OkCupid, one of the most popular matchmaking websites, is admitting it too, like Facebook, has mislead its followers through social experiment fun and games.
Maybe the company believes its users should be called OkStupid.
Basically, what OkCupid is doing is conducting what are known innocuously as A/B tests in the people-matching industry.
Christian Rudder, one of the site's co-founders, authored a blog that explained and described some of the experiments and fact-finding exercises in which the company engaged. Ostensibly, these tests were designed to make their product better and improve accuracy in helping people meet the right people.
Most of the experiments were not intrusive on people's online dating lives or manipulative or misleading - they were just statistical analysis exercises, towards the goal of extrapolating trends and attitudes that could be used to make OkCupid's matching algorithms better.
For example, in one experiment, the company conducted "Love is Blind" day in January 2013. All users' photographs were temporarily removed from the site to see how it would affect interactions. The site's traffic dropped substantially, but conversations that were initiated sight-unseen still flourished - until the pictures were restored and most of those nascent relationships were quickly extinguished.
Only one of these trials didn't really pass the stink test - what the company labeled as Experiment 3: The Power of Suggestion. In this examination, OkCupid selected people who had matched up at 30 percent compatibility and told them, deliberately inaccurately, that they were actually a 90 percent match.
As a result of this sleight of numbers, the site found that users exchanged more messages when they were led to believe that compatibility was high. What OkCupid discovered was that just the suggestion of compatibility makes people like each other more.
OkCupid then reversed the methodology, telling people who had tested as compatible that they were not. Based on the exchange of four messages as the acceptable level for compatibility, the experiment now revealed that when forecasted high compatibility percentage equals actual high compatibility, that the odds of a single message evolving into a conversation were better than mismatched high-low compatibility levels or equally low levels.
Rudder expressed no remorse for the company's actions, believing that all of this noodling will result in a better product that will make their users' OkCupid experience a more successful and fulfilling one.
A bit cynically, Rudder bluntly pronounced, "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."
OkCupid competes mainly with Match.com, eHarmony and Plenty of Fish.
