While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages—basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you’re female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you’re male—but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than “UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.”) Similarly, knowing that “vegetarian” is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren’t one.
Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you’re trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn’t roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don’t. If you don’t believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW’s readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They’re not all inane, but …
(I suppose I’m making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I’m wrong, feel free to disregard.)
By the way, just in case you don’t feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I’ve seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn’t make the stunt any less scummy.
Don’t get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actually the gospel truth. The site’s judgments are based on that standard. So don’t take them too seriously.
I suppose I’m making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I’m wrong, feel free to disregard.
I have no problem with dates who are smart and have common interests and rely on tits to get attention. :)
By the way, just in case you don’t feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I’ve seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn’t make the stunt any less scummy.
That seems to be a desirable outcome and one that I expect would be the natural outcome from applying statistical measures to interaction patterns. I expect and prefer OKC to provide matches that are most likely to lead to rewarding interactions. These do tend to be more likely between people of approximately equal hotness.
Thanks, that was interesting. One of his conclusions has a funny side effect: if you care a lot about how hot people are, you’re probably pretty attractive. ;)
cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you’re male
Does that help? I would have expected leaving the head there to go with the abs would work better. If I see pictures of just breasts then I wonder what is being hidden (and aside from that find the expressions on a girls face and the style of hair to be potentially attractive.)
Interestingly, since receiving the mail saying I’d now be seeing hotter people in matches etc I have noticed a distinct fall in attractiveness of profiles to me, whether looks or profile based.
By the way, just in case you don’t feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I’ve seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn’t make the stunt any less scummy.
I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of stunt since I got that email. I’m curious why you think the idea is ‘scummy’ though? Given how skewed first messages are towards physically attractive women (the same effect doesn’t seem to exist for men) it seems like some kind of mechanism for balancing this effect would be useful.
I’ve thought about a dating site where you have to ‘pay’ more (probably points of some kind rather than real money) to contact the most contacted people to try and reduce this effect but I’m not sure how you’d pitch it so as not to offend people. It would help counteract the trend for the hottest girls to be overwhelmed with messages and the average girls left receiving few messages though I think which could potentially be good for everyone.
I’m curious why you think the idea is ‘scummy’ though?
Not segregating people by hotness, emailing them to tell them so. It’s the equivalent, by omission, of sending a bunch of their users a message saying “you’re not pretty enough.” It’s a message which saturates our culture, and I’m not a fan, whether it’s stated outright or not.
I’ve thought about a dating site where you have to ‘pay’ more (probably points of some kind rather than real money) to contact the most contacted people to try and reduce this effect but I’m not sure how you’d pitch it so as not to offend people.
This would solve the balance problem from a technical perspective but not a human one. If you set a site up this way, the value of an incoming message would be proportional to the cost of messaging you. If you’re “cheap,” an incoming message is just as likely to mean the messager couldn’t afford anyone better as that someone’s interested. If you’re “expensive,” every message means interest … but you get fewer of them than you might elsewhere. Nobody wins.
I’m definitely interested in better algorithms for matching people up, but I don’t think that particular idea is viable.
This would solve the balance problem from a technical perspective but not a human one.
This is definitely a problem. I think you’d need to somewhat disguise what was going on so people didn’t feel they were being ‘priced’.
If you’re “cheap,” an incoming message is just as likely to mean the messager couldn’t afford anyone better as that someone’s interested. If you’re “expensive,” every message means interest … but you get fewer of them than you might elsewhere. Nobody wins.
I’m not sure you appreciate the dynamics of messaging on these sites. The hottest girls get vastly more messages than anyone else, more than they can possibly read and reply to. The problem they face is filtering out messages they might actually be interested in from the noise. For these users fewer messages is better, particularly if the messages are higher quality (which they will probably tend to be if they are expensive to send).
Meanwhile less physically attractive girls and most guys get few or no unsolicited messages. The system should help increase the number of messages they receive. They may indeed be receiving messages from people who ‘couldn’t afford anyone better’ but they are getting messages and chances are the messages they receive will be from more realistic matches. As wedrifid pointed out, people tend to end up in relationships with people of roughly equal attractiveness. All the average guys who send dozens of messages to the hottest 1% of girls who they have little hope of success with might consider messaging someone whose profile interests them but who is of more average physical attractiveness.
I may not have made it clear that the idea would be that the recipients receive some or all of the cost of messaging them. This way the most in demand users would be able to ‘afford’ to message people of similar attractiveness but wouldn’t be deluged with messages from people ‘beneath’ them who they likely have little interest in.
I think you’d need to somewhat disguise what was going on
Agreed.
I’m not sure you appreciate the dynamics of messaging on these sites.
No, trust me, I know this part. :p But I see what you mean; my afterthought about how it would reduce their message quantity missed the point.
particularly if the messages are higher quality (which they will probably tend to be if they are expensive to send)
I wasn’t assuming that would be the case, although
recipients receive some or all of the cost of messaging them
this would mean that hot people would mostly receive messages from other hot people. Which, according to your link, would be preferable for them. Interesting.
Okay, I retract my immediate rejection, at least enough to admit that I’m curious about how this would pan out.
The post I linked to was purely about the camera and how a picture should be taken, not what a picture should be taken of.
True, but they have another one about the other thing.
I’m still not quite sure how we should give advice in general, not knowing what the other people are looking for.
Hmm. I’ve sometimes made a point of trading profile evaluations with people who know me well in person—the idea being “does this fit what you know of me?” This isn’t directly useful for our purposes, but I wonder if that’s actually a good criterion, and if so, what we can learn from it.
I suppose what that method checks for is for impressions we get from the way people write things which give a significantly different idea than they intend. Even little things like the same word repeated in nearby sentences can convey thoughlessness or inarticulacy. Or the combination of different profile pieces, written at different times, might suggest a strong emphasis on something which isn’t that important to the subject. What if we went through each others’ profiles, line by line, and verbosely described the impressions and implications we read from it? In other words, explicitly state the details we’re filling in between the lines. Might that be a productive form of profile critique between strangers?
What if we went through each others’ profiles, line by line, and verbosely described the impressions and implications we read from it? In other words, explicitly state the details we’re filling in between the lines. Might that be a productive form of profile critique between strangers?
Possibly. Extreme diplomacy needed though, you would have to be careful that your negative associations with specific traits didn’t leak too much into the language used. I’ll give it a go.
1) You give the impression you are mainly interested in game design (both in the what you are doing and message me if). Would you also like talking about the design of other non-game things?
2) Your profile doesn’t indicate an interest in the real world (MMO + guitar + books). Are you interested in societal problems and their solutions (or lack thereof)?
You give the impression you are mainly interested in game design
Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for—this should be more clearly on a back burner, since it’s not a primary thing. I was thinking of rewriting the “message me if” soon anyway, so that’ll probably go away.
Your profile doesn’t indicate an interest in the real world
This is a good example of your point about negative associations—using “real world” to mean “the big picture/humanity as a whole” instead of just, well, occurring outside of a virtual reality. So I read that as “you have no life,” which would offend me if I didn’t think it was a misunderstanding.
Are you interested in societal problems and their solutions (or lack thereof)?
Some of them. Some I find interesting problems in their own right, but in general I don’t spend cycles on things I don’t feel I have any power over. Which charity is most efficient is not really an issue you worry about when 10% of your income is still approximately $0 (and I’m not swimming in free time to donate, either). With luck, I might in some years be settled enough to have the luxury of addressing the big picture. In the meantime, it doesn’t seem productive to spin my wheels about it.
This is a good example of your point about negative associations—using “real world” to mean “the big picture/humanity as a whole” instead of just, well, occurring outside of a virtual reality. So I read that as “you have no life,” which would offend me if I didn’t think it was a misunderstanding.
Will try harder in the future :) I’m probably odd in thinking that parties/clubbing are much forms of escapism as computer games. Neither are bad inherently either, a little escapism is a fine thing.
Some of them. Some I find interesting problems in their own right, but in general I don’t spend cycles on things I don’t feel I have any power over.
Even if you don’t have power over them, knowing what is going on big picture wise can be useful: what education to pick (growth/shrinking industries), where to live (do you expect oil prices to go up significantly in the near future, if so then minimize commute time) etc .
If these things aren’t interesting to you and you wouldn’t want to have conversations about them, then it doesn’t matter.
I’m probably odd in thinking that parties/clubbing are much forms of escapism as computer games.
