[jcc80]

Well, he did answer questions before but with thousands upon thousands to choose from it would be pure chance that he would answer the same ones as the type of women he was interested in. Is it wrong when a person does something they wouldn't normally do to get noticed? For example, is asking for directions when you're not really lost to strike up a conversation "lying and manipulation"? Literally, I suppose it is but I hope dating sites learn from him. The point should be to get more people together to have more chances for "success".

[asnyder]

Not completely true. You can find someone you're interested in and then click on "She cares about" and that will list all her public questions that she cares about, he can then answer those.

My general concern is that manipulating of the data in this way essentially lowers the value of the data in general and thus becomes a cycle resulting in the actual features of the site being no longer useful.

[jcc80]

Oh, my take was that he exposed how the data keeps people apart. The number of matches is greatly determined by which questions you answer instead of the actual content of the responses. I suppose I understand why they do it though, since the system would feel useless if you had hundreds of people (in a big city) that were a 99% match. It provides people with a sort of false selectivity.

[frandroid]

That's the part that burns me. There could be people you have matching answers for 1000 of the 3000 questions, but the way OKC sets its system up, the system would never surface them. Considering that this is a site conceived by mathematicians, I think that they have set this system to provide people with a false sense of fine-tuning but in reality, it keeps most of the matches you could find away from you. Sounds like a scheme to keep people use your dating site rather than helping people actually find a date.