this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
371 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37711 readers
167 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Many years ago™ OkCupid actually had a good system, before it revamped itself and got bought by Match (Tinder).
In the old version of the website, you could answer any amount of questions from a huge catalogue of sometimes very obscure and specific questions and look for people who had very similar (or very different) answers overall. You could chat freely with everyone and had the option to look just for (platonic) friends.
I had incredibly interesting discussions with people who were at the opposite spectrum of my answers. And I made a few acquaintances and two amazing friends who still are my friends today, one is even my roommate for 8 years now! I also found a group of white hackers and Linux enthusiasts for real life meetings and we still hang out occasionally.
Two other friends of mine looked for and found romantic partners there and they are both happily married to the partners they found via OkCupid back then.
It went all down the gutter when people used the "platonic friends" option to get into your pants.
And when OkCupid tried to make more cash by pushing into the sex/romance market more and copying dating apps.
I don't think something like this would work anymore. Dating apps and the weird culture and thinking about a "sexual market" seem to have broken humans or something. This asinine idea is just another symptom.
Did they get rid of the questions? That was the most awesome part of OkCupid. Because you not only answered the questions but you could pick if you cared what your potential matches answers should be.
I met my wife on OkCupid, we were a high % match according to OkCupid and we did turn out to be a great match. That's stupid if they got rid of that.
There's a big conflict of interest in dating apps: if you're successful you stop using the app, and of course the company doesn't want that.
But if everyone has a shitty experience with it, they won't recommend it or even tell people to stay away from it. But if it works well, they'll praise it, thus gaining more users.
And enshittification and buying up competitors will lead to all sites being the same, which is exactly what has happened. Executives don't care about providing a useful service, they just care about getting richer
Match Group has basically ruined all of online dating.