
By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier - rbanffy
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16812152/okcupid-usernames-controversy-anonymity-privacy-dating-online
======
wwweston
If you think _this_ is big, by the way, make sure you take a look at their
post from December 11th:

[https://theblog.okcupid.com/why-okcupid-is-changing-how-
you-...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-
message-f14d492e7853)

They've completely obliterated the way messaging works. You will never see a
message from someone unless you're either looking at their profile or you've
"liked" them.

It's an interesting model. But it's also essentially driving interaction
through the matching bottleneck, which is at odds with the substance-over-
selfie slogan, since it turns incentives towards profile enhancement rather
than investment in messaging. And it's also the kind of change you can't just
blog-post explain away and expect to keep your existing users, just like the
name change. It would be better suited for a new product than an existing one.

Then again, maybe dating sites work best with massive turnover in userbase
anyway. And even if not, that doesn't mean this isn't some of the sharpest
possible product management out there. At least in the sense of responding to
the incentives for people who want to develop their product careers, not
necessarily in terms of actually improving the product.

~~~
colmvp
> They've completely obliterated the way messaging works. You will never see a
> message from someone unless you're either looking at their profile or you've
> "liked" them.

I've read people on /r/okcupid say it's a bad thing, but quite honestly I
consider that a good thing.

There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and basically
get very few if any replies. One of my best friends is like myself, a person
of colour, and his response rates are putrid despite putting good efforts in
writing interesting opening messages that relate to the persons profile. He
and I probably interacted with as many profiles in a two year period, except
he had to put way more effort into his endeavors just to get marginal gains in
the number of actual women he got minimum first dates from.

When I use apps that have a model where you can't unlock messaging unless you
have mutual interest, it still results in low response rates but the amount of
investment is far, far lower than when I used the traditional model of having
to initiate with messages and hope to God that they're okay with dating an
Asian dude. The newer model actually encouraged me to use the app because I
only had to spend a minute or two a day just to navigate through a select
number of profiles.

Going into online dating, I used to believe in the whole substance over selfie
idea, that putting your best foot forward and having a good personality could
make up for some differences, but after analyzing my stats of online dating
over the last two years and seeing the disparity in terms of reply rates by
ethnicity([https://i.imgur.com/UTfGthn.png](https://i.imgur.com/UTfGthn.png)),
I'm particularly skeptical of the idea that putting efforts in messaging and
profile writeups really make that much of a difference.

~~~
vertex-four
> There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and
> basically get very few if any replies.

As a really quick point, dating sites are quite explicitly not built for men.
They acquire men at a far higher rate than women, and men ~tend~ to be the
ones approaching women, and so pretty much every feature should (from an
objective point of view) be designed to _filter out_ men that women aren't
interested in, so women receive fewer attempts at interaction from them.

The bias against PoC on dating sites is a serious problem, though. And tbh,
the whole mess that is the online dating experience in general is a cultural
one that dating sites aren't going to solve - it's a system which allows
people to much more closely follow their biases, with essentially no risk of
anything bad happening.

To be honest, as a woman, I don't know anyone of any gender who's had a good
experience with dating sites (aside from using Tinder to find sex partners).
My experience has been that I find most of my partners almost by accident
through hobby/social meetups, or in the IRC social channels where I spend a
lot of my time.

~~~
jessriedel
> > There's nothing more exhausting as a guy than to write messages and
> basically get very few if any replies.

> As a really quick point, dating sites are quite explicitly not built for
> men. They acquire men at a far higher rate than women, and men ~tend~ to be
> the ones approaching women, and so pretty much every feature should (from an
> objective point of view) be designed to filter out men that women aren't
> interested in, so women receive fewer attempts at interaction from them.

Your dismissal of the importance of not wasting the time of men doesn't work
if higher quality men have more of their time wasted. That is, if the men who
write detailed messages get worse results than the men who write a thousand
identical one-liners (or who swipe right on everything, etc.), then the former
type of men will leave the site and women will be left with the latter type.

More generally, I've talked to _many_ women who decline to actively seek out
good men in real life, and who explicitly justify this based on their
observations that there is a deluge of men trying to get their attention. So
they decide they'll just passively filter the seemingly-unlimited supply of
men who approach them. The key flaw is the assumption that the pool of men is
unchanged compared to an active strategy.

