turns out that we have opposing political and religious views (we're both fairly moderate, so we're not polar opposites, but we do categorize ourselves as Dem/Rep, Atheist/Christian). Personally, I'm a little surprised that things have worked as well as they have, given that, but love is mysterious.
Surprisingly, we discovered that we were on OKC at exactly the same time, but due to the above discrepancies our match percentages were so low that we never saw each other. I'm not sure what moral one should take away from that, other than that your mental checklist of dating requirements may be less relevant than you imagined.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
It was also an interesting odyssey into my own preferences, prejudices, and thought processes. Sometimes I wasn't interested in getting a lot of results. Instead, I'd sit down with a desire to explore a very specific search, which often resulted in zero hits. I'd fiddle with the search until I got a few hits. One day I met a really pretty girl (not available, unfortunately) who was Indian and kept thinking about how great it would be if she was going on my upcoming backpacking trip with me. So I did a search for South Asian women who listed backpacking as an interest, and got zero results, none at all in my area, even after I removed all other criteria (18-60+, 4'0"-8'11", all body types, etc.) I was intrigued by the result, so I tried other ethnic groups (no black women into backpacking, either, IIRC) and found that East Asian + backpacking produced a set of results that I could process in a reasonable amount of time. Voila, I found a few interesting profiles and ended up getting a date with one of them.
Small result sets always intrigued me. Searching for women making over $150k turned up a very small set for my area, with a couple of interesting and surprisingly approachable-sounding profiles. When I broadened my search radius, I found one girl I would have messaged in a heartbeat if she lived closer. It was strange how often a small result set had a higher density of interesting and compatible profiles, even if the parameters I chose to create it seemed unrelated to my preferences. The >$150k search surprised the heck out of me; I assumed it would turn up a bunch of women I had no chance with and nothing in common with. But that was pretty typical for small result sets, at least the ones I tended to produce. Large result sets contained lots of interesting people, too, but the payoff of interesting profiles per time spent slogging through results was much lower.
[+] [-] JeffL|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rue|15 years ago|reply
The take-away is that there is no "special someone". Just a fairly large pool of "soulmates" with suitable chemistries. The less discriminating you are about the more superficial stuff (biologically speaking), the better your chances.
[+] [-] vaksel|15 years ago|reply
when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.
with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
[+] [-] maxawaytoolong|15 years ago|reply
The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.
Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
[+] [-] strlen|15 years ago|reply
Actually, I found it to be completely the opposite. Most of the guys messaging the girls either (sorted by frequency):
1) Send a picture of their privates
2) Send something incoherent e.g., "GURL UR SO HOT"
3) Send a long, creepy essay
4) Have zero compatibility with her, haven't read her profile (past the picture), etc... and are sending something generic.
So if you actually read their profile and send intelligent messages selectively, you'll get responses.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
Hence, if you're looking for an intelligent woman who wants a monogamous relationship, she'll be looking for a good individual match with a guy who has time for her, and she'll be looking for ways around the numbers problem. That means playing up what makes you different, and being good at targeting yourself to the right women. I'm not a catch by any means, but I had a pretty good response rate on Match.com, to the point where I worried that I wasn't casting a wide enough net. I think one of the reasons I've been successful is that I'm very honest and try to communicate as much of my personality as possible through my ad, even the aspects of my personality that aren't universally liked. That's how you hook into women's individual taste and how you help them solve the numbers problem. (That's not the same as putting your worst foot forward; I don't advertise things about myself that nobody would like.)
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|15 years ago|reply
I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
[+] [-] orenmazor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teach|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackattack|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
When I go back into the ring, I will keep using Match, but I will try other sites at the same time. My experience with Match is that it's worth the money, and at any time I can find a dozen or so prospects in my city (~1 million people.) After you've gone through your top picks you have to wait a long time for new faces, though.
