As far as I can tell, once OKC has decided you like something, there’s no way to explicitly tell it you don’t. Even removing it from your profile doesn’t kick in immediately. If someone searches for, say, “scientology,” and you put in your profile that “scientology is crap,” you will come up on the search. This is not what either of you is trying to accomplish. Besides, that doesn’t describe you. If you’re an active organizer of major scientology protests and are looking for someone to do that with you, okay, put it in. Short of that, don’t give yourself keywords you don’t want.
When I worked on a “search and metrics” team, one of the things we discovered by trying a recommendations engine implementation on a slice of the site’s traffic for a bit was that what seemed to matter most for the purposes of the recommendation engine was simply that a user had any reaction at all to a video. It seemed that the vast majority of content space just bores any given person, but “passions predict passions” even when the passions have different valence (hate/love).
Maybe my experiences don’t apply here, but it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to imagine that OKCupid’s “stupid algorithm” operating on naive behavior could out perform algorithmically aware meta-strategy that “made sense” but hadn’t been validated with some sort of field experimentation :-)
I believe you can get yourself off the list as liking something, but only by selecting “not an interest” when presented with an icebreaker match based on that flag.
I, for instance, am officially off the lists as liking “having fun,” the phrase being included in my profile as part of a jab at people who say that they “like having fun.”
Ha—that’s interesting, although not too surprising. A lot of people looking at media seek out things they think are awful on purpose, to get riled up and then pass it on. (There’s an Abstruse Goose about that, although I can’t for the life of me find it.) I’d like to think it’s less true that people actively seek out dating profiles of people they think are horrible, but in my heart I know that it isn’t. : \
In general I would agree not to assume that their algorithm is wrong when they’re the ones with the data. But I still think it’s a better use of my time to find people who like what I like.
When I worked on a “search and metrics” team, one of the things we discovered by trying a recommendations engine implementation on a slice of the site’s traffic for a bit was that what seemed to matter most for the purposes of the recommendation engine was simply that a user had any reaction at all to a video. It seemed that the vast majority of content space just bores any given person, but “passions predict passions” even when the passions have different valence (hate/love).
Maybe my experiences don’t apply here, but it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to imagine that OKCupid’s “stupid algorithm” operating on naive behavior could out perform algorithmically aware meta-strategy that “made sense” but hadn’t been validated with some sort of field experimentation :-)
I believe you can get yourself off the list as liking something, but only by selecting “not an interest” when presented with an icebreaker match based on that flag.
I, for instance, am officially off the lists as liking “having fun,” the phrase being included in my profile as part of a jab at people who say that they “like having fun.”
Ha—that’s interesting, although not too surprising. A lot of people looking at media seek out things they think are awful on purpose, to get riled up and then pass it on. (There’s an Abstruse Goose about that, although I can’t for the life of me find it.) I’d like to think it’s less true that people actively seek out dating profiles of people they think are horrible, but in my heart I know that it isn’t. : \
In general I would agree not to assume that their algorithm is wrong when they’re the ones with the data. But I still think it’s a better use of my time to find people who like what I like.