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The official blog is the cleaned-up version, they removed the most interesting articles when they sold out to match.com

Famously, the article "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" got deleted during the acquisition.

[1] Mirror: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...



It's a good article, and one of the key takeaways:

If a dating site makes you pay to send messages, then they have an incentive to make you send messages to inactive accounts rather than active accounts, since people with inactive accounts have to pay in order to reply.


There were also articles that ran counter to popular gender theory/politics.

This is off memory but I believe their stats showed that men rated women's photos on what resembled a classic bell curve, shifted to the right slightly. Ie, dudes were generally reasonable if not a wee bit overly kind.

Women were exceptionally brutal in ranking men's looks. Women's ranking of men was a triple-diamond ski hill with damn near most of the userbase falling in (I believe, again, this is from memory) the bottom third. "Women are held to unrealistic beauty standards" seems to be more than a bit of projection.

Funny story: I got banned from OKCupid once for calling out other volunteer flagmods (people suckered into wasting their time policing OKCupid user photos for free) for body shaming and transphobia (the latter almost exclusively toward transfemmes, but both coming almost exclusively from white, straight women.) Hilarious.


Some "controversial" blog posts they deleted.

How men and women perceive attractiveness https://archive.is/489UV#selection-282.0-282.1

We finally answer the age-old question: should men keep their shirts on? https://archive.is/9fJQh#selection-282.0-282.1

We Experiment On Human Beings! https://archive.is/QNCbf#selection-278.0-278.1

How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get https://archive.is/kMP32#selection-278.0-278.1

Don’t Be Ugly By Accident! https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyac...

More can be found here:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/index


i'd love to pay for the substack of whoever wrote that blogpost, they have to be sitting on a mountain of unpublished insights.




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