OK Cupid and Lesbians

[danaeris]

So, I have to say that I think OK Cupid is by far the most accurate and possibly the only accurate dating service I've ever seen anywhere. All those silly quizzes out there which supposedly determine whether or not you're a match... well, I'm skeptical.

The problem is, it doesn't have a high enough resolution. For the most part, it does a successful job of sorting my friends out of the rest of the people on there -- most of the top matches are people I know or people who know people I know -- but I'm not entirely convinced of how accurate, within that group, the matches are. Still, the theory of the site, with the right questions, is good.

Having said that, I have to say that I've found an interesting result. It seems easy to find bi females with a match as high as 88% searching locally. But if I do a local search for Gay females, the highest match is an 80% (which is particularly low). Looking at world matches, I get a 90% match in bi females, and the lowest match on the first page is an 88%. The world matches for gay females range from a high of 87% to a low of 80% on the first page.

What I'm seeing here is that, particularly in the Bay Area, but in general, I'm just not a good match for gay women. This doesn't surprise me. I've never felt drawn to participate in lesbian culture... it just doesn't appeal to me. Part of it, however, might be the high incidence of polyamory in the bi community vs. the lesbian community. Still, my matches with straight men and bi men range similarly to those with bi girls.

Comments

[ebenezer.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that the quiz seems to be able to distinguish your interests from the interests of lesbians. Taken one step further, we might conclude that a second-order effect of this capacity is the ability to determine whether *you* are bi or lesbian. Perhaps a system like this will lead the way in being able to provide some sort of self-assessment for orientation, or, better still, provide a generic dating service that will find you matches that you want independently of some orientation that you happen to state.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

I think you should check the website out - you clearly don't know how it works.

OK Cupid does have a quiz you take when you join, but it is not what is really going on with the website. What's REALLY going on with the website is that they have over a thousand questions. Most or many of them were submitted by users who had already answered more than 500 questions. The more questions you answer, the more accurate your matches are considered to be. Whenever you answer a question, you must also say what you want your ideal match to answer in response to the question. So the more informed you are about what you want in a partner, the more likely it is to give you a good match.

When they match you, they use all sorts of bell curves that take into consideration how you fall in comparison to users in general who have answered the questions you have answered, how many of those questions the person you're being compared to has answered you have also answered, and thus how much overlap there is.

They're very mathematical about it, and I think you would find the math behind what they're doing interesting.

[cos]

I was not at all surprised to find that the preponderance of my high matches on okcupid are bi, rather than straight, even though there seem to be more straight women than bi signed up overall.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

Some of the poly related questions may be working 'against' you in regards to gay vs. bi, possibly.