Piss Poor Programming

Though I try, it is difficult to go for too long without hearing or seeing an excruciatingly annoying add for yet another dating site.  Sometimes it is some annoying chick talking at me from a Pandora ad, or maybe a tv commercial that makes me want to throw up, or just a banner on a website featuring a female model who is definitely not in need of the service being advertised and in no way representative of the people that are.

All of these websites are crap.  Like the mythbusters often do, I will base this strong assertion on a sample size of one:  okcupid.

Okcupid is a dating site.  The particulars of why they think they are different and not a complete failure are irrelevant.  Here is a list of the kinds of girls okcupid matches me up with.  And when I say "matches me up" I mean it sends me an email telling me to check out some girls profile because it thinks I would be interested in them.  These girls are one of the following:

1) Ugly Girls.  I've tried dating girls that I had no attraction to and it didn't work out.  According to ugly people, this makes me shallow, and I am damn proud of it.

2) Girls That Are Taken.  Okcupid allows you to post information in a profile.  One piece of information is whether or not you are dating someone.  Its not free text, or even a complicated field.  Its like a combo box.  I'm pretty sure a first year programmer using a toy language like BASIC could write something like "if they are already dating someone, stop trying to match them up with people."

3) Girls That I Have Explicitly Told Okcupid I Don't Want.  Okcupid provides a mechanism for you to identify girls that you never want to see again, in the form of a "hide" button.  They claim that upon using this mechanism, you will no longer see that person.  When I see a girl that I don't want to date, maybe because she's ugly, or she told okcupid that she likes men but in the written descriptions of herself says she doesn't ever date men (WTF?), I click on hide.  Then, a few weeks later (or longer), okcupid sends me an email suggesting I check out the profile of the girl I hid.  I'm not making this up.

4) Girls I Already Know In Real Life.  I can't foresee many situations where running into someone I already know on a depressing, crappy dating site will improve our chances of being with each other.  Thats like running into some girl that already rejected you at a self-improvement seminar, or maybe a moped dealership, or a dungeons and dragons game.  Finding out she has no dating life just twists the proverbial knife.



I was inspired to write this post because, in my okcupid profile, I wrote that I don't care about the Beattles.  I did this because I have discovered that sharing that information makes music nerds angry, quickly, and I really really love to harrass people with strong opinions on what other people like.  And because its true.  Today, okcupid sent me an email about an "icebreaker" message.  Subject: the Beattles.  Apparently, after scanning my profile with the most primitive parser imaginable and seeing the word "Beattles" it decided I liked them and thought it should match me up with some excited Beattles-loving girl whose hopes I just crushed.

I don't really know how to work this in, but I would like to keep all of my okcupid-bashing in one post, and I've been dying to complain about it, so I'm just going to add it:  the people who run okcupid also post on a pseudo-statistics related blog where someone looks at aggregate data (like how tall people say they are in their profiles) and then makes wild assertions by either confusing correlation with causality, or simply being ignorant of statistics.  Firefly Girl thinks they are really smart.  Firefly Girl was not a math major.