Also, this is a pretty poor multiple-choice poll. The categories could have been better-chosen. I doubt many people fall clearly into a single one of these categories. I'm seeing someone and not actively looking, but I'm not in a relationship; I met her online, but not on a dating site; I'm a member of a pay site, but also a member of OkCupid, but barely bothered creating a profile there because I met someone on Match.com right after I joined OkCupid. I clicked "other" but I think I was expected to click one of the others.
If the categories can't be improved, maybe a solution for situations like this is to let people pick more than one option, and track how many people picked at least one? If not automatically, then through a choice saying "Choose this if you participated in the poll?"
[+] [-] babul|15 years ago|reply
The "popular" ethnic sites (e.g. shaadi.com) are geared more towards "marriage" than "dating", but surprisingly most ethnic people on them want to "get to know you first" for a long time (in most Indo society this is usually done in a family context i.e. with others around, and for a relatively short period of time before a marriage decision is made, the short time frame being there to protect the individuals i.e. modesty of girls, and prevent "undesirable" behaviour, all this being counter balanced by the families getting involved to ensure matches are good and process does not take excessively long), which is basically "dating" by another name (but seems more socially/culturally acceptable, especially in Indo cultures, due to the "marriage" pretext/context).
Perhaps many people are on them as there is no major ethnic alternative, hence I think an ethnic OKCupid (or clone) would do well. I may even try to build (an albeit rubbish) one for Show HN November, lol.
Of course this is a single view garnered through anecdotal evidence, observation of many others (over the years), lots of general discussion on the topic with people from all walks of life, and based on a small sample size, so totally unscientific, but yet remarkably true.
[+] [-] blahedo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truebosko|15 years ago|reply
I used it because I was out of school and working in a small company with only 5 employees so my options were almost nill on finding a date outside of the bar scene, which is more skewed to getting laid than actual dating :)
[+] [-] ghurlman|15 years ago|reply
Only in NYC
[+] [-] mxavier|15 years ago|reply
I've noticed that if you live anywhere remotely near a large metropolitan area but prefer not to date there for whatever reason (Seattle in my case, I hate navigating/being in large cities) you're kind of screwed. I'd estimate that 90% of the results/suggestions I get are from Seattle, regardless of any distance constraints I put in.
Also, the woman I dated briefly from OKC next met some guy about 25 years her senior and wound up in the passenger seat of a car going 100+mph with a man heavily intoxicated with pills and alcohol pointing a gun at her. I'm sure that happens very infrequently but I'd argue that dating sites might make it a bit easier for nutjobs to control their appearance to potential victims.
Aside from that, OKC is, as far as I know, the best-designed dating site out there.
[+] [-] ojilles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike_esspe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] starpilot|15 years ago|reply
a. OkCupid worked for me
b. OkCupid hasn't worked for me yet
c. I've never used OkCupid
At the moment, these poll results are useless. The poll tries to infer too much about general online dating instead of answering the real question: does the most popular free online dating service, OkCupid, work for HN readers? That's enough to investigate through one poll.
[+] [-] strlen|15 years ago|reply
One tip, however: if you're a straight male and in Silicon Valley / South Bay, consider setting your search radius to also include San Francisco.
[+] [-] binarymax|15 years ago|reply
A friend of mine actually charges people money to write their dating site profiles. He boasts a seriously good turnover for relationships (for the record he didnt write my profile :) Its all truth, but some people have no idea what to write on those things.
[+] [-] rdl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danilocampos|15 years ago|reply
Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.
Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
[+] [-] MistyKaye|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradlane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhancock|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twymer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenduks|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takameyer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadgeidel|15 years ago|reply
I had bad luck with OK Cupid in that area myself (Mitchell 2004-2008). I couldn't find any compatible matches within the 100 mile radius either. I finally just gave up.
Haven't tried in the new area (Colorado Springs).
[+] [-] hyad|15 years ago|reply
I met a girl one time who said "You get a good relationship when you need it the least." I think that is the crux of why it doesn't work or can't work. It's like when you find something you've lost, but only after you stop searching for it.