I complained about their pushing their heteronormativity on me. Whenever I say that I'm looking for both girls and guys, they show me girls at a, like, 10:1 ratio to guys, my quiver matches are all girls, girls everywhere.
I even told them that I understood there are many more straight girls than gay guys, but that their website does not need to match reality in this regard, it is software. It doesn't feel good to say that I want both and then only get one, the straight option, shoved at me constantly. I thought a slider to control the proportion of genders presented would be good or, if that be too hard, at least adjusting it so it's closer to 50/50 (even if most bisexuals preferences are not exactly that). We'll see if/how they respond.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
As a stopgap solution, is it possible to temporarily change your sexuality listed on the site so that it only returns males?
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton
That puts an interesting perspective on the last item here:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/
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Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Oh, it is, but that's not what I want.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
And DIM, I wonder if my complaint is actually a cause of (some) of that last item. If I list myself as bi and only see women shown to might, I might message only women. If, like Spock suggests, I have to change my settings to only see guys, well, women are out of luck.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
(Oh, goody, I get to exercise my statistics-geek muscles.)
It's hard to evaluate this phenomenon while the matching algorithm remains secret. But I would expect that the gender ratio you're seeing in the pool presented to you reflects not any built-in biases towards one gender or the other, but the fact that the people who match you best, according to the algorithm, tend to be female. This is probably due to base rates, as you suggested, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If, say, the algorithm computes your fitness score for each eligible person on OKCupid, and these scores are normally distributed within various subgroups of the population, and these fitness scores are not generally much higher in men than women, than of the (say) 100 fittest people, most will be women. Showing you a pool with more men in it would mean showing you lower-ranking people, which would be, by definition, less optimal. (The issue here is similar to how in statistics more generally, biased estimators are often used because they're better than the best available unbiased estimators, the improvement more than making up for the bias according to the loss function under consideration.)
If you care about gender equality apart from OKCupid's idea of fitness, than you're asking for something different than what OKCupid is trying to provide, which is a list of the best possible matches. I would expect that the best way for OKCupid to provide such a compromise would be with distinct pools of men and women, which you could switch between at will. Randomly intermingling those pools in a proportion you choose, as you seem to be suggesting, seems a bit odd.
Perhaps the most sophisticated approach to this problem would be to statistically fit sets of people to you rather than individuals. This would require a great deal of thought and testing and the benefits are ambiguous, since, after all, you're only looking for that special someone, not that special foursome. It only makes sense from the perspective that OKCupid is supposed to have you date people from which you are expected to learn the most about your dating preferences, rather than just the people you are most likely to marry.
But when's the last time you dated a woman, anyway? I can't remember you mentioning a girlfriend.
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Jordan, quoting Genesis 2:18: "It is not good for man to be alone."
Fred: "in genesis noah also put two of every animal on a boat when he was 600."
OKCupid seems to be a pretty open-minded site and I doubt they're trying to push heteronormativity on you. Do you genuinely think that or do you just use it as an exaggerated way of saying, "I want to see my results have more guys in them".
As a side note, Jess was my top match on OKCupid. It's the reason I met and married her (also in her profile picture she looked like she had great boobs).
Well, yes and no, Alex. I don't think they are actively pushing it. But such things can happen without it being actively pursued.
In terms of what Kodi said, the list of matches is only one feature of OKCupid, and the one I have the least problem with. If I ask OKC to list all my matches in order from greatest to least, I expect there to be more women, and I am fine with that.
But OKCupid also does other things. They randomly put 12 people with match percentages >65% on your home page every time you load up. Every week they choose three random people from that same range as your Quiver matches. It's not just the three highest people. They have a quickmatch function where you rapidly look through condensed profiles randomly.
It's these functions that give me the issue, and the ones that can be more easily changed by software. When there are 12 random people on my homepage, but on average only 1 is male, or when I get 3 Quiver matches a week, and they are all female, that makes me feel that those relationships are more valid and stressed, even though I know that is an unconscious thing on their part. (But after all, unconsciousness of it is part of what heteronormativity is all about, which is why I chose that word.)
ETA: And the last time I dated a woman was quite some time ago: 2005. But, I mean, I've only had 3 relationships since then.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I feel like that would be really easily fixed by adding a slider or something.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
That was exactly my thought.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
The homepage and Quiver matches sound pretty arbitrary by design. If the OKCupid people think it makes sense to present randomly selected people who are merely above some threshold, then it does seem kind of odd that no gender slider is available, or, for that matter, buttons for things like "Only Jews today, please". I guess the best way to think of it is that the homepage and Quiver matches are for the lazy. Power users filter the ranked matches themselves. The site has an API, right? Or at least some way of getting a machine-readable list of top matches? If not, that, to my mind, is the most needed missing feature. You might then try looking for a geekier dating site. :)
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Jordan, quoting Genesis 2:18: "It is not good for man to be alone."
Fred: "in genesis noah also put two of every animal on a boat when he was 600."
Well, the thing about a website is that things don't really happen unconsciously. You program something a certain way, and then that's how it happens. Weighting girls over guys on purpose would have to be conscious.
Perhaps there's just some common thread among girls, or some question you answered, that decreased guy match levels.
Also you'd just assume there are more straight/bisexual girls on the site than gay/bisexual guys.
I don't think it would have to be conscious. I think the conscious decision would have to be something like "ignore gender when they want both," but that decision had certain consequences.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
The other thing in here is that my vague recollection of this SA thread by an OKCupid administrator:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3404309
is that they've been getting complaints form the beginning that the current trinary (women/men/both) fails to address more subtle distinctions, but that these requests have been made in the academy cant of queer theory ("there is no tick-box for genderqueer," "heternormativity") rather than in practical terms ("I would like to see more dudes"). As a result, to reach consensus within the organization, people need to educated and won over, and it becomes a political thing with marketing involved, and it's all a mess, when instead you could just present the code monkeys with an unfulfilled use case:
Case: Bi male user wants to see dudes
Solution: Query user for more pleasing dude ratio
That said, my experience could be reflecting SA more than OKC feedback. Also the events depicted above are fanciful.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I guess I'm just really mad at the academy for being obtuse and lashing out at it in the form of internet dating use cases.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir