> OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder's trends in an effort to match their level of growth.
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
Okay... what was the ratio of active men to women on OkCupid each year? How about on Tinder? You worked there, and that's an unfair assessment of Tinder.
The fundamental trend in these dating apps is that ratio, and the relative growth (or decline!) of that gender's active user base. And it's not something Match, or for that matter Dataclysm ever discussed, even though it's kind of the most important single metric for a dating app.
I mean ask demographers, they talk about 3m:2f being a crisis ratio [1]. And on Tinder it's probably closer to 10:1-20:1, I'm sure they pay AppAnnie (or whatever they're called now) to push out some fake ass numbers here and there. If it wasn't a horrible number - anything worse than 3m:2f is pretty horrible! - they would write about it, and they simply won't.
On the one hand I really liked Dataclysm, and I was bought into the ideas it put forward. There's this post from 2018 by the author that used to say, oh well the reply rate to black women was 20 percentage points lower, which is the same in 2008. Well, trends showed about 18 percentage points more interracial marriages, the data was totally counter to trend: that indicated a problem in OkCupid, not in the user base as the author claimed. The Tinder PR team kind of put the kibosh on that kind of transparency for the wrong reasons, but it was the right idea.
So this big essay prompt format that the app used to use, I don't know if it was part of the problem where OkCupid was fundamentally against trend. In some respects, clearly, the essays versus swiping didn't matter. It certainly seems intuitive that the essays matter, it appeals to a sense of superiority in a particular audience's way of believing how online dating should work, but those guys are operating in the vacuum of the single most important data point (the actual ratio) and are forced to essentially generate fictions for why the apps work the way they do and why it worked for them.
I appreciate that from your point of view, 2013-2017 was a focus on "mobile" and that in your opinion that was "bad." But c'mon, show me a category of free app that didn't have a focus on "mobile." I personally think the apps are doing the best given the circumstances - the ratio! - and that everything else is dancing around this because, if people knew, you know, they'd stop using them.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Date_onomics/7GDVBgAAQB... (page 22)