The destruction of OkCupid by Match Group looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.
OkCupid used to be the best place to match diverse people.
They crowdsourced thousands of multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter:
- Which answers you accept
- How important each is to you
- Your answer for the other side of the match equation
- Voluntary explanation
The match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex. "Friendship" contained ethics and communication style, so it also worked for business partnerships.
Then Match Group bought it.
For a while they let it be, but then they:
- Removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- Removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- Removed keyword search - no more finding niche interests not included in the questions, like "furry"
- Removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- Deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- Deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- Deleted all accumulated likes, which were the best matching people around the world with maximal couple/friend/sex partner potential except, for example, location for now. They broke the profile links, so bookmarks became useless.
- They delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven't been messaging in a while, as if that meant they're not a match - no, they have a temporary problem, such as life situation
- They police inconvenient statements in the users' introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer healthcare insurance CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing (for months) "fuck the healthcare system - make a better one" was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Some of those names are quite funny when read in other languages. In Portuguese, azar means "bad luck" and chispa means "get lost" (though spelled xispa). Both are not things I would expect a dating app to be named after.
And yet perfectly describe my dating life
In French, hasard, pronounced like azar, is just luck or randomness, neither good nor bad.