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> Of course, matching people well is hard

I thought OKCupid did a great job. The second person I had a conversation with ended up becoming my wife.

I really liked how OKCupid had a seemingly never-ending set of personality questions. You could answer none of them, or you could answer 100 of them, and the more you answered, the more confidence it had in its matching. You would even flag the importance of each question, so you can tell it if something is an absolute deal-breaker (like your desire to have kids or stay child-free), or if something is a mild preference, like hair color.

> (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)

IMO, Tinder ruined online dating. AFAIK, it makes zero attempt at actually matching people based on any metrics other than location and age.

Actually, I take that back. Tinder didn't ruin online dating, shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit when they get rejected did.




Early OKCupid was amazing, their matching algorithm was spot on. I had a similar experience, and matched with my wife there after only a handful of other dates. The craziest part- she had made a profile, and we’d matched, but she wasn’t ready to date at the time and deleted her profile. A couple months later she remade it and we matched again! Neither of us realized we were the same people until after we had started dating and talked about previous messages we’d sent out. So their matching was definitely legitimate. We were a 92% match on OKCupid. It’s 11 years later and we’re still happy as 2 clams! OKCupid was the most meaningful website in my entire life, because it helped me find my lifelong partner, and I never paid them a cent.


The questions were easily manipulated, so I would find someone I liked, changed all my answers so we would be either 96% match or lowest as possible because I would always get interest from them when they discovered who viewed them with the lowest score, usually they would send a message 'hey we are supposed to be enemies' which led to dates.

They were community made questions so often very vague and not very reliable, another attempt would work if someone remade that feature with user voting maybe on best questions


This seems like it would be counterproductive.

If you had a low-percentage match, then I wouldn't think it would lead to a successful relationship. Gaming the percentage doesn't seem like it would have a good overall outcome.


I found with OKCupid, that the women I scored the highest matches with (like 97 or above) had forgotten to check the "I don't want to see, nor be seen by, straights" checkbox. Two of my exes came out as gay and another 2 probably should have.

> shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit when they get rejected did.

I'm afraid that's so true.




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