What happened to OKCupid?

A case study in dating app degradation

As I noted in a previous article titled “Why dating apps suck,” I talked about why the business model of most dating websites and dating applications is fundamentally at odds with creating successful monogamous long-term relationships. The short version is that “pay to play” dating apps make money from frustrated users — not satisfied users. Creating successful monogamous long-term relationships takes away potentially paying clients.

Today, I’m going to talk about OKCupid, which was started roughly twenty years ago. For a period of close to ten years, OKCupid was the titan in the free online dating space, and arguably the best dating website compared to its paid competitors as well. At the time, it was mostly free.1 OKCupid had a strong, transparent, and effective match-making system, one which took multi-dimensional matching to the max.

These features make OKCupid a good case study for dating app degradation of the type I’m describing. OKCupid’s transition from highly successful free dating website to a barely-functional “pay to play” dating app is easy to explain.

The problems with single-dimensional matching

Within any given culture, there is usually a broad consensus about what appears attractive. Many dating websites and apps generate and use attractiveness ratings for their users, including at least some later versions of OKCupid. Others use sophisticated machine…