Before (and for some amount of time after) they made the Real Name policy their safety tips page specifically said Guard your identity. Don’t share your real name https://web.archive.org/web/20160928225651/https://www.okcup...
[0] https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...
And then more than a month later she started with more Cheaterville posts, this time posted as his full name https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2012/3/15/aimeexx1-...
Now, I wonder if perhaps staff/owners of Cheaterville weren't using dating sites to attempt to find people to blackmail. IIRC the site would remove any posts about you for a hefty fee.
I was an early adopter of OkCupid, in fact long before they were acquired I was actually a volunteer moderator. It was interest in the early days because you could tag stuff "I like [[Metallica]], I read a lot of [[science fiction]], and I like to eat [[pizza]] before going to [[SCA]] fighter practice" and you could find people with similar interests that way, which was cool. I actually met some really cool women and am still friends with a couple of them. But then it started going downhill pretty quickly once they were purchased by the Match.com folks. Lots of dumb changes, removal of long-standing features, drastic increase in spam messages from people hundreds (or thousands) of miles away, requiring real names etc.
Didn't surprise me.
Every single time I'd pay for a Match.com account (over multiple years, as recently as last year), within a day of my subscription someone would message me. I'd always, like a sucker, pay again and reply and nothing... or they'd reply once or twice with very basic replies and stop. Now, I'm not saying they're scamming users to get them to pay for another month but... sure feels like it.
I anecdotally noticed a massive increase in spam/fake accounts when the same company bought Tinder too.