~~~
ahh
> if higher quality men have more of their time wasted... if the men who write
> detailed messages get worse results than the men who write a thousand
> identical one-liners (or who swipe right on everything, etc.), then the
> former type of men will leave the site and women will be left with the
> latter type.

Yeah, that's not what makes a man "high quality" by the data and revealed
preferences online. Attractiveness does. The men any woman wants to see on a
dating site online don't have their time wasted, because they get responses to
whatever they write.

------
oxplot
I think most people who've commented on the OKC post here and on their blog,
are missing a few points:

1\. Names can be faked. I don't see any long term and practical way for OKC to
enforce real names (as FB and G+ showed in the past). So this is really a non-
issue.

2\. Photos are much more problematic because it's assumed that one cannot
search based on a photo. A 5 second Google Image search on profile pictures
from OKC however shows that a lot of people re-use photos they post on various
social sites. It takes one of those places to have your real name next to your
photo and you're identified! Google Image search is just the tip of the
iceberg. It's getting easier and faster every day to compile database of
photos and run a AI algo on it to recognize faces.

Any company who boasts protecting privacy of its users ought to find a way to
protect against facial recognition.

~~~
Sylos
Just because names can be faked, doesn't mean that everyone who should be
doing it (which is everyone), will be doing it.

Some might misinterpret the sign-up process, thinking the name will only be
used in special situations, others might think that they're thought of as
weirdo, if they don't use their real name, when everyone else supposedly is.

And the last group simply does not understand, or does not think of the
consequences of entering their real name. It's simply irresponsible to leave
privacy and security entirely up to your users. Especially without any reason.

Pictures being potentially worse does not have anything to do with this being
shit as well. Many potential stalkers don't know reverse image search either.

------
aestetix
It seems like we go through a round of this every couple of years. First it
was Google Plus, then it was Quora, it's been Facebook for a while, and now
OKCupid has thrown themselves into the idiocy ring.

I've already written and spoken at length about how misguided, stupid, and
harmful these policies are. So has the EFF. For years. There really is no
excuse for a company to even consider adopting one of these now, assuming they
adopt policies based on evidence and reason, which seems increasingly
unlikely.

This one is particularly egregious because of all the abuse it opens people up
to, especially women. If you have a photo and a legal first name, all someone
has to do is match the photo against Facebook or flickr, match your first
name, get a last name, and the address comes along shortly after that. Because
of the nature of okcupid, I could actually see someone sending a woman a few
messages, taking it personally that she doesn't respond, looking her up,
finding her physical address, and then she shows up as a news tragedy.

If OKCupid moves forward with this, there might actually be blood on their
hands in the future.

------
verst
OkCupid user since 2006 here (with multi year periods of inactive account).

The OkCupid website hardly changed since 2006. The only big changes I've seen
is making their messaging someone dependent on first liking / starring them.
Now this name change...

I'm surprised by the sudden change -- I was prompted when I opened the app. I
did change my profile name to my real first name. I'm already easily
identifiable on the internet (for example through an image reverse search),
but my first name and city usually suffice to find me on your favorite search
engine. While this puts me at risk (which I can personally manage), it does
make others more comfortable. In fact, I want people who are motivated to be
able to verify that I am a real person.

That being said I'm glad that OkCupid (now; perhaps a policy update) is not
forcing real names to be used. It would be better if they altered their prompt
and asked for an online nickname that is not a username and need not be
unique.

I doubt OkCupid will let users search by real name. The username still seems
to be an internal identifier for the time being. The profile URLs are of the
form
[https://www.okcupid.com/profile/<username>](https://www.okcupid.com/profile/<username>)

If you knew my username you could still directly jump to my profile despite my
real name update.

Just for fun -- compared to the OkCupid population I'm apparently:

* More Organized * More Polite * More Scientific * More Nerdy * More Mathematical * Less Spiritual * More Confident * More Athletic * More Trusting * Less Suave * More Indie * Less Friendly

There is definitely some bias since OkCupid users mostly come from a US
culture background I believe. I come from a certain European country that
would be well described by the above ;)

~~~
ashleyn
A "real name" policy (which is really just a "legal name" policy) would drive
away trans users, which is arguably a major portion of their userbase.

