Rudder, Christian, “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get.” Weblog entry. OkTrends. October 5th, 2009. December 14th, 2011 (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/).

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.

more compatibility usually means more replies

First of all, how do we know that race shouldn’t matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that “true love is colorblind?” No, we’re not: we know race shouldn’t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching. That is, more compatibility generally means more replies.

On OkCupid you create your own unique matching system, and that means your better matches are people you actually want talk to. Below is a graph showing match percentages vs. reply rates for a random sample of 500,000 people.As you can see, in general, the better you match someone, the more likely you are to reply to a first message from them.

We can see this principle in action when we look at our trusty control, the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side-by-side, with similar rates colored yellow. There’s no real need to inspect the numbers; just observe the similar colors.

Throughout this post, yellowish colors are short-hand for “neutral” and red and green indicate “strong preference.”

People of the various Zodiac signs match each other all at roughly the average rate, and, as we would expect, they reply to messages similarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved:

Again, don’t bother squinting, just check out the colors. We’ll soon look very closely at these tables.

Learn more about how race affects the messages you get on OkTrends. Read the rest of the article How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get on OkCupid.

Keep reading about how race affects the messages you get…

Rudder, Christian, “10 Charts About Sex.” Weblog entry. OkTrends. April 19th, 2011. December 11th, 2011 (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/10-charts-about-sex/).

This was one of the first infographics ever made:

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.

Chart #1

We found this by crossing the match questions Do you like to exercise? and Is it difficult for you to have an orgasm?, and, as you can see, women who don’t like working out report twice the orgasm problems of women who do.

Chart #2

Here, we took a single question — Is your ideal sex rough or gentle? — and scraped people’s profile text for the words that most correlated to each answer. Here are word clouds for women and men in their 20s.

The text is basically Hot Topic versus, I dunno, Burberry. But beyond the words the interesting thing is how men’s and women’s preferences change with age:

This dataset only includes single people, of course, but I was still very surprised at how many old men like it rough. Looks like I’m going to have to rethink a cherished part of my worldview.

Chart #3

The odds shown in this chart, and the others like it later in the post, are odds “in favor”—in this case, odds in favor of being into giving oral sex. The higher a group’s odds, the more into it they are.

Since so much sexual slang involves meat—”hot dog,” “sausage,” “burger,” “beef injection,” “another beef injection,” and so on—I thought this would be a fine occasion to point out that there are plenty of veggie alternatives:

Vegetarian-Friendly Sex Slang

Peeling the banana.

Tossing the salad.

Squeezing the melons.

Zeroing in on a grown man’s nuts and nutsack.

Putting Monsanto in yoursanto.

Ordering the split pea soup.

Sorry, that’s got ham.

Cornholing others.

Find out how long most relationships last, the odds of masturbating today, and more on OkTrends. 10 Charts About Sex on OkCupid.

Find out who’s claiming they never masturbate…

Rudder, Christian, “The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures.” Weblog entry. OkTrends. January 20th, 2010. December 7th, 2011 (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/).

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.

Myth 1

It’s better to smile

One of the first things we noticed when diving into our pool of photos is that men and women have very different approaches to the camera.

Women smile about 50% more than men do and make that flirty-face four times as often.

Now, you’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social situations, but at least for your online dating photo, that’s just not optimal advice. For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera, like the center and right-hand subjects above.

Notice that, however, that flirting away from the camera is the single worst attitude a woman can take. Certain social etiquettes apply even online: if you’re going to be making eyes at someone, it should be with the person looking at your picture.

Men’s photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don’t smile:

Maybe women want a little mystery. What is he looking at? Slashdot? Or Engadget?

It’s interesting that while making flirty eye contact is relatively okay for men, flirting away from the camera is the worst thing they, too, can do.

Learn more profile picture myths like whether or not photos of guys with their shirts off attract more dates.The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures on OkCupid.

Cleavage, a good or bad thing? Read more to find out…

Rudder, Christian, “The Best Question For a First Date.” Weblog entry. OkTrends. April 19th, 2011. December 12th, 2011 (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/).

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.

First—define “easy to bring up”

Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what’s okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:

If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?
Do u own 3 or more dildos in your room?
Do you hsve a decent job?

I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!

So, instead of judging each question’s first-date appropriateness subjectively, I turned to statistics. I decided our candidates were the ones that (a) most people were comfortable discussing publicly, and (b) were mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn’t just guess. I sliced OkCupid’s question pool like this:

That blue rectangle is our highest-quality, least-invasive questions, and we next examined each of them for interesting correlations. (If you’re interested in knowing more about the above graph, you can drop-down an explanation here, complete with an interactive scatter plot that took me forever to make.)

More details on how we pared down our candidate pool of first-date questions [hide this]

Whenever a user answers a match question on OkCupid, he has the option of keeping his answer private by clicking this box:

The less often people check that box for a given question, the more confident we can be that the question is okay to talk about. I sorted our huge mass of questions accordingly. Here’s a simulation of the process—I can only picture a small subset of the data we crunched, but it should illustrate the principle involved. To explore the questions in the plot, you can mouse-over one to bring it forward and click it to send it back.

This interactive scatter plot is unavailable at this time. To see the plot on OkCupid, click here.

At first, this seemed to work pretty well. It at least separated the questions about race and politics and sexual history from, say:

Are clams alive?

But as we got deeper into this post, this ordering felt inadequate. A question like Which describes you better, normal or weird? might be fine to ask, but doing so is of little value because almost everyone has the same answer. 79% of people think they are weird. Ironists “rejoice”.

We wanted to recommend useful questions, not just ones that weren’t awkward. So I added another dimension to the plot: how much each question splits public opinion. I’ve called this second property “answer diversity.” Now let’s sort by it, too:

This interactive scatter plot is unavailable at this time. To see the plot on OkCupid, click here.

Doing this, we can think of our space of questions as four zones, roughly described like so:

This interactive graphic is unavailable at this time. To see the plot on OkCupid, click here.

Clearly, the lower right-hand corner contains the kind of questions we want, and that’s where we found the correlations we report below. Just wanted you guys to know we didn’t get them out of thin air, or, worse, off some blog.

Now let’s get right to the results. This is the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep: