If you remember the old OkCupid blog they used to post interesting articles about online dating. I know their article about whether you should smile on your profile picture was eventually debunked [1], but it was nonetheless nice to have objective, data-based, non-pua advice on how to be successful in online dating.

[1] https://blog.photofeeler.com/okcupid-is-wrong-about-smiling-...

They did tons of data analysis across all aspects of profiles, and had a popular blog where they published the results.

They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.

I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.

Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.

The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.

I did like that they shared a lot of hard data with insightful analysis. At the time, there were a lot of narratives about what women wanted and it was refreshing to see them post what was actually working. I remember being skeptical about anything being private online at the time, but I guess that perspective wasn't as pervasive.

makes me wonder if the person you went on a date with cherry-picked you due to your data. (anyone who would post on hacker news is obviously a good catch!)

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