OkCupid,2.8M profiles out of 3.2M tested, open to all by default

by yakamok • 10 years ago

20 21 10 years ago

serge2k• 10 years ago

My personal opinion is that profiles should be set as private by default as people don't often investigate the options they have, even i didnt realise my profile could be viewed publicly by the rest of the world.

It's a dating site.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

yes it is, but it should be private when your logged out, its public to those who dont have an account on okcupid

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

To clarify, the default state is that the profile is available to logged-out users.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

Correct

parenthephobia• 10 years ago

Is that worse than it being available to logged-in users?

Sure, you can't control what randoms on the Internet might look at your public profile, but you can't control who signs up for OKC accounts and looks at your private one, either.

alex_doom• 10 years ago

It always seems to be on any site where you have to create a profile, by default it'll be exposed to google.

I really wish there was a checkbox at the end of a registration form that said something like "Show Publicly". I'd wager most people would leave it unchecked.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

yeah it appears people including my self don't notice

_asummers• 10 years ago

Totally not important to the content of the article, but to the author: your date line is broken. It's saying it was published on 2016-0-0, currently.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

cheers fixing it now

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

By sheer coincidence a research dataset containing OKCupid data was released today: https://osf.io/p9ixw/

I looked through it and it's very robust. I should have a few data visualizations up using it soon.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

thats fantastic, i will have to have a look, i imagine its a bit more organised than my quick scrape

yakamok10• 10 years ago

give me an email i would love to see some more visualizations, what do you use?

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

I use R and ggplot2 for my visualizations (coincidentally those are also the tools used for the linked paper). Most of my visualizations are on my blog. (check HN profile)

bcherny• 10 years ago

Are you saying 42% of profiles are empty? That would seem to indicate that OkCupid is really puffing up their MAU numbers.

yakamok10• 10 years ago

yeah i noticed it a lot while checking profiles that there was just nothing written up at all. never really thought about it being a fake profile.

IndianAstronaut• 10 years ago

Not Okcupid, but another dating site I went to had one profile message me. In her hobbies list it said "I really enjoy: NULL"

cshimmin• 10 years ago

To the author: scientific notation (with only 2-3 digits of precision) would make most of this much more readable. Also avg and std deviation are usually more informative than avg + max. Or better yet just make a histogram (probably with log axes). Cool article!

OkCupid,2.8M profiles out of 3.2M tested, open to all by default

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