[Breefield]

I was totally with this up until:

I then herded our collection of fake people...to five different US cities, where they would be allocated in pairs. The best looking man and woman in one city, second best boy and girl in another, and so on.

So the control is lost, even though care was taken to give them similar usernames.

In my experience OkCupid is drastically different in different cities. I feel that the attractiveness scale is completely useless when the profile gender pairs were seeded into different cities.

I actually stopped reading at that point though, so perhaps there was more to learn, but that was kind of an ender for me.

[Terretta]

Because of the matching system, two profiles with identical answers would have shown up identically ranked, therefore obvious to any searchers. So they would have been flagged.

And any variation in answers or questions answered would have matched different personalities, throwing off stats.

Had to be done.