Yes and no. I see your point, but I think being social and developing those skills is healthy and productive. Some video games can also teach you skills that are broadly applicable, but I don’t know of many.
what education to pick (growth/shrinking industries)
I was so unwilling to acquire an education in something not personally important to me that I put off going to college for about six years, until I knew what it was I was interested enough in to choose as a specialty. So, while I can see why someone might choose an education based on industry, it’s not really for me.
where to live (do you expect oil prices to go up significantly in the near future, if so then minimize commute time)
I don’t have either a car or a driver’s license. This might conceivably change at some point, but I haven’t really needed them yet, and I don’t really expect to get into a position where I do any time soon.
Don’t get me wrong. I do read some current events, and when I get curious I’ll go study a bunch of history to put it into context. (A while ago I spent three days on Wikipedia reading about every major conflict in the middle east since Israel’s statehood, because I was sick of only having a general “there is conflict there” sense without understanding why.) But doing so is not a major part of my life.
While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages—basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you’re female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you’re male—but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than “UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.”) Similarly, knowing that “vegetarian” is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren’t one.
Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you’re trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn’t roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don’t. If you don’t believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW’s readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They’re not all inane, but …
(I suppose I’m making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I’m wrong, feel free to disregard.)
By the way, just in case you don’t feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I’ve seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn’t make the stunt any less scummy.
Don’t get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actually the gospel truth. The site’s judgments are based on that standard. So don’t take them too seriously.
I have no problem with dates who are smart and have common interests and rely on tits to get attention. :)
That seems to be a desirable outcome and one that I expect would be the natural outcome from applying statistical measures to interaction patterns. I expect and prefer OKC to provide matches that are most likely to lead to rewarding interactions. These do tend to be more likely between people of approximately equal hotness.
That’s conventional wisdom, certainly, but I’d be interested in seeing an actual study.
Who You Find Attractive is Based on How Hot You Are. I couldn’t find a published study with a couple of minutes but I recall seeing experimental evidence for this before.
Thanks, that was interesting. One of his conclusions has a funny side effect: if you care a lot about how hot people are, you’re probably pretty attractive. ;)
Have you tried google? I’ve seen several but do not have the links on file.
Does that help? I would have expected leaving the head there to go with the abs would work better. If I see pictures of just breasts then I wonder what is being hidden (and aside from that find the expressions on a girls face and the style of hair to be potentially attractive.)
I thought they’d mentioned that in OKT once, but I just went back and looked and didn’t see it. So maybe I made that up.
Her personality. >_>
As I recall, “body” as opposed to face pictures actually hurt your chances, statistically.
Interestingly, since receiving the mail saying I’d now be seeing hotter people in matches etc I have noticed a distinct fall in attractiveness of profiles to me, whether looks or profile based.
I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of stunt since I got that email. I’m curious why you think the idea is ‘scummy’ though? Given how skewed first messages are towards physically attractive women (the same effect doesn’t seem to exist for men) it seems like some kind of mechanism for balancing this effect would be useful.
I’ve thought about a dating site where you have to ‘pay’ more (probably points of some kind rather than real money) to contact the most contacted people to try and reduce this effect but I’m not sure how you’d pitch it so as not to offend people. It would help counteract the trend for the hottest girls to be overwhelmed with messages and the average girls left receiving few messages though I think which could potentially be good for everyone.
Not segregating people by hotness, emailing them to tell them so. It’s the equivalent, by omission, of sending a bunch of their users a message saying “you’re not pretty enough.” It’s a message which saturates our culture, and I’m not a fan, whether it’s stated outright or not.
This would solve the balance problem from a technical perspective but not a human one. If you set a site up this way, the value of an incoming message would be proportional to the cost of messaging you. If you’re “cheap,” an incoming message is just as likely to mean the messager couldn’t afford anyone better as that someone’s interested. If you’re “expensive,” every message means interest … but you get fewer of them than you might elsewhere. Nobody wins.
I’m definitely interested in better algorithms for matching people up, but I don’t think that particular idea is viable.
This is definitely a problem. I think you’d need to somewhat disguise what was going on so people didn’t feel they were being ‘priced’.
I’m not sure you appreciate the dynamics of messaging on these sites. The hottest girls get vastly more messages than anyone else, more than they can possibly read and reply to. The problem they face is filtering out messages they might actually be interested in from the noise. For these users fewer messages is better, particularly if the messages are higher quality (which they will probably tend to be if they are expensive to send).
