Top all-time · #1525
theblog.okcupid.com
Company blog · theblog.okcupid.comculturedata
theblog.okcupid.com is the company blog at theblog.okcupid.com, writing about culture and data. Since 2016, 48 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “Your Looks and Your Inbox (2009)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link OKCupid's blog as a source of statistics from its dating data, such as attractiveness ratings, height, age preferences and race and attraction. Commenters use it as evidence in dating discussions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Your Looks and Your Inbox (2009)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-02-12
- /the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae27 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-25
- /race-and-attraction-2009-2014-107dcbb4f0606 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-04-29
- OkCupid does away with open messaging between users5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-12
- The Case for an Older Woman: How Dating Preferences Change with Age4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-10-16
- OkCupid data shows who you should message by age, and it's not who you'd think3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-02
- /a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-19
What Hacker News says?
Who would you prefer doing daily standups or long stretches of remote pair programming with? The one with the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is? Or the one with sharp features, pleasant colour rendition, high resolution, and maybe even a pretty bokeh in the background? Humans love pretty pictures. See OKCupids[1] image…
Comment linking /dont-be-ugly-by-accident-b378f261dea4
on “16-inch MacBook Pro”Submitted OkCupid data shows who you should message by age, and it's not who you'd think as a story · 47 points
HN discussionOKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Comment linking /the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2
on “Suspicious Discontinuities”Submitted An Open Letter on Why We’re Removing Usernames as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI've been on the internet. I know people lie. The OKCupid blog found that "There are consistently 4x the number of people making $100K a year than there should be" [1]. They also lie about their height, and what they look like. What reason should I have for trusting anonymous self-reported data in a category where people are known to exaggerate? [1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Comment linking /the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2
on “New Mac Pro”Submitted More than half of OkCupid users like bondage, kink as a story · 41 points
HN discussionI got one: https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-important-college-is-to-mill... It's the same in germany. It also comes down that people here don't care that much about degrees but value other things more if they have to choose.
Comment linking /how-important-college-is-to-millennial-daters-760c2c72e6f9
on “Which jobs most often pair together among married couples”Submitted OkCupid does away with open messaging between users as a story · 24 points
HN discussionOkCupid has great statistical into their data: https://theblog.okcupid.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Your Looks and Your Inbox (2009) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHeight, dating marketplace. Status in general. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-07-19/dating-apps-an... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/miriamfauzia/height-dat... https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/only-15-women-interest-58-... https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Comment linking /the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2
on “Scientists discover a new hormone that can build strong bones in mice”Submitted What Flirting Looked Like in 2016 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAt least he's willing to go 5 years older: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...
Comment linking /the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5?gi=b726c122d042
on “Facebook Dating”Submitted Why OkCupid is changing how you message as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's probably a misremembering of actual findings: At least on OKCupid, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness, while men rate women at right about 50% as below-average and 50% as above-average [0]. OKCupid has since deleted the post with their findings [1], but references to it still exist all over, as does an archived copy [2]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/ [1] http…
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “So I reverse engineered two dating apps”Submitted What Flirting Looked Like in 2016 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's the published article: https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0... Basically, men rate women more along a bell curve, but mostly message the upper end of attractiveness, whereas women rate most men as ugly and then reply anyway.
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps”Submitted The Future of Dating as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOKCupid ran this experiment: https://theblog.okcupid.com/we-experiment-on-human-beings-5d...
Comment linking /we-experiment-on-human-beings-5dd9fe280cd5
on “When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets”Submitted The Case for an Older Woman: How Dating Preferences Change with Age as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey might be security wise rather weak, but their statistics blog is a brutal-beautiful view into what humans search for dating. https://theblog.okcupid.com/tagged/data
Comment linking /tagged/data
on “How to boost your popularity on OkCupid using CSRF and a JSON type confusion”> Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting? Because different people are suited to different jobs. Why didn't (and don't) women generally compete for manufacturing jobs? Because being a creative designer or HR professional or pre-school teacher or dental hygienist is something much preferred for certain types of people. Just look at the numbers [1]. Men not only don't want to do certain types of…
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners”When it come to vague recollections, source is not that easy to bring. I don't write down what I see, so sometimes you got to take it for what it is. Through after some searching, I did find today what I looked at several years ago and they seems very similar to what I recalled. "The survey shows that about 80% of the single women interviewed think that it's reasonable for men to only consider a relationship if they…
Comment linking /the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2
on “When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners”> Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting. This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about. > Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate. The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since yo…
Comment linking /the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5
on “Explaining Sex Rate Changes”This ignores the far bigger reaching impact of online dating, that which includes some uncomfortable gender dynamics for hetrosexuals; The top percentage of men get the lions share of the dating options and presumably more frequent sex with no reason to commit to the ladies in question while lower tier men suffer disillusionment from their lack of options. The OK Cupid blog page is a filled with these sorts of nugge…
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing Society”OkCupid actually wrote an article about this that's pretty interesting - https://theblog.okcupid.com/why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-... tl;dr tons of spam / offensive messages. I actually think that with advances in NLP and content moderation since then, you could re-introduce a paradigm like this with potentially less spam.
Comment linking /why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-message-f14d492e7853
on “The dating app paradox”There are plenty of people giving advice here on general life stuff and a lot of it seems pretty good, but I don't know how actionable all of it is for you right away. I met my wife on OkCupid. I think that OkCupid is probably the best online dating site of the major ones (or at least it was when I used it), but it requires some effort. Assuming they haven't changed too much, I think this would help anyone using it:…
Comment linking /the-most-important-questions-on-okcupid-32e80bad0854
on “Ask HN: I’m 41 and still unmarried – what should I do?”I don't have the numbers on hand, but it's likely even more drastic. The original blog post has long since been deleting ( https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0... ), but according to one of the OKCupid founders: > [Women] rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’. You can imagine that people aren't swiping for "average", so the selected percentage would be even less. Link: htt…
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground”There's a good read that was put out by OK Cupid (the dating site) 15 years ago outlining exactly this. They had a lot of personality questions that they'd use to match people, so they had a lot of this data correlated with a lot of demographics. One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans,…
Comment linking /the-democrats-are-doomed-or-how-a-big-tent-can-be-too-big-fdc9bf8be312
on “IRS head says free Direct File tax service is 'gone'”If you search in Google you would see people getting those results on tinder, but here I put the study done by okcupid, which probably is more accurate: https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...
Comment linking /your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
on “Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking?”
