OKCupid Admits To Purposely Giving Users Bad Matches In Site 'Experiment'

BUSINESS INSIDER - July 29 - Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OKCupid, wrote an enticing blog post called "We Experiment On Human Beings!" to lay out three different experiments the dating site ran on its users without asking for permission. In the most controversial experiment, OKCupid lied to users. The site took pairs of users with low match ratings of ~30% (the ideal match is 100%) and told them they were a 90% match. They also did the opposite, giving highly-compatible pairs of users low match ratings. OKCupid found, somewhat unsurprisingly, that more people sent messages to matches they perceived to be compatible with. But users also sent more messages to people they were actually compatible with, regardless of the match score shown to them, proving the efficacy of its matching algorithm, but also the role of suggestion in matchmaking.

by Rebecca Borison
See full article at Business Insider

See all posts on OkCupid