
Your looks and your inbox - thirdusername
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/
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patio11
I have loved all of the okcupid linkbait.

Much of it conforms to the old wives tales or intuitions of people, but "The
women who are subjectively rated the most attractive get disproportionately
less attention from men. No, really, we're not making it up, we can
demonstrate this with SQL" is a whole lot more fascinating than the equivalent
finding justified by, ahem, wild speculation. (Or its close cousin, "We
surveyed 18 men and 22 women who happened to be enrolled in psych 101 at this
campus! Sweet, sweet empiricism!")

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bdr
OkCupid isn't a representative sample, either. Even more, you have to take
into account the site mechanics: a mutual 4 or 5 star rating results in a
"match event", but any other combination doesn't. So rating someone 1-3 is
equivalent ("I don't want to talk to them") as is 4-5, and men and women's
responses to this mechanic may influence their ratings in differing ways.

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brandnewlow
This is the case. Rating someone a 4 or 5 generates an e-mail to that person.
So the only reason you rate someone a 4 or 5 is if you want them to come check
you out.

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ericd
Yep, which might also explain why the women are apparently so harsh on their
ratings compared to men - they already get more messages than the guys, and
don't want to be contacted even more.

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Tichy
A dating site for geeks would have to include automatic A/B Testing for
profile pictures.

Can't wait for their analysis of what makes a photo attractive. Especially as
for men, men don't seem to have a good grasp as to what would appeal to women.

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netcan
That sounds kind of evil. It would be a great way of getting advice for
dressing, hair, etc.

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Tichy
Come to think of it, HotOrNot probably already provides that.

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hazzen
An old coworker of mine at an internship did exactly this to find the most
attractive profile picture for a dating site. He had a sample size of maybe 10
photos and used HotOrNot to do a simple ranking of them. The top rated ones
were used as his profile picture on social networking sites.

Unfortunately, he left out one part of the experiment - he did not have the
"ugly" photos as his profile picture, measure response rates, and then try it
again with a "hot" photo.

I am currently running an experiment with my OkCupid profile along similar
metrics - I am varying my profile picture, as well as certain parts of my
profile, and testing profile views, response rates, and 4-5 star ratings. This
is mostly out of frustration with the pitiful view/response rates I was having
originally, but if the data is interesting I might do a write-up.

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bd
"Totally decent-looking" dudes are actually co-founders of OkCupid :)

<http://www.okcupid.com/about-us>

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abossy
_As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as
worse-looking than medium. Very harsh._

The female rating is particular interesting. Are only ugly men on OKCupid
(myself included)? Or do men look worse in pictures than women? After all,
remove the makeup, carefully selected attire, and fancy hair, and you have
your average male. Even photogenic men don't look as good as their photogenic
counterparts, in my opinion.

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vaksel
most guys shoot from the hip when it comes to pictures, women prep the crap
out of it.

Hell I know a girl who used photoshop to tweak a photo she used as a profile
picture on facebook

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netcan
If you're serious about online dating you should probably be getting
professional profile photos.

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psyklic
I disagree. I've done quite a bit of online dating, and professional photos
(a) don't show your fun side, and (b) often look quite different than how you
look on an average day. What this results in is me distrusting them -- before
I meet anyone, I need to see a candid shot of them in natural lighting.

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Tichy
I think there would have to be a special kind of service: a photographer who
can take photos that look as if they were casual, but aren't. Even for Twitter
and other social networks casual is probably better, but few photographers (if
any) understand that so far.

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gaius
Any photojournalist worth his or her salt could pull that off. Might be a nice
little side-income.

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rbritton
I am a photographer, and I've had inquiries for this. No one is willing to pay
more than a few dollars, which doesn't even offset the time required or the
depreciation of the equipment.

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warfangle
As a photographer, what is your opinion on the "going rate" or similar for a
spread of five natural looking photos, compared to what you get offered ("just
a few bucks")?

Curious if it's similar to what happens when people in "typical" social
circles find out I'm a freelance web developer, offering as little as $100 for
what could easily (after graphic design and so forth) be two weeks of work.

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mattmaroon
Not really surprised about the female curve. They say attraction for males is
85% physical and 15% personality, and for women the reverse. Not sure on the
accuracy of those numbers, but the general principle is probably true. And
since you get no inkling of personality from a picture, it isn't shocking.

What I'd really like to see is if they listed the guys to one group of women
as just photos, then to another given select bits of data, what would happen
then. I suspect you'd see strong correlations, especially if income were
there.

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jacobolus
> _you get no inkling of personality from a picture_

Really can't agree with this. How people present themselves in self-chosen
photos tells quite a bit about personality.

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joezydeco
Man, ain't that the truth. My favorites are the following categories:

\- The only good photos I have of myself are with friends in bars.

\- My cat/dog has to be in the photo. I love my cat/dog more than I'll love
you.

\- The only time I look good is with my ex, so I'll crop his side of the
picture out. You won't notice, will you?

\- 20 self-photos of me in the bathroom mirror. Don't mind the mess in the
background.

\- I love to travel! Can you see that speck at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower?
That's me!

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joezydeco
Thought of a few more:

\- I was a bridesmaid! Try and find me in this group of 8 well-dressed women!
This says nothing about my craving to be married at all!

