By: Funny Or Die
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.