Meanwhile less physically attractive girls and most guys get few or no unsolicited messages. The system should help increase the number of messages they receive. They may indeed be receiving messages from people who ‘couldn’t afford anyone better’ but they are getting messages and chances are the messages they receive will be from more realistic matches. As wedrifid pointed out, people tend to end up in relationships with people of roughly equal attractiveness. All the average guys who send dozens of messages to the hottest 1% of girls who they have little hope of success with might consider messaging someone whose profile interests them but who is of more average physical attractiveness.
I may not have made it clear that the idea would be that the recipients receive some or all of the cost of messaging them. This way the most in demand users would be able to ‘afford’ to message people of similar attractiveness but wouldn’t be deluged with messages from people ‘beneath’ them who they likely have little interest in.
Agreed.
No, trust me, I know this part. :p But I see what you mean; my afterthought about how it would reduce their message quantity missed the point.
I wasn’t assuming that would be the case, although
this would mean that hot people would mostly receive messages from other hot people. Which, according to your link, would be preferable for them. Interesting.
Okay, I retract my immediate rejection, at least enough to admit that I’m curious about how this would pan out.
The post I linked to was purely about the camera and how a picture should be taken, not what a picture should be taken of.
I doubt that we are sufficiently weird that we like grainy, poorly lit, low resolution images.
But yes, I’m still not quite sure how we should give advice in general, not knowing what the other people are looking for.
True, but they have another one about the other thing.
Hmm. I’ve sometimes made a point of trading profile evaluations with people who know me well in person—the idea being “does this fit what you know of me?” This isn’t directly useful for our purposes, but I wonder if that’s actually a good criterion, and if so, what we can learn from it.
I suppose what that method checks for is for impressions we get from the way people write things which give a significantly different idea than they intend. Even little things like the same word repeated in nearby sentences can convey thoughlessness or inarticulacy. Or the combination of different profile pieces, written at different times, might suggest a strong emphasis on something which isn’t that important to the subject. What if we went through each others’ profiles, line by line, and verbosely described the impressions and implications we read from it? In other words, explicitly state the details we’re filling in between the lines. Might that be a productive form of profile critique between strangers?
That’s a really good idea.
Possibly. Extreme diplomacy needed though, you would have to be careful that your negative associations with specific traits didn’t leak too much into the language used. I’ll give it a go.
1) You give the impression you are mainly interested in game design (both in the what you are doing and message me if). Would you also like talking about the design of other non-game things?
2) Your profile doesn’t indicate an interest in the real world (MMO + guitar + books). Are you interested in societal problems and their solutions (or lack thereof)?
Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for—this should be more clearly on a back burner, since it’s not a primary thing. I was thinking of rewriting the “message me if” soon anyway, so that’ll probably go away.
This is a good example of your point about negative associations—using “real world” to mean “the big picture/humanity as a whole” instead of just, well, occurring outside of a virtual reality. So I read that as “you have no life,” which would offend me if I didn’t think it was a misunderstanding.
Some of them. Some I find interesting problems in their own right, but in general I don’t spend cycles on things I don’t feel I have any power over. Which charity is most efficient is not really an issue you worry about when 10% of your income is still approximately $0 (and I’m not swimming in free time to donate, either). With luck, I might in some years be settled enough to have the luxury of addressing the big picture. In the meantime, it doesn’t seem productive to spin my wheels about it.
Will try harder in the future :) I’m probably odd in thinking that parties/clubbing are much forms of escapism as computer games. Neither are bad inherently either, a little escapism is a fine thing.
Even if you don’t have power over them, knowing what is going on big picture wise can be useful: what education to pick (growth/shrinking industries), where to live (do you expect oil prices to go up significantly in the near future, if so then minimize commute time) etc .
If these things aren’t interesting to you and you wouldn’t want to have conversations about them, then it doesn’t matter.
Yes and no. I see your point, but I think being social and developing those skills is healthy and productive. Some video games can also teach you skills that are broadly applicable, but I don’t know of many.
I was so unwilling to acquire an education in something not personally important to me that I put off going to college for about six years, until I knew what it was I was interested enough in to choose as a specialty. So, while I can see why someone might choose an education based on industry, it’s not really for me.
I don’t have either a car or a driver’s license. This might conceivably change at some point, but I haven’t really needed them yet, and I don’t really expect to get into a position where I do any time soon.
Don’t get me wrong. I do read some current events, and when I get curious I’ll go study a bunch of history to put it into context. (A while ago I spent three days on Wikipedia reading about every major conflict in the middle east since Israel’s statehood, because I was sick of only having a general “there is conflict there” sense without understanding why.) But doing so is not a major part of my life.