\- I could only get my coworkers to shoot this photo of me at the office. Can
you see I hate my job?

\- Here's some cleavage to distract you.

\- This is me & my dad. I'm not a daddy's girl at all, but get ready for the
interrogation when you pick me up.

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mynameishere
I question the numbers. (Well, the female ones anyway.) I had a plentyoffish
account a few years ago, and the image ratings averaged around 3.5 out of 10
for both men and women. I know that the hotornot guys had the same problem,
and admitted to fudging everything upwards.

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jjs

        fudged_hotness = 10.0 * ((hotness / 10.0) ** (1 / gamma))
    

Then just crank up the gamma correction to 3.0, and your 3.5 out of ten is now
a reasonably-attractive 7.0472987320648917 :)

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ejames
Favorite quote from the other posts on the blog: "This is what 'dying alone'
looks like as a png." Lots of fun statistics, and some humor to boot.

~~~
jrockway
Not as hilarious when all the attractive girls ignore your messages because
they are flooded with spam, however...

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jimboyoungblood
If they're ignoring you, doesn't that mean your messages are spam too?

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jrockway
Sure, if they log into the site to read it. Most people got tired of bothering
long ago, however.

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noodle
this sounds like a problem to solve. i'd like to see a dating site that
doesn't involve browsing profiles like a catalog, and encourages people to
respond to messages a bit more.

kills two birds with one stone, if you have it based on a smarter matching
algorithm that requires you to give private feedback on people you interact
with, to help hone your personal recommendations. also makes fake profiles and
spamming a much tougher prospect, and would probably give it an overall safer
feel.

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araneae
tl:dr Women don't have unrealistic expectations, they're just saying that the
average man is ugly.

I disagree with their interpretation that the fact that women rate men as low
attractiveness means they "have unrealistic standards for the 'average' member
of the opposite sex."

Remember, they didn't ask "do you think this guy is above or below the average
attractiveness." They asked "is this guy attractive." There's an implicit
assumption that "neither attractive or unattractive" is equivalent to "average
attractiveness of men."

That assumption is wrong. Men are ugly. So _of course_ most men will be rated
as more unattractive on average than women.

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diN0bot
interesting. women rate men much more harshly on looks, yet a woman's
attractiveness is much more important for whether they receive messages.

sounds like attractiveness is rated poorly for women partly because it doesn't
speak to women.

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physcab
Ok, I'm going to go out and say it: There is an absurd amount of pressure on
women in this society to be perfect.

Now, I'm not going to refute the fact that I wouldn't message the most-
attractive women as well. But if the knee-jerk reaction of a woman is to
reject the message from the most-attractive men or to harshly rate decently
looking guys, there are outside factors affecting the female perspective of
appearance, especially if the same isn't true for men.

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endtime
Did you read the whole article? Men's attractiveness ratings of women are
healthily distributed, almost unbelievably so. And women rated about 8.3/10
(rather than perfect 10/10) got the most messages.

~~~
physcab
I did, but I'm not sure what in your comment disproves the self-esteem issue.
My point is not what men think of women (how they rate them), but what women
_do_ when presented with the options I mentioned (attractive guys messaging
them).

If an attractive guy messages me, I would be thinking as a woman "Wow, this is
validating" instead of "No, he must have made a mistake". If it's the latter,
you have to wonder what initially gave her the idea that he made a mistake?
Was it something deeply engrained?

Maybe I didn't read the article correctly, but please don't assume I didn't
read the whole thing. Starting off your comment like that is not very
welcoming and doesn't add any value to the conversation.

~~~
endtime
You didn't talk about self-esteem. What you said was this:

>There is an absurd amount of pressure on women in this society to be perfect.

I think the data show precisely the opposite - that women aren't under
pressure, at least from men, to be perfect. That was the point of my comment.

Actually, in my experience, women are many times more guilty of the things
they typically accuse men of than men are (e.g. objectifying the other sex,
being judgmental about looks, etc.). Men are under at least as much pressure
as women in these regards.

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alttab
I met my girlfriend on ok Cupid over a year ago within a week of signing up.
The site was a lot less spammy then, and most would say we just got dumb
lucky.

I've done other sites and while pictures matter, if you're not a 4 or 5 not
coming across boring or desperate will _make_ you a 4 or 5 in comparison.

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sganesh
As far as I know, women date by "how you make them feel?" not how a guy looks
:)

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albertcardona
okcupid is doing science. I wonder what academic will pick up this data and
extract evolutionary biology conclusions from it.

~~~
lionhearted
I don't know why you're being voted down - it seems to me like they are doing
science, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a reference to Okcupid in a
university study or a pop science book.

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ovi256
If they release their dataset, it'll spark a lot of research. Datamining
researchers today use a lot of 'hot' datasets, from Netflix to ePinions, which
are sometimes old, but they are available. In some research domains, it is not
uncommon for data sets to have huge importance, including getting you tenure
and being guaranteed resources to exploit the dataset you gathered.

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albertcardona
In this sense I meant it: that they are collecting valuable data. That their
own analysis is flawed by their own bias is evident to me, but does not
diminish the value of their data.

