Is there any real benefit to this change? It seems like a wash for men and a serious increase to cyber-stalking for women.
Frankly, it's a bad idea to supply ANY personal information to random strangers (like on a dating website.) If you have an unusual first name, it's almost trivial to search Facebook to find someone.
There are certain communities (such as people who are genderqueer and transsexual) who experience targeted harassment. Asking users to expose additional personally identifying information is a really shitty thing to do.
How about your photos? Those are as PII as it gets. If you're not careful (and majority of people aren't), and upload the same photo you use for your linkedin or twitter account, a 5 second Google Image search can easily reveal your true identity.
In fact, I have, in the past, emailed OKC and others and asked them to put measures in place so when a user uploads a photo, it's checked against various sources online and if it's a match, the user would be warned that it's potentially revealing their identity. I'm not sure if they took note of that.
They're trying their hardest to turn it into a Tinder clone, presumably there's an internal bonus scheme bending their minds. The fact that being a clone of another service with > 10x as users is radiantly idiotic when your only hope of survival is creating a distinct niche is probably not lost on them. It just doesn't matter. Someone's bonus this year is riding on numbers that kill it next year.
My guess is that OkCupid isn't raking in enough money compared to it's siblings, and it was given a directive: make more, or die. And right now its management is thrashing about trying to find a formula to survive.
It is designed for an era when going on the Internet was an activity. You were in front of your computer or you were not, and you had screen names that were not your real name.
I'm betting all of that is alien to the current generation of single people, and for the young women who are the bread and butter of any dating site, seeing men with in-joke names is off-putting in ways it wasn't a decade ago.
Some single people are over 30 and remember using the internet on screens larger than a 3x5 card. (Sorry, is it assuming too much to expect that the audience here knows what a 3x5 card is? It's a bit like a paper version of Trello. Don't want to alienate the youths.)
I think it's credible that any dating site that wants itself to remain au courant (sorry, that's French, maybe too far outside the properly targeted cultural comfort zone? Heaven knows one must be careful to avoid this kind of faux pax in order to keep from alienating one's audience) is going to have to make sure it's keeping women in their 20s/30s. But are women in that demographic really universally (a) put off by usernames (b) prefer "always-on" dating apps (c) prefer photos and short text blurbs to photos+essays+match questions?
I hope not, because if so, I'm screwed (sorry -- is that too mild/anachronistic? It means "fucked", but it's a little more polite, just in case the audience here isn't familiar). Or rather, not screwed. Services like OKC work an order of magnitude better for me than swipe-apps, I'd guess because I'm better with words than I am photogenic or handsome. But maybe I'm wrong and women universally much prefer the swipe model?
Why do men have such a hard time accepting that women have it harder?
Any proof of that?
> Focusing mostly on women ... would solve most of the problem
Any proof of that?
Everything you wrote is simply sexist to the core.
Why does there need to be a focus on a specific gender to address a problem?
Because everything is broken and we are mere mortals with limited attention and ability to improve the world and shortcuts are always tempting.
This particular problem probably varies by nation, but it is only bad to stereotype like this when you either assume that the partial solution is a total solution, or when your perspective fails and you cause more harm than good with your solution.
Both of those failure modes happen. Yet, all the evidence I have seen says men are more likely to harass than women are. Same effort should provide a greater benefit by focusing on male harassment… except that this is online, so “does this text look harassing?” is probably how this should be handled specifically by OKC, but now I’m definitely guessing.
When we look at online harassment we see more male than female perpetrators, and more female than male victims, especially when we look at the most serious offences.
No one credible disputes these figures.
For violence, most victims are male, with proportions similar to that of sexual violence for women but with an total higher occurrence rate.
If we go closer to crimes that happens online, here is some exact numbers for related crimes (using Swedish data):
Threat of violence: 5.3%M 5.9%F.
Harassment: 4.8% M 6.1% F.
Stalking: Of the total, 75% F, 25% M.
But we can also go deeper. Reported death threats directed at men are 700% more common than threats of sexual violence directed at women (2015). Death threats is the single most common reported type of threat, covering 39% of all reports. The most common reported threat directed at women is to unlawful publish photos, 10% of all reported cases. Practically all threat directed at men or women was made online or via SMS. The report notes that men is more likely to receive threats from strangers, while women are more likely to receive threats from past sexual relationships (40%).
Online harassment is complex, and Scandinavian countries has a strong reputation in social science of having large and good data.
https://www.bra.se/download/18.5e2a4a6b14ab166759985c/142261...
You seriously think this is consequence free for men? Thats... pretty amazingly unimaginative.