I do not use Facebook because it is impossible for me to change my legal name
due to restrictions of my birth state. What the government insists on calling
me is a legal name, it is not my "real name". This is far from exclusively a
trans issue: Facebook even harassed Salman Rushdie over it, because that's
only his pen name.

~~~
DanBC
> Facebook even harassed Salman Rushdie over it, because that's only his pen
> name.

That's a big misunderstanding from Facebook. In the UK you don't have a legal
name. Your name is whatever you wish it to be. You can use whatever name you
like, so long as you're not doing it with the intent to defraud.

~~~
poizan42
Can you just get a passport with whatever name you want? If not then you
clearly do have a legal name.

~~~
DanBC
Yes, you can get a passport in any name. Passports might require a deed poll -
but that's just a piece of paper with a solemn declaration that you no longer
use the old name.

Salman Rushdie would be able to get a passport in either his pen name, or his
other name.

~~~
nofilter
I think that's pretty awesome. In Estonia, you can only change your first name
(and even that with that quite a few restrictions and a lot of hassle with the
government paper work), but you can only change your last name to be one of
your close relatives's last name (mom, dad, grandmothers, grandfathers).

------
mgbmtl
However they're not forcing people to use their real name?

As someone who used okcupid, it seems like a good move. A lot of people chose
very silly usernames. Okcupid would even recommend at some point to suffix
names already taken, so I would see a lot of "foo_taco".

~~~
loudandskittish
And fooasaurus

~~~
kristopolous
I'd certainly have coffee with that person.

------
iaw
Is there any real benefit to this change? It seems like a wash for men and a
serious increase to cyber-stalking for women.

~~~
officemonkey
It enhances bad behavior from men because they it helps them "hide" their user
name. Also, if you think that men are immune from cyber-stalking and
harassment, you haven't been dating on-line very much.

Frankly, it's a bad idea to supply ANY personal information to random
strangers (like on a dating website.) If you have an unusual first name, it's
almost trivial to search Facebook to find someone.

There are certain communities (such as people who are genderqueer and
transsexual) who experience targeted harassment. Asking users to expose
additional personally identifying information is a really shitty thing to do.

~~~
oxplot
> it's a bad idea to supply ANY personal information to random strangers

How about your _photos_? Those are as PII as it gets. If you're not careful
(and majority of people aren't), and upload the same photo you use for your
linkedin or twitter account, a 5 second Google Image search can easily reveal
your true identity.

In fact, I have, in the past, emailed OKC and others and asked them to put
measures in place so when a user uploads a photo, it's checked against various
sources online and if it's a match, the user would be warned that it's
potentially revealing their identity. I'm not sure if they took note of that.

~~~
gaius
The old pre-Match OKC might have, they were proper old-skool data geeks. Match
execs won't have understood what any of those words meant.

------
JoshMnem
Real name policies are terrible and misguided.

~~~
seattle_spring
Maybe in the case of a dating site, but I disagree when it comes to Facebook.
I see a lot of low quality comments, and they almost always come from people
with a fake name, a fake profile picture, or both. Anonymity seems to bring
out the worst in everyday people when it comes to discourse.

~~~
draugadrotten
> Anonymity seems to bring out the worst in everyday people when it comes to
> discourse.

While I agree that anonymity may allow for bad behaviour, it also allows for
good behaviour and focusing on the message rather than the messenger. Our
conversation here on HN is an example, where draugadrotten and seattle_spring
doesn't really reveal which one of us has two PhDs and a couple of million
dollars in the bank. Our comments are judged based on what we write, not who
we are. When it comes to sex, politics and religion, people are sometimes
harassed or killed for what they say under their real name, so anonymity is
very important. Transgenders have been mentioned as an example on OkC. And on
dating sites, relationships benefit from being judged on the content of the
message, rather than the cover photo and cv. There are many women on LinkedIn
who thinks otherwise and court men with a good job, but OkC was always a good
alternative. With a real name policy, this is no more.

