OKCupid: We Experiment On You, Deal With It

OKCupid: We Experiment On You, Deal With It

“Experimenting on people” makes most of us feel uncomfortable, like we’re rats in a lab being prodded with weird devices and fed food that makes our organs bloated. But today, OKCupid tried to put that notion to rest — or at least, it tried to explain that services need to experiment on you in order to make their products better.

There’s been a huge outcry recently over the way that Facebook experiments on users to learn more about how to improve its product. This is very silly, of course, because companies have been experimenting on their customers for ages. That doesn’t make it right, but Facebook’s News Feed experiments are hardly an isolated case, and more importantly, the experimentation isn’t likely to go away.

OKCupid has always experimented on users, and even promotes this aspect of its methodology in its chemistry beaker branding. What else do you think you’re doing when you’re giving a person the thumbs up, if not giving OKCupid another data point? Still, people don’t seem to get it — so founder Christian Rudder took to the OKTrends blog with a few examples of how OKCupid has poked and prodded its users. His reaction to the whiners is pretty unequivocal:

But guess what, everybody: 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.

Rudder goes on to unpack several OKCupid experiments and how they gave the company insight into user behaviour — insights that help the company improve its service. For example, he notes what happened when OKCupid temporarily removed pictures from online dating profiles. It turns out that people dismissed each other less often, and were willing to engage and even meet up in real life at a greater rate.

Rudder told me on the phone that many time these experiments lead to what amount to very mundane changes in the service like the colour of the button or the location of text. In some cases though, OKCupid, does meddle in ways people might find more offensive, like showing you hotter people to get you more engaged. And ultimately all of the decisions “play with your emotions” in that they change how you interact with people that you might fall in love or have sex with.

But the bottom line is this: You are being experimented on in a highly anonymized way at all times on the internet. It’s part of the price you pay for using largely free services that are so effective. If there were no experiments, these services wouldn’t be nearly as good — and you wouldn’t want to use them anyway. [OKTrends]

Picture: Nick Stango


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