21 Other Experiments OKCupid Conducted on its Users

When news broke of Facebook manipulating user emotions through the sorts of posts they were exposed to in their newsfeed as a part of an experiment, it caused a public outcry about the ethics of such practices (not a big enough outcry for people to stop using Facebook, of course, but an outcry nonetheless). Since then, the dating website OKCupid has issued a statement claiming it’s OK for sites to conduct experiments on people. Here are some examples of experiments that OKCupid has conducted on its users:

• Set you up with attractive, cool, financially stable dates but who are already in happy marriages.
• Matched you with your sister a bunch.
• Did a Find/Replace for any instance of ‘travel” and switched it to ‘commit hate crimes.”
• Added ‘love to laugh” to the one profile on the site that didn’t already have it.
• For three hours, everyone was that Tara Reid pic where her boob fell out.
• Included everyone’s dick size. (Admittedly, these were just educated guesses.)
• In the gender options, ‘women” was changed to ‘vaginalmen.”
• If you put ‘doctor” as your occupation, OKCupid added ‘french horn players only” to your profile.
• Set up folks with the same unisex names to see what’d happen. Chris and Chris went well. Pat and Pat went BAD.
• If you listed a favorite quotation, regardless of which one you chose, it attributed it to Sir Farts a Lot.
• Used all information gathered for upcoming OKCupid Book and told you you’d receive royalties.
• Users were given better matches depending on how many times they sarcastically muttered ‘Okay, cupid” under their breath while using the site.
• All users, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, are initially matched with Tom from MySpace.
• Users with 99% compatibility with each other were told the other person has HIV.
• Little boys were allowed to look at everyone’s conversations.
• The word ‘hello” in messages was replaced at random with ‘dam i wanna fuk u titz.”
• Really kind users with the lowest success rates were only shown users who had died.
• Anywhere after someone had written the phrase ‘I love,” they inserted the word ‘Nickelback.”
• Sent fake messages to people saying “Ur cute! I’m in your closet.”
• Automatically sent 36 angry responses if someone didn’t respond to a message within 12 hours.

If ‘Game of Thrones’ was listed as an interest, it added ‘Into S&M” to the self-summary.