Baffling OKCupid situation

July 14, 2015 11:23 PM

Help me understand what’s happening with my OKCupid profile. In the first 36 hours on joining I had 382 likes and 76 messages (none worthwhile). Since then, not a thing. What’s your take on this? Bonus question: is OKCupid the right place these days to look for a long-term partner?

I am a 44-yr old female with two elementary-school kids. I am well-educated, self-deprecating, attractive, and have a good career which gives me financial independence. I have recently become single and, since I work remotely and have little opportunity to meet new people, I created an OKCupid profile and included my best photos. I indicated I am looking for men aged 41-47. I live in a small CT town an hour’s drive from New York City, and I originally put down my actual zipcode.

The huge initial response was followed the next day by complete and utter silence and zero profile visits.

A friend who is an OKCupid veteran suggested I try changing my zipcode to a NYC one, saying the deluge would happen again. She was wrong. There was no change at all. My friend sent me a test message and visited my profile, and both of those worked.

I’ve returned my zipcode back to my actual one now, because I have no desire to misrepresent myself.

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

A lot of the time, if you're active on the site (posting things, changing your profile), they feature you and that will contribute to higher traffic. 382 likes to none does sound a bit strange, though. Maybe it's some sort of technical glitch?
posted by knownfossils at 11:42 PM on July 14, 2015

Some of the search and discovery features of OkCupid can/do prioritize new accounts, and accounts that have edited their profile recently. If you update the text on your profile, you'll show up in some people's activity feeds. As a queer cis man, the anecdata I can offer that'd be pertinent to your own OkCupid experience is pretty limited; men and women on OkCupid have entirely different experiences when it comes to messages. By far (in heterosexual interactions at least), men do most of the seeking and messaging, while women get deluged with messages of questionable quality (as you experienced on your first day). This can be to your advantage, though, if you do some active searching and messaging yourself, as any conversations you initiate are very likely to get attention. Answer a lot of match questions (at least 100), then do some searches with aggressive filtering and keep an eye out for high match percentages (90%+) and low enemy percentages.
My last three relationships began on OkCupid, including the one with my current partner/spouse. We're a 99% match and have been together for several years.
posted by NMcCoy at 11:44 PM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Was the initial response a lot of men in far-flung countries complimenting your beauty and asking to be friends? On my most recent round of reactivation, I got a slew of these kinds of messages - my thinking is it's got to be some kind of new scam that a hundred men in their 20s in Morocco and Italy and Iraq and Kuwait have a sincere interest in a meaningful relationship with an unknown woman in the remote US midwest. Spikes of these messages come and go; when I ignore them they fade away for a couple of weeks.

Anyway, what others said - answer lots of questions and hound out your own matches to message with initiative. Good luck!
posted by mibo at 4:35 AM on July 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I find that OKC is fairly quiet for people over 40, but I don't mind that so much as I tend to be picky anyway. I don't know about the "long term partner" angle, but it does happen...

A thought - there is a filter you can activate on your mailbox where messages from anyone that don't match your profile within a certain percentile get screened (i.e., if anyone that isn't at least an 85% match to you sends you a message, you just don't see it). Maybe you accidentally turned that on?*


* Frankly, you may want to leave that on if you have, or turn it on if you haven't; I have mine on, and every so often I take a peek at what those screened-from-me messages are like, say "ugh" and walk away again.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:40 AM on July 15, 2015

Sorry to hear about your troubling OkCupid experience. My female friends (I'm a gay male) have shared their OKCupid experiences with me, and their results have been decidedly mixed. This isn't a criticism of OKC necessarily--if anything, OKC is probably a natural extension of the "real-world" dating experience, which can be fraught even in the best of circumstances. That said, I found that OKC's questions-and-answer matching format saved me a lot of trouble learning things about people before going out on a date.

I met my husband off of OKCupid. We exchanged a few messages on the site, then exchanged emails, then met in person, and initially became good friends. A year afterward, we realized that we had slowly, gradually fallen in love, and three years later we got married (just after the SCOTUS ruling). I'm not sure how typical my experience is, but it was a success, and I sincerely hope for your success as well!
posted by Quaversalis at 7:42 AM on July 15, 2015

Every time you change anything, you get thrown up on the front page with that change highlighted. Answer a question a day or change a single sentence in your profile.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:53 AM on July 15, 2015

Seconding that regular log-ins and interactions with the site, including replying to messages and using "quickmatch," generates more interest. (Also, the age range you're looking for is pretty limited; you may want to expand it. When you search, do you see a lot of local men in that range?)
posted by metasarah at 11:04 AM on July 15, 2015

Agreed that you have to be active to show up in more users' match lists. Try answering some more questions or reaching out to some folks you're interested in.
posted by smirkette at 11:56 AM on July 15, 2015

The way OkCupid promotes profiles is quite intriguing. A new profile seems to go straight to the top of the page (also there is a option to search for new people). Doing little edits and answering their questions seems to get you more traffic, as does editing your profile picture. But interestingly, the more you message people and reply to messages, the more messages and views you seem to get. Logging on for the first time in ages seems to generate a flurry of messages too.

So if you want lots of messages, my advice would be to be as active on the site as possible and reply to every single message you get.

The flipside of this, of course, is that when you are top of the page you get all the messages from the sleazy idiots who are messaging every single person in the hope that one will bite, rather than someone who has done a search for people like you and actually read your profile and decided they might like to get to know you better. So perhaps a lack of messages is not a bad thing. Just sit back and wait for the good ones to come in...
posted by intensitymultiply at 1:36 PM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

is OKCupid the right place these days to look for a long-term partner?

Yes.
posted by John Cohen at 3:15 PM on July 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

So if you want lots of messages, my advice would be to be as active on the site as possible and reply to every single message you get.

Seconding being active on the site, but I would not recommend replying to every message you get, unless you want an even bigger shitstorm of nonsense emails, along with a handful of people who will take your reply as encouragement and never leave you alone again.
posted by triggerfinger at 4:33 PM on July 15, 2015

is OKCupid the right place these days to look for a long-term partner?

I found my sweetheart there.
posted by Karessa at 9:57 AM on July 16, 2015

Bonus question: is OKCupid the right place these days to look for a long-term partner?

A friend of mine met his wife via OKCupid - both of them are over 40.
posted by SisterHavana at 9:52 PM on July 16, 2015

Mod note: This is a followup from the asker.

Thank you all for your replies.

I found out that I was shadowbanned by OkCupid when all that traffic stopped and nobody replied to my messages any more.

It seems somebody or several people reported me for spamming – I used the same cut-n-paste reply and told them as much, to write to the 76 people who had sent meaningless messages. I thought I would do them a favor by explaining why their message didn’t work.

So, for those reading, the way you know you’re shadowbanned is that the ‘Boost profile’ option disappears from your page.

Ok Cupid can undo the ban but you have to write to them and wait for days or weeks.

I chose instead to delete my profile and start over.

Now I have normal traffic but I have a total fear of being shadowbanned again, since anyone with a grudge could report me for any reason.

posted by cortex (staff) at 11:13 AM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, that's just dippy (that you got shadowbanned, not your fear).

I think you'll be fine, it may have been that only one or two people complained but then OKC investigated and saw the multiple responses and ran it through some metric analyzer or something and that's how they caught that "oh, it's not just 2 guys, it's 76" and they're the ones who pulled the trigger. I actually never respond to the lame-o messages myself; that's actually why I have that filter, so I never even have to see them.

I think you'll be fine. Good luck.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:12 PM on July 17, 2015