

Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message - smokinn
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/14/online-dating-advice-exactly-what-to-say-in-a-first-message/

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jadence
Given that they measure "success" by response rate I'm not sure I put a whole
lot of faith in the below quoted analyses. Perhaps the low "success" rate is
because people reply w/ an outside service that OkCupid can't track?

"#4 – Don’t try to take it outside. Obviously, all successful OkCupid
relationships outgrow our in-site messaging feature. But an offer to chat or
of an email address right off the bat is a sure turn off. One of the things
online dating has going for it is its relative anonymity, and if you start
chipping away at that too early, you’ll scare the other person off."

~~~
dusklight
given that okcupid doesn't charge for their services, it seems unlikely that a
majority users are switching to out-of-site communications right away. There
are no real incentives to do so.

~~~
TimothyFitz
Switching to out-of-site has two big benefits: 1\. OkCupid's chat system is
horrible, and results in lots of missed messages. 2\. An IM handle gives an
easy way to ping people later, the other person is subscribing to be IM'd by
you in the future.

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noodle
"how's it going. in your profile, you mention zombie metal bands. they're
pretty awesome."

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rimantas
atheist zombies

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roundsquare
atheist vegetarian zombies??

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roundsquare
Just curious... why was I down voted on this? If its something that makes
sense I'll try to avoid it next time.

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mixmax
Probably because the whole thread smells a bit too much like reddit with all
the puns that don't add anything besides humor to the conversation.

It's a fine line.

~~~
noodle
i'd make the argument that the article submission itself is a bit too much
like reddit, hence the reddit-like response from myself and others. i couldn't
really think of anything very HN topical to say.

its an interesting post, for sure, but not what i'd consider standard HN fare.

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Goladus
This is really only marginally useful information. Interesting, but not as
practical as it seems.

The writers' profile does not seem to have been taken into consideration.
Rarely does anyone respond without first checking out the profile of the
person who just sent the message. Is saying "hi" really a problem, or is it
more that people who typically say "hi" also have a boring profile?

Also, getting a single response doesn't mean much. You might say "sorry" and a
woman might respond "that's ok" but when you try to continue the conversation
it'll go nowhere. Real life dating advice doesn't discourage saying sorry
because you'll get ignored, it's discouraged because it makes you boring and
lower status. If you can do it without falling into that trap, it works in
real life. (Accidentally bump into her shopping cart and say "sorry" and then
smile and change the subject)

My okc stats are: 26 attempts to initiate contact, 9 responses. 1 live meeting
and 2 open threads(1 fresh, 1 getting stale)). I don't have numbers for people
who tried to iniate with me, except that I've met at least 3 others.

So that means while I get a 35% response rate there's only an 11% meet rate
after that (though it may be 22% soon). So 4% total. While getting a little
feedback feels good and can be useful, a few polite responses is not generally
what a user's goal is. How many messages result in meetings, that's what I
want to know.

~~~
roundsquare
Not just that, but are people who start with "How's it going" generally
writing better? There are a number of ways this data can be misleading... many
of which fall under "correlation vs causation."

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dkarl
Some girls get a hundred emails a week from guys looking for hookups. How are
the numbers affected by those high-volume shameless creeps who spam every girl
who looks easy to them? I suspect that physical compliments are a bad idea,
but these numbers don't help confirm that. Saying a girl is "pretty" could
actually help, yet score low in this analysis because it's a creep marker.
There's no attempt at persuasive analysis here, just like in the other recent
post that was featured on HN. Or did I miss the part where they explained that
they targeted a certain subset of messages for analysis?

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vaksel
oh yeah the girls get spammed like crazy. They get like 500 emails a week.
Hell a chick I know didn't even provide a picture and STILL got over 100
emails the first week.

~~~
smokinn
She was probably featured in the "new users near you" email okcupid sends out.
I imagine it trickled off after that though.

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BRadmin
part I is here:

[http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/03/how-to-get-
peop...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/03/how-to-get-people-to-
reply-to-your-messages-in-online-dating-part-i/)

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hughprime
Fascinating data. The reply rate for messages containing "how's it going?" is
almost twice that of messages containing "hi". In fact, "how's it going?" is
the only string mentioned (apart from "Zeus") that actually pushes the reply
rate up above 50%.

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tlrobinson
I wonder how well "How's it going Zeus?" would work.

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jjs
Probably _too_ well.

That guy's married, and his wife's the jealous type!

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felideon
I wonder if "god" faired so poorly because it was in lowercase, as it fails
the first advice: "Be literate." Christians are careful to use it as a proper
noun, God. So if the word _christian_ faired well, and _god_ did not, it seems
like it's a turn off because you're probably not really a Christian as opposed
to the fact you mentioned _God_.

