Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.
When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:
The takeaway here is that although race shouldn’t matter in messaging, it does. A lot. Continue reading…
Later remembered as “the map that made a nation cry”, it depicts Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812. The wide tan swath shows his Grande Armée, almost half a million strong, marching East to Moscow; the black trickle shows the few who straggled back. It’s an elegant fusion of geography, time, and temperature into a single statement of military disaster.
Of course, using modern tools of analysis, like circles and the color blue, we can get an even clearer picture of history:
It is our goal today to create graphics of similar concision and power, but about something more useful than war — sex.
All the data below, even the most personal stuff, has been gleaned from real user activity on OkCupid. Some of it our users have told us outright by answering match questions; some of it we’ve had to learn from observation.
Other than the unifying theme, sex, there’s no big point or thesis to this post: just comparisons, correlations, and quirky trends. Continue reading…
Hello, old friends. I am back from dark months of data mining, here now to present my ores. To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things:
Facial Attitude.Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?
Photo Context.Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?
Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?
In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For interested readers, I explain our measurement process, and how we collected our data, at the end of the post. All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture. Now to the data. Continue reading…
First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.
This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid’s database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:
What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?
Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you’re looking for, we’ll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they’ll be useful to you in the real world. Continue reading…
