OK Cupid is experimenting on and lying to some of its users, says “That’s how websites work”

Everyone got a little upset when Facebook revealed they had performed experiments on their news feeds, and now OK Cupid is saying they’ve done similar stuff, and even took their social experiments farther.

“We Experimented on Human Beings!” is the title of Christian Rudder’s blog post on OK Cupid’s OK Trends blog. He starts off by explaining that no one on the internet really knows what they’re doing because the concept of websites is still fairly new and evolving. “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,” he explains. “Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.”

Some of the experiments OK Cupid had tried out has involved taking the text of their profile completely out for viewers of some profiles so they could sort out exactly how important a person’s description of themselves is versus just the pictures. From this experiment, and a very public one where they took out all the photos for a day in an attempt to launch a blind dating app, they learned that the photos are everything for internet dating and the text means very little. “Essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you,” he says.

At one point they tried suggesting people who were supposed to be great for each other, based on their previous analytics, that they were horrible for each other to see what happened. The end result that people who were told they were a bad match even if they were supposed to be a good one suffered. The best results are when they are both told they are a good match, and they actually are (based on OK’s algorithms, of course.)