14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Facebook isn’t alone in the race to play games with people’s feelings. OkCupid has revealed that it experimented on its users, too, including by telling the wrong people that they’d be a perfect match to each other just to see if they’d connect.
“I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out,” starts off Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OkCupid.
He explains that he noticed how annoyed people were after it was revealed that Facebook experimented with their news feeds, but he has a news flash for everyone – if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site because that’s how websites work.
Rudder goes on to tell the world about some of the experiments OkCupid has been tinkering with. For instance, the site took pairs of bad matches and told them they were “exceptionally good” for each other.
“Not surprisingly, the users sent more first messages when we said they were compatible,” Rudder admits, which he says is exactly what the site teaches people to do.
The experiment was taken one step further as the company wanted to see whether the displayed match percentage caused more than just that first message and it seems that the answer was “yes.”
“When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are. Even when they should be wrong for each other,” Rudder coldly explains.
In another experiment, OKCupid ran profiles with pictures and no profile text for half of the people involved in the test and vice versa for the other half. People only responded to the ones with pictures, indicating that users don’t simply rely on someone’s words when considering dating them.
Once more, it seems that Internet companies have no qualms about playing with people’s feelings and emotions. Facebook, as you may know, ran an experiment on 689,000 users, modifying the News Feed algorithm to display more negative or positive posts to determine whether people were influenced by the moods their friends were in.