OKC
Not Oklahoma City, but OkCupid. I preferred the way that it was before, when you could give explanations to the surveys. Not only that, but there were six categories of questions - ethics, religion, sex, lifestyle, dating and other. Now it’s just two boxes - agree and disagree. You no longer have the option of answers that you would accept or not accept. Nor do you have the option of deciding what level of importance that the answer has for you.
OkCupid’s passport section mostly shows me people from Singapore, Indonesia, the U.S. and the Philippines. Sometimes, it’s Japan, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Canada and Africa. It’s now opening up to Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. It’s because I’m typing this, which makes me think that I’m either being monitored by an A.I. spy or my conversation with someone on OKC about Hong Kong has triggered this. Either way, they’re trying to cover their tracks by mixing things up with new suggestions from Guatemala, Colombia, India, Vietnam, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Ecuador and Dominican Republic. I only come across Europeans outside the passport section i.e. if I change the distance setting to 500 miles.
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Another thing that I’ve noticed as a non-paying member is that the number of likes that you are allowed to give depends on how many people that you pass. On one day, the number of first contact messages that I was allowed to send was a hundred. This isn’t exactly riding the gravy train because OkCupid sneakily doesn’t inform you when someone had last logged in. You have to read the profiles to find clues such as a person who feels the need to tell you their age, what their plans are for a particular year or what were the highlights of a prior year. It’s come to my attention that some men “mistakenly” put down the wrong gender so that they can see if any of their friends are online. In the case of women, some lie about their gender to avoid being messaged by unsavoury men. Although it would be much easier to pretend that they are very old (almost impossibly old).
Speaking of which, I did an experiment with the age-seeking settings on OkCupid’s passport section. With middle-aged women, over 50% of whom I was shown were white women. I got more responses from them than English women aged from 25 to 37 (my preference). Also, I’ve always had more positive feedback from white middle-aged women in England than their younger counterparts. To digress, OkCupid would be a lot more convenient for everyone involved if you could search for people in different countries like on Face Party (which predated MySpace). If this was the case, there wouldn’t be so many foreigners wanting to change their location so as to improve their English or boost their self-esteem. Even on FetLife, you are given the option to browse every country despite not being allowed to use orientation, gender or age search filters.
On the subject of ageism, so many women on dating sites and apps tend to lie about their age (“I accidentally put down the wrong age”) because they either want to appeal to younger men or they want to avoid older ones. There should be a Cougars and Cubs search filter to avoid this fiasco, especially on OkCupid (which needs an interracial filter). Speaking of which, the results of my OKC age experiment were the same with old women. With teenagers, I have been shown exclusively ethnic minorities (most of whom are from the Philippines). It got to the point where I was essentially speed-swiping left (i.e. turning them down) by pressing the X button via the left-clicking of my mouse. I wanted the madness to end that much.
Despite the age setting being 18–19, it took longer to go through them than my 40–49 search, my 50–59 search and my 60–99 search. I would have figured that it would be vice-versa since it’s easier to be a single 40+ person than a 20- one. In today’s world, teenagers are more likely to find their partners on other types of apps/sites like Instagram or TikTok. What they don’t tell you about OkCupid, Bumble and Tinder is that the only people who you come across in your searches are the ones who are looking for people of your age group. With that in mind, there were slightly more white women in my 20–29 search. There was a vast improvement during my 30–39 search.