~~~
CaptSpify
This is what I miss about the old internet. The one I grew up with, when
everyone was (rightly) told to keep their personal info off the internet. I
didn't have to spend much time worrying who I was talking to, and how it could
be tied back to me. Conversations felt more honest, because I could focus on
the merits of the conversation, rather than based on the "credentials" of who
was having the conversation.

~~~
seattle_spring
The "old internet" I remember is still alive and well when I play older video
games. I don't think less than 75% of the messages on their online platforms
are anything other than hateful slurs.

~~~
JoshMnem
Good behavior in communities is a result of moderation and leadership, not
pseudonyms vs. real names.

------
tzs
> Via email, a company spokesperson told The Verge that OKCupid won’t require
> legal names

If they aren't requiring using your legal name, then doesn't this just really
mean that instead of making up a handle like "bigasslectroid" I need to make
up something like "John Bigboote" instead that looks like it could be an
actual name?

~~~
rhizome
If they're just making people change their handles with a _suggestion_ they be
real names, I have to wonder if, in effect, it was all just an attention-
getting setup for the email they sent out today with a discount on paid
subscriptions.

------
anigbrowl
Not an OKC user but this seems silly and petty; I presume they've hit some
sort of ceiling in user engagement and think that this will let them break
through it.

Thing is, those silly usernames tell me something about who I'd be dating if I
were a user; there's nothing wrong with someone having a cheesy name if it
helps them find love with someone who has a similarly cheesy take.

Also, it's bizarre that a site like OK Cupid thinks words like sexy and lover
are somehow 'dirty' (according to their own blog announcement).

------
lord_jim
Say that I am building an app that leads to real world interaction,
potentially with strangers. Clearly a real name policy is not a good way to
make these interactions safer, but what would be a proper alternative? A
reputation system? Any existing apps that do a good job with this?

Right now I’ve just surfaced links to user’s social profiles so that other
users can verify if this is someone they may be able to trust

~~~
PakG1
I wonder if this is a more difficult problem because the "good" ones are taken
off the market, potentially forever. Follow the logic, does this leave
emotionally irrational people to have a larger share of the reviews than
normal? And then just like it takes only a couple of unreasonable bad Yelp
reviews to unfairly damage a restaurant, I can imagine a couple of emotionally
unhealthy people damage someone's future dating prospects by writing stuff
that has more to do with themselves than their dating partners? Maybe you can
account for this by reevaluating reputation by weighing scores from people who
receive high scores higher than scores received from those with low scores?
Gets really complicated really fast, no? Really curious how online dating
companies attack these problems.

~~~
indigochill
This problem is exaggerated on dating sites due to their nature of "good"
users exiting the system, but it applies to pretty much all reputation systems
since there's always something to be gained from unfair damages, whether
that's emotional release or perhaps competition. And people are usually more
motivated to post bad reviews (for whatever reason) than good.

I think if we don't bother with a total score the way many rating systems do
and instead show the count of good/bad reviews and show the reviews side by
side, it should represent the depth of those reviews and a reader can then try
to determine from the review contents whether the good or bad reviews are more
likely to be true. It takes a lot more effort to write a compelling negative
review than it does to simply rate someone/something poorly.

------
vander_elst
Usually when a website makes changes to the terms of service users will be
notified and they can opt out if they don't agree.. I cannot believe that a
website with more that 1M active users did not send such an email.. It's on
the users to take care of their digital identity. (I don't work and I don't
have any affiliation with okc)

------
hitekker
A friend of mine worked at OKC two years ago, and departed when things went
vertical.

Given the horror stories she told, I'm not surprised they've fallen to pieces.

------
darepublic
I (straight male) found my wife on okc but not sure it would have been
possible with these changes. My pics are for some reason generally
unflattering and I get a better response with profile plus actual meeting
people. Also I would have been too embarrassed to message people if I had to
use my real name

------
Tharkun
It asked me to tell them my first name. I told them my first name was my
username. Problem solved.

As soon as they start enforcing real names, I'm out of there. They claim to be
"substance over selfies", but most of their recent changes are going in the
opposite direction.

------
Overtonwindow
I've always felt that dating websites dig into our personal data on a
different level than social media platforms. This seems like it might be the
next step in that evolution, to really drill into us, and encourage our
privacy erosion.

------
raverbashing
Do people still use this website?

It was the one that had people with the least affinity with what I was looking
for

Edit: older platforms don't attract people that are up with the latest trends