~~~
roundsquare
I wonder how well mentioning religion to a person who puts religion on their
profile vs mentioning to someone who doesn't compares. They say "Christin"
doesn't help as much as atheist, but I would bet that people who put
"Christian" in their profile respond more...

~~~
khafra
On their first post on this subject, I asked if they were going to do some
response modelling based not only on the message, but on profile features like
spirituality, math ability, desire for love, etc.

No reply, unfortunately.

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andreyf
_No reply, unfortunately._

There's a joke here somewhere...

~~~
roundsquare
Maybe khafra should have put "zombie" in the first post?

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hughprime
The main problem, I think, was opening with "hi ur pretty"

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chaosmachine
Wow, atheist +42%, vegetarian +41%! I'm set :D

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swolchok
It's not +42%/+41%; it's 42%/41% average reply rate, whereas the overall
average is 32%.

~~~
chaosmachine
Ah, you're right. Unusual graph format, would be helpful if they labeled the
line.

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jules
This data can be misleading. Girls probably get way more messasges and guys
send more messages. The reply rate for messages sent by a man is probably much
lower than for messages sent by a woman.

A man in more likely to call a woman "pretty" than the other way around. Thus
the reply rate for "You're pretty" is low (30%, the average rate is 32%). But
the reply rate for man-to-woman messages is 27%. So saying "you're pretty"
probably _helps_.

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eru
"Scientifically, this is because it’s a little evil sounding."

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physcab
I know they took precautions on protecting user privacy, but there is
something a little bit unnerving about analyzing personal messages without
written consent.

~~~
Herring
You put your data on their server. Life is generally much clearer if you
expect people to act according to their interests.

~~~
physcab
I don't mean to suggest that users don't. I'm just saying its a bit unnerving.

As a data scientist, one needs to constantly ask themselves ethical questions
concerning that data they are working on. Just because it exists, doesn't mean
you should munge on it. I know its quite the temptation, because it's what I
currently do!

I prefer to create an outlet where users are willingly giving up that
information to be analyzed. They can still act according to their interests,
but at least they know what will become of their information.

~~~
kevinpet
That would turn out just like internet polls showing Ron Paul winning in a
landslide and security blog polls showing most people memorize a unique 14
character alpha-numeric password for every site they visit.

This is the right way to anonymize the data -- publish only aggregate data,
rather than anything which can be analyzed individually. If you don't expect
everything you do to be anlayzed, you need to stay off the internet.

The answer to privacy issues is user education. Asking companies to behave
nicely will lead to users being extremely vulnerable to bad actors.

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bbsabelli
Interesting. And predicatable?

I suspect that incorporating the second date conversion rates would skew this
data significantly since vegetarian atheists are rarely alike.

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biohacker42
Can someone explain to me why this is still not dead, while the link to _50
Lectures on Brain Anatomy and Development, Neuroscience, and Psychology_ is
dead?

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silverlake
I just concocted a message on okcupid with almost all these phrases and I got
a reply in 30 minutes. It works.

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dgreensp
Interesting data, but lots of fallacies in the analysis. Correlation/causation
is just a start.

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flashingpumpkin
funny. was just searching for this article a couple of hours ago but couldn't
find it, and now it's popping up on the frontpage again.

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xiaoma
HN is the last place I expected to see online dating tips.

~~~
jrockway
And yet, it's the first place were I expect to see "HN is the last place I
expected to see..." posts.

~~~
xiaoma
Think of those posts as an immune response. Without it, the content of the
articles and quality of the comments quickly matches that of Digg.com. Without
enough of it, you get Reddit.

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clistctrl
I met my current girlfriend on OKC (dating for a bit over a year), its a great
site :)

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KonaB
Someone had to say this: how is this (even remotely) HN material? Let me
guess: it's about "hacking" dating. Yeah, right. And rape is about hacking
sex?

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jonknee
Data analysis and trending is topical to this audience. There are a lot of
startups that could use techniques like this to increase return visits--
instruct your users how to be more successful.

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whimsy
It also analyzes what sort of language people tend to be receptive to (at
least on dating sites... possibly elsewhere, too).

This could be useful if you're trying to create a rapport with users on your
own website (albeit through one way communication).

~~~
lucumo
Yeah, I wonder how "How's it going?" or "Yo" fare against a simple "Hi" in
customer relations. Maybe there's something to be said for making that less
formal.

