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OKCupid Experiments on Users Too
With recent news that Facebook altered users' feeds as part of a psychology experiment, OKCupid has jumped in and noted that they too have altered their algorithms and experimented with their users (some unintentional) and "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." Findings include that removing pictures from profiles resulted in deeper conversations, but as soon as the pictures returned appearance took over; personality ratings are highly correlated with appearance ratings (profiles with attractive pictures and no other information still scored as having a great personality); and that suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Isn't that what A/B testing is all about?
Program Intellivision!
"No. It's what some unethical douche bags do."
There are ethical douche-bags?
The people who run OKC were a bunch of statistics nerds. It runs (ran, anyway) on a custom web server that performs a lot of real time analysis. Their blog is chock full of incredibly detailed information about their users. This shouldn't be news to anyone who has even the slightest clue as to how OKCupid actually works.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.
Anyone who has ever:
a) taken any metrics about there site
a) altered their website in any way
b) measured whether or not it made any difference
Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...
Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.
Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.
Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".
The only change is the addition of the number 7.
The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.
The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.
Findings include that ... suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
All this means is that OKC's match algorithms suck: there's only a weak correlation between match scores and real-world compatibility (like with every other dating site).
Yes, they're divorce attorneys.
FB's experiment was to see if they could alter the mood of their user. OKC tried to see if they could get more conversations going. Intent matters. OKC's is fairly harmless. FB's experiment could have a ripple effect and cause negative consequences.
"People are shallow and place too much value on appearances," said the fat, ugly nerd. "They should be like me, and value what's in peoples' souls. For instance, I can tell Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson are perfect for me, because they have such beautiful souls."
The fact is that the experiment they Facebook conducted was mild to what other corporations do every day under the umbrella of "marketing".
They use control groups and try every trick they can to manipulate your mood, feelings, impressions of their products. They carefully script interactions to take advantage of your feelings and social norms. Also take the recent example in the past few weeks of the scripts that Verizon's 'account retention' departments use to try and wedge people into keeping their account longer. Those weren't just thrown together, those were made with careful research and years of experiments on customers and focus groups.
The only difference with what Facebook did and the rest do is that they shared their results with everyone. Was Facebook Unethical manipulating people the way they did? I think so, and I'm only less interested in the service after that scandal, but what they got them in trouble was sharing it with the rest of the world in a way that might have also done some honest good. Now they will learn from their mistakes, keep it to themselves, and use that research purely to manipulate people for higher profit and no one will say a thing.
That probably depends upon whether you consider the terms of use of the online service, grocery store loyalty card, casino player's card, etc to be transparent. Those terms of use that no one reads.
There is also consent by action. The casino does A/B testing by offering some a $40 steak dinner plus $40 in chips while it offers others $80 in chips. You clicked on the advertisement/offer, or you opened the envelope that arrived in your postal mail, etc.
Similarly the coupons a grocery store offers you are often part of an experiment. Hell, changing the items on the isle end caps are sometimes part of an experiment.
My marketing processor thought that grocery store loyalty cards were the greatest invention ever in the history of marketing. The data collected and opportunity for experiments enormous.
It's obvious you do not have a clue about what real "censorship" is. So a website rejects posts that do not meet their basic and usually very low standards you agree to when posting there, BFD. On the other hand under real censorship the site would not even exist in the first place and if you tried to start one in some countries you would have state security knocking on your door.
or perhaps all people are shallow.
Try this the next time you want to try an online dating site: Create two profiles, a "real" one and a fake perfect match to your real profile and see how long it takes for the site to claim that your fake perfect match has attempted to contact you and for only $4.95 you can sign on to the paid service and reply.
"A walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet".
- Deteriorata
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Do you think the donation information was leaked accidentally? If you do, you probably think that the IRS also accidentally lost months worth of email that may have contained evidence pertaining to that agency's targeting of conservative groups during an election season. It won't be state security knocking on your door, but the feds are still going to arrange for someone to come after you.
Facebook's experiments bother me more than OKCupid's. They're deliberately manipulating which news stories their readers see in order to affect their mood, and seeing how that affects the readers' behavior. That seems mean and dishonest. (Of course, I didn't know Facebook had news, so I'm not in their target market anyway, but it still seems mean.)
OKCupid's a dating site, which means that all their "compatibility" scores are pretty much guesswork anyway, assisted by a lot of measurement, so an occasional suggestion of "maybe you two should see if you want to date" to people they normally wouldn't match up isn't that much perturbation of their approach anyway, and "whoops, pictures are broken, why don't you try talking first instead of just looking at pictures" is just fine, and both of them give them a bit of data outside the ranges they'd normally be collecting from - perhaps there are people that would get along well who they haven't been matching up. (I'm not in their market either, fortunately.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>lying about compatibility on a dating site.
Here's the gist of it, they already were lying about compatibility, or at least what you think of as compatibility. Different cultures have distinctly different criteria for selecting mates and it evolves over time. There is no golden rule, no algorithm, no magic. They throw a bunch of different shit at the wall and see what sticks. Why they look so good at finding matches is not actually finding matches but weeding the unmatchable out. Take them out, and most other people can date a pretty wide range of other people with just a few points of similarity.
The fact you don't think that their matching changes over time boggles my mind. Culture evolves and changes, technology evolves and changes, communication evolves and changes, to think some kind of static algorithm could possibly work at matching people under those influence is insanity.