~~~
methodover
What do people use nowadays? Tinder?

~~~
raverbashing
Tinder is pretty popular, there are other big players in this market

~~~
nugi
Such as?

~~~
raverbashing
Happn, Bumble (I think there might be others)

------
dvt
Outrage culture at its finest; then again, it's The Verge, so I'm hardly
surprised.

The author has absolutely no argument apart from a dubious anecdote by a
reddit user. It also cleverly ignores every _counter_ -example out there,
e.g.: Tinder uses real names, Bumble uses real names, Hinge uses real names. I
mean, by its own admission, the article is much ado about nothing: "Via email,
a company spokesperson told The Verge that OKCupid won’t require legal names,
but the shift is already unpopular with users."

What's the difference between a non-legal name and a web handle? That you can
use underscores and numbers in the latter? Why are people getting mad, again?

~~~
jacques_chester
Those other websites don't have extensive question lists encouraging users to
reveal sensitive information about their political, religious and sexual
interests.

People who are interested in kink, for example, are highly represented on
OkCupid because they can advertise it without worrying about being identified
by co-workers, family members, fellow church-goers and whatnot; similarly they
typically don't want to be stalked by strangers either.

There's also the problem of uncommon names. This handle is my actual legal
name, a decision I made years ago that I frequently think of as both
profoundly liberating and incredibly stupid.

The name "Jacques" is quite uncommon in the USA and the Anglosphere generally.
I'm aware of this because my name has been mispronounced and misspelled for my
entire life. Even though it is a common western European name, I fully expect
that I will be reported from time to time and occasionally removed.

At which point, what am I meant to do? Scan my passport?

~~~
dvt
> People who are interested in kink, for example, are highly represented on
> OkCupid because they can advertise it without worrying about being
> identified by co-workers, family members, fellow church-goers and whatnot;
> similarly they typically don't want to be stalked by strangers either.

If you upload pictures, you can be easily identified. If someone wants to
stalk you, a reverse-image search is trivial to do. But even if we disagree on
that point, you _don 't have to use your real name_. So, again, what is the
argument?

~~~
jacques_chester
> _If you upload pictures, you can be easily identified._

If it has your face, yes. Kink profiles don't, as a rule.

> _If someone wants to stalk you, a reverse-image search is trivial to do._

Most folk use a photo specific to OkCupid for this reason.

> _you don 't have to use your real name_

You have to use the one you'd prefer to be called by. I don't know about you,
but that's the name my mother gave me. On top of which, it is already being
"enforced" in a way that will pretty much guarantee that my actual name will
be seen as an evasion of the policy.

If folk want to go by their name, the original policy allowed that. Or they
could go to Bumble or Tinder or a billion other wannabe apps. What OkCupid
allowed was choice to choose any name, even a dumb one, for any reason.

That they sneered and smarmed their way through the announcement just makes me
angrier and less willing to take them seriously.

Edit: there are also people saying that they edited the blogpost and their FAQ
after a backlash against a strict real-name policy:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/7ljp4u/realname_ch...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/7ljp4u/realname_change_hits_lgbt_community_hardest/drmyeoq/?context=5)

Edit 2: There are multiple screenshots of "first name" and "real name" text
from the app and website which predate the alleged change to the text of the
blogpost and FAQ: [https://imgur.com/LaYdmba](https://imgur.com/LaYdmba),
[https://imgur.com/aOIKjKR](https://imgur.com/aOIKjKR)

