[avshyz]

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly in some users profiles ("I date only men with cars, I find it important to date gentlemen", "If you're of middle eastern origin - don't even bother sending a message") and been verbally abused in personal messages ("It's funny you've thought you have a chance with me", or another who've said "The only chance you've got with me is if your penis is 15 inches in length"). I was told I need to walk it off and don't let it get under my skin. But I can't. I've thought about quitting more than once, but the alternative is a status quo I've grown to hate.

But I'm an engineer, so I've decided to automate my OKCupid experience.

Using node & puppeteer I've run a histogram, it showed that in my country, 75% of the profiles are almost completely empty (less than 10 words). I used to manually dislike these profiles (as they'll keep coming back in the search results until you dislike it), but now my script does it for me. The next thing I've done was to sort these profiles - I give higher priority to profiles that have a longer word count, that features keywords I prefer ("fascinating", "studying", "reading", are words that I catch my attention).

It used to be a very basic script, but every negative and toxic encounter has motivated me to keep it going. Right now I'm working on building a frontend to show the script's results. I'm planning on showing "suggested openers" based on the questions the potential match has said or mentioned and adding NLP features (such as sentiment analysis).

[kansi]

That moment when you need to fix a product before you can get a date!

Anyways is it open source :D

[Kalium]

Online dating systems aren't really optimized for much of anyone, sadly. They tend to be balanced between optimums for different user demos.

[lazyhummingbird]

They tend to be optimized towards making money, frankly. They hold the valuable possibility of a connection with another user hostage behind bad user experiences and paywalls.

[Arete31415]

Good for you!

FYI for all dating folks out there: women do not want you to approach them in the street. Like, let's say, 99.5% of the time.

[chobytes]

This. I'm legitimately scared when random guys approach me, as I've had guys grope me, try to corner me, etc in past. Sadly, I feel like these are common experiences for women.

[wvenable]

Yeah this reminds me of the Louis C.K. bit: "How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat! To women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them!"

"If you’re a guy, imagine you could only date a half-bear-half-lion. ‘Oh, I hope this one’s nice! I hope he doesn’t do what he’s going to do.’"

Every woman I know has had one of those common experiences -- many times -- but honestly when I was younger man I really had no idea what women go through or the frequency of it. My wife has had more than few things happen to her over the years.

[stuntkite]

It's weird that he did so much self aware material about male sexual misconduct. That self awareness kind of makes the Louis J.O. thing a lot more sinister.

[jotux]

Someone wrote a book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Optimal-Cupid-Mastering-Hidden-OkCupi...

[monksy]

How has your experience been with their anti-scraping attempts?

[avshyz]

Certain requests returned errors unless I've fetched them in the browser's context (pretty easy using using puppeteer). I've also been throttled. My password was reset after an aggressive scrape and I was prompted with a mail stating my account's behaviour's suspicious.

The solution was, obviously, to make my scraper run slower. :)

[HamSession]

Would be cool if you open sourced it, I would happily add my NLP expertise to it as I have the same issues.

[avshyz]

It's still coarse, but once I'm done it'd be awesome!

[matt_the_bass]

Good luck! I met my wife on that site.

[avshyz]

People like you are the reason I haven't called it a day, and quit from that site

[chobytes]

This sounds like a giant red flag to me.

I hope you at least disclose your methods to people you contact.

[avshyz]

I understand your concerns, to be honest. Please don't think I'm a sociopath, or a "player". I've just had too many bad experiences in this site (at one point a date told me that maybe the reason I'm not really experienced in relationships is because my parents' divorce "screwed me in the head"), have been verbally abused (Someone in the site told me that the fact I've sent her a message tells her I live in a fantasy). I've wanted to quit, but I'm shy. So shy, it feels as if this site is my only alternative. I've tried to contact okcupid's support team - I wanted them to ask them to add the options to filter out empty profiles, to reflect uncertainty in their matching algorithm (I oft see a profile with 90% ranking, only to see it's based on TWO answers!!), or to add the options to filter on the personality traits that are important to me (OKCupid allows you to filter based on people's personality traits - such us "sexpirience" or political inclinations, but they didn't allow that on traits important to me, such as "nerdiness" or "literacy" - even though they tag profiles matching these traits. They just, for reasons beyond me, don't allow you to filter that in the search page) They've refused. So I've decided to do their job, for my sake.

I'm also not taking it too seriously. This is my pet project (I'm not obsessed with it), and a place where I channel the negative residue that sticks to me from logging into that site.

I don't keep it disclosed, Aù contraire, I write that plain on my profile "I use a JS script to filter out empty profiles". Most of the people that send me a message in OKCupid don't even bother reading my profile (even though I've kept my it brief). And the ones who do find it amusing, and interesting.

[lma21]

What, why? It looks a reasonable solution for a missing 'filtering' feature :-)

[chobytes]

They're treating people as objects to be measured and quantified. The sentiment analysis thing at the end sounds borderline sociopathic.

I would personally be terrified of anyone who thought this was an ethical or acceptable thing to do.

[keerthiko]

OkCupid recently added filtering features to inbox, to filter away messages under X word count, or match % < N. I think this is just a more advanced version of that. I think the time spent on the top of the online dating funnel (browsing often-misleading profiles, reading their essays, and trying to start a conversation that either results in no response or an offensive dismissal) does not contribute to personal development OR enjoyment in any way, so why not minimize that time, so that a person can focus on the human interaction that comes after?

[ghostbrainalpha]

He prefers people who fill out their profiles, and like reading..... that's a bit of a jump to sociopath.

There are some bizarre and horrible things people do on dating sites. If you have had bad experiences, that's not ok. But don't prejudge this person without really understanding the effect his code is having.

[ball_of_lint]

What exactly is unethical about this? No one has the right to make him view their profile. If a few simple heuristics help him avoid clear mismatches and toxic conversations then he's doing nothing more unethical than any dating site that matches people up based on interests or personality.