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11/02/2024 11:29:29 am

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OkCupid Admits Experimenting on Subscribers

OkCupid

(Photo : Facebook)

After Facebook notoriously tested the emotions of its subscribers in 2012 sparking outrage among users, here comes OkCupid.

Christian Rudder, one of the founders of the friendship and dating site, admitted on a blog, "We Experiment on Human Beings!" that it's carried out trials on its users that seem way worse than what Facebook did.

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In a nutshell, OkCupid's trials messed up people's emotions.

In one instance, the company wanted to see if its matching algorithms worked. Its algorithms are used to forecast whether people will like one another.

OkCupid intentionally tricked subscribers into believing they had matches with people with the same interests, when actually it proved to be the opposite.

The company not only persuaded incompatible users to contact each other but to talk to each other just because the site told them they were compatible.

Its subscribers were 70 percent more likely to continue talking to a person with a 30 percent compatibility rating because they were duped into believing they had a 90 percent match, according to Bloomberg.

The online romance site collects and analyzes all the data it receives. OkCupid has disclosed some details about trials it held in the past.

Among these trials was one in 2011 where it revealed that "beer lovers are 60 percent more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met."   

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