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Comment by actuator | Hacker News Reader

I think it is irresistible for a dating app to not milk on human vulnerability and emotions.

Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same.

I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top.

Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.

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I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts.

Popular theory is their acquisition by the same company that owns every other dating site on the planet had something to do with it.

Given that at first they only deleted this blog post and left the rest up, I'm pretty certain that is indeed it.

They deleted lots of others as well.

Yes, later they did. But at first this one blog post got singled out, immediately after acquisition.

Tinder

You pay for the scarest resource: attractive people.

What is attractive has been evaluated and optimized over time by Tinder.

Tinder is not your only option. Good old dating still works magic even more now since everybody seems to date via app. The tides have changed.

What Tinder in my point of view evolved, is more a chat platform, than a dating platform. Good looks and speed is everything. I find it way easier to date offline than online even though I am on the attractive tier. No answer for 4 hours? Off you go. Does not happen offline + WhatsApp.

Trying to meet people organically is very hard right now with covid so i was forced to go back to the tried and true tinder.

> I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts

The old posts were critical of Match.com, who OkCupid were acquired by.

I'm pretty sure it's an open secret that paid Tinder is definitely helping out their users in various obvious (e.g. see who swiped you) and non-obvious ways (e.g. more favorable matching algorithms).

Not sure if it's a bad thing either, as the common saying goes: if you're not paying then you're the product and non-paying Tinder users are there to prop up paying ones. The only down-side I'd argue is mentally hurting ignorant people with self-image but I think Tinder is doing good amount of effort explaining this.

I think they got archived - https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_...

Journalists and users interpreted their research to be the company’s marketing direction and part of how they created their users’ experience, rather than data revealing mass user behavior. Blame the messenger, reaction. Also, revealing parts of the sauce is perhaps more advantageous to competitors than may have been anticipated. They just don’t benefit much as a company when the reactions to published research becomes yet another thing for PR to manage.

When there’s something too controversial to say publicly, it’s almost always true.

If we assume this statement to be true, that still leaves the huge problem of figuring out whether the reason for something being removed/silenced is due to its controversial nature, or any of a number of other possible explanations.

That meme is so stupid. Things can be 'controversial' or frowned upon, or flat out illegal for many different reasons.

Reasons include but are not limited to:

Inciting of violence

Threats of death

General stupitidy of idea

Legitimate criticism of authoritarian powers that be

General rudeness

I can definitely think of a few things that are controversial and are definitely not true.

1. the holocaust was a hoax

2. democrats are run by a secret cabal of satanists that use the blood of children to make immortality drugs

3. illuminati exist and are alien lizard people

4. Donald trump is smart and did a great job with the coronavirus

If you think any of the above 5 statements are true and are downvoting me for it, please go fund yourself with a startup far far away from me.

Interestingly enough,

>use the blood of children to make immortality drugs

has actually been the topic of notable research. Though the studies I've read were with regard to growth factors and proteins in youth blood plasma. Democrat links I leave on the cutting room floor. Vanna White is the only potential candidate I have currently for an immortal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-h...

Ambrosia was the big name startup around the time iirc.

The rest is mostly hogwash, I agree, but if you actually do a bit of digging, a tall tale sometimes has a nugget of truth. There is also a level of translation and realism required.

>In fact, illuminati exist and are alien lizard people

becomes much less insane if you filter it through the understanding information propagates with less resistance through lower reliability channels and extract the oh so much more likely meaning:

>There exists a small kernel of individuals with influence spanning far beyond what any normal person would experience or recognize, and their mentality or approach to dealing with things is so different as to be hard to understand from a casual observer's or outsider to their number's point of view.

1 and 4 my pedantism and integrity will in no way allow any reasonable entertaining of however.

I do not need your funding at this time, and do hope it isn't taken personally if occasion should find I do in the future, or we end up in the same startup. I just wished to point out that sometimes what sounds absolutely batshit insane is merely missing explicit context.

> I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts

Political correctness. Hopefully there are copies around the web, those posts were very very interesting.

This is correct. Too many people found the results of their collected date "problematic" so they scrubbed the web of them the best they could.

Do you actually have evidence of that? It seems at least equally likely that ownership changed and new management felt that keeping people in the dark about how dating sites work is better for business.

Not disagreeing, but I think calling it political correctness is actually granting those folks too much credit. It was people who were unqualified to process or understand the company’s findings chiming in with pop interpretations, just because they wanted to feel a part of what was supposed to be an intelligent conversation backed by data.

That doesn't explain the posts they edited to be less offensive.

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