Thursday, February 10, 2011

OKC is good for something ....

.... yeah, and that would be the occasional laugh brought on by sheer increduility at what their employees choose to do with the billion pieces of user-provided information they can sort and twist in any way they want in order to create entries for the site's "research blog":  OKTrends.

Topics of yore: 

"How Your Race Affects the Messages You Get." 
"Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex."
"The Case for an Older Woman."

Most recent topic: "The Best Question for a First Date:
"This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid's database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:  What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?"
Essentially, as they say later on, "the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep."

I'll leave it to you to read for your own gems of wisdom.  I, personally, have laughed until pain every time I have read this paragraph, which is only provided to give background context.
 First--define "easy to bring up"
"Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what's okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:
Q: If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?
Q:
do u own 3 or more dildos in your room?

Q: Do you hsve a desent job?
"I would go f***ing insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!"
Do read.  I mean, considering my angst-filled 2-year history with the site, if it can still provide something to joke about, you're going to have to trust me that it does.

It also, as always, reminds us all how much FUN! dating is.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I really liked their telling me what states and countries I should head to for matches and what states I should avoid. North Dakota was my number 1 match state and Slovenia was my number 1 country. Here I come!

Karin said...

@Jen -- I've been to both places and both are pretty cool...you should at least think about it. :-)

AJ said...

Well, it would make an interesting reply to the typical question, "So, what brings you to ____?" Not a job, not for school...