Users & Usage

Throughout the years OkCupid has conducted several experiments on their users. In July 2014 there was a large public controversy over a blog post by OKCupid’s president admitting he had the biggest influence in attracting others. They lied to about 500 users about their match percentage meaning someone who was a 30% match was displayed as a 90% match (Grimmelmann, 2015, 223-224).A lot of users were angry at the fact they were hiding profiles from other users or giving incorrect matches. Under the blogpost explaining the experiments one of the comments reads, “People signed up expecting you all to be truthful. You weren't. It's not funny, and even worse it could have been dangerous. If you want to perform science experiments, go to school" (SBS News, 2014). People believed they were being exploited and some users decided the leave the site. OkCupid's president did not understand people's negative reaction about online experiments and claimed "if you use the internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” (Hern, 2014). Overall, OKCupid’s users have been on the decline and with the popularity of Tinder it continues to fall.

OkCupid has struggled to attract the younger generation as their users continue to get older. The younger generation have shifted to a mobile first mentality and Tinder has a much better mobile experience (Quora, 2015).

References:

Grimmelmann, J. (2015). The Law and Ethics of Experiments on Social Media Users.

Cornell Law School. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=260416 8  

Quoara. (2015). As of mid 2015, has Okcupid's user base been mostly hollowed out by

Tinder? https://www.quora.com/As-of-mid-2015-has-Okcupids-user-base-been-mostly-hollowed-out-by-Tinder

SBS News. (2014). Anger Over Dating Website Experiments. Web. 

          http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/07/30/anger-over-dating-website-experi meant

Hern, A. (2014) OkCupid: We Experiment on Users. Everyone Does.

TheGuardian.https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/okcupid-experiment-human-beings-dating