OKCupid will make people use real names on their dating profiles | Hacker News Reader

OKCupid will make people use real names on their dating profiles

theverge.com

22 pointsValentineC10 comments

What's the point of this, other than "nicknames are hard to remember?" Not a rhetorical question, since that seems to be the main point brought up in the article. Presumably, there's some other problem they're trying to solve with this.

Anecdote: I found seeing the various usernames on the platform quite nice when I used OKCupid a few years ago. When my now-husband and I met on the site, some of our first discussions were about why we chose the usernames we did.

One reason and one only- to make it easier to sell user information. OKC has detailed, directly-stayed information on all its users’ likes and dislikes, of a sort second second only to that generated by Facebook (maybe.). If they (or some marketing analytics firm working with them) can figure out a way to connect your user profile made on your laptop to you as an Amazon shopper on your cellphone, that’s worth Big Bucks. Having a real first name makes this easier- and also makes the reliability of the process sound more convincing to executives who still don’t, deep in their bones, trust statistical techniques.

If it's a paid account then they would already have that information. Is the quality of data they will mine from the free accounts worth it? I don't know. If you have the app installed they can already see your location and what not. Just seems like a bad move.

So they've smartly circumvented the obvious privacy problem by only requiring first names, not full names. However, "real life" first names tend to be a lot less varied and unique than screen names. So how are people supposed to distinguish between dozens of Steves, Bobs and Annas?

Maybe for white people. But I count 142K unique first names in a database of 3300K people for the very multicultural province of BC Canada.

Maybe for white people.

You mean culturally homogeneous people. I guarantee those names are arranged in a Pareto distribution, in which the vast majority belong to tiny numbers of people, while everyone else has names that are common within their culture, be they Michael or Mohammed.

But I presume you're one of those delightful "white people are boring/unoriginal/have no culture" folks, so carry on.

Since OKCupid isn’t going to be asking people for their drivers license or birth certificate anytime soon to validate the names. All this means is that instead of hotstud799898. You can be Hughe G Dickerson.

Basically an easier to read name.

the OkCupid blog post/announcement has some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985368

You can set your first name to be AllAboutBass and it'll be a-okay.

Pro tip: they accept "First" as a first name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com