Dating by the Numbers: Why “hacking” OkCupid is a waste of everyone’s time
This data point is an outlier.
Is there no problem out there that can’t be solved by SCIENCE? Apparently not. Indeed, it has recently come to my attention that one heroic nerdy dude actually used MATH to get a girlfriend. No really, an actual girlfriend. As in, a living human female that he’s seen naked. (We can only presume.)
Wired magazine found the story so astonishing that they devoted an entire 3000 word feature to it.
The piece tells the tale of Chris McKinlay, then a grad student in mathematics at UCLA, who went searching for love on OKCupid, a dating site that uses daters’ answers to various questions, ranging from silly to profound, in order to calculate a “match score” that supposedly measures your compatibility with a potential date. But McKinlay wasn’t getting as many dates as he wanted.
So he decided to “reverse-engineer” OkCupid. As McKinlay — ever the romantic — explains on his own blog, he used his mathematical skillz to analyze the “high-dimensional user metadata in [the] putatively bipartite social graph structure [of] OkCupid,” and adjust his own profile accordingly.
Basically, he crunched a lot of numbers to figure out how the kinds of women he was most interested in — in particular one data “cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists” — tended to answer questions. And then he fiddled with his own answers — and his choice of which questions to answer — so he would score higher match percentages with them. Ta da! Suddenly he had more matches.
He claims not to have answered any questions dishonestly, but as Wired notes “he let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.”
It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that fudging your answers so they’re more like those of the women you’re targeting will make it look like you’re more like them. You can pull this same trick in real life by pretending to agree with everything a person says.
But you don’t have to be a psychologist to see that doing this kind of defeats the purpose of OKCupid’s match algorithms in the first place. You’re creating the illusion of chemistry where there may be none. Essentially, you’re cheating, but in a really self-defeating way.
And by focusing so intently on statistically crunchable data, he also ignored a lot of the more intangible “data” that the profiles provide if you actually sit down to read them. The numbers don’t reveal anything about a person’s verbal charm, or their sense of humor. They don’t tell you about the interesting little details of the person’s life.
As Katie Heaney notes in a Buzzfeed piece on McKinlay’s strange quest:
[M]uch of the language used in the story reflects a weird mathematician-pickup artist-hybrid view of women as mere data points … often quite literally: McKinlay refers to identity markers like ethnicity and religious beliefs as “all that crap”; his “survey data” is organized into a “single, solid gob”; unforeseen traits like tattoos and dog ownership are called “latent variables.” By viewing himself as a developer, and the women on OkCupid as subjects to be organized and “mined,” McKinlay places himself in a perceived greater place of power. Women are accessories he’s entitled to. Pickup artists do this too, calling women “targets” and places where they live and hang out “marketplaces.” It’s a spectrum, to be sure, but McKinlay’s worldview and the PUA worldview are two stops along it. Both seem to regard women as abstract prizes for clever wordplay or, as it may be, skilled coding. Neither seems particularly aware of, or concerned with, what happens after simply getting a woman to say yes.
And that’s where McKinlay’s system seems to have fallen down entirely. Though Wired is eager to present his “hacking” as a great success, it took McKinlay more than 90 dates — 87 of them first dates with no followup — before he found his current girlfriend.
In other words, his wondrous system produced a metric shit-ton of “false matches” and wasted a lot of people’s time, including his own.
And in the end it wasn’t his data crunching that brought his girlfriend to his door; as Wired notes, she found him on OKCupid after doing a “search for 6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA.” Happily for him, McKinlay already matched her preferences in these areas. In addition to appreciating his height and eye color and location in physical space, she apparently was also charmed by his cynical approach to OkCupid dating, so maybe they are a match made in heaven, if not in his data crunching techniques.
While McKinlay was going on first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date, people I know have found wonderfully compatible matches — and long-term relationships — through OkCupid without having to date dozens of duds along the way.
How? Partly because OkCupid’s match algorithms led them to some interesting candidates. But mainly because they read profiles carefully and looked for compatibility in the words, not the numbers.
Posted on February 7, 2014, in okcupid, PUA and tagged okcupid. Bookmark the permalink. 728 Comments.
I thought that what you see as your match with someone is different to what they see as their match with you, because it gives more weight to what you want. So you’d have to match what you say you are to what they say is important, not vice versa.
@Kim, ah, and IMO that makes it even worse. So what he did was make sure he was higher than he should be in their search results, rather than simply affecting his search results.
Pond scum, like cream, floats to the top.
Kim — you’d have to do both really, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt with regards to “I didn’t lie”. Which is, admittedly, probably bullshit.
But I’ve answered some in the weirdest manner possible because there is no “anything but that answer” option — check all the others and make it mandatory. And I am MASSIVELY annoyed that there is no actual “no, really OKC, this isn’t a ‘keep an open mind’ situation” — meaning if you check the boxes that you want a partner who thinks ze is never owed sex, and make it mandatory, you may still get matches who think rape is okay. Just to top off that shit sundae, on the app there is no way, at all, to see the answers to questions you marked as important or the questions with unacceptable answers (both are things you can view online, if you actually look at their answers to the questions). And, of course, that one, and a few other really skeevy ones that amount to “is rape okay if…” are kinda obviously asking that so rapists are prolly gonna lie anyways. Not all of them, sure, but exchanging real names is your choice and they don’t do background checks or anything and the goddamned safety tips link is tiny and in the footer. Call me paranoid, but “we have no idea if this person has been arrested for rape or murder” should be highlighted. There is a question about whether you’ve been arrested, but it’s yes/no, so rapists and drug users would put the same answer, if truthful.
Now, I’m sure most OKC users are fairly decent people, but the answer to how much do they care about their users safety seems to be “not very much”. Point here, besides that I’m cranky, is that it’s no safer than meeting anyone else you met online.
This creeper is definitely a creeper, and I apologize if my obsession with math made it seem like I thought otherwise.
When my friend and I were using OK Cupid at the same time, this was a bit of a problem because we got mostly the same guys for matches. More than once we both went out with the same guy without realising til afterwards.
This:
combined with this:
Suggests that UCLA computers were used to do all this unethical data collection/botting.
I wonder what the university’s policy on this is.
Do you remember when there was a big fuss about some dating site (not OKCupid) making at attempt to screen out convicted sex offenders? There were actually some dumbasses getting all “hey, convicted sex offenders need love too, don’t they deserve a second chance?”.
Not from me they don’t.
I’m happily partnered and don’t use dating sites (plus I don’t live in the US) so I don’t have a kitty in this race, and I read this as a fucking guy who feels entitled to do whatever he wants, with the end justifying the means.
It sure as hell sounds like pseudo-mathematical game. And I saw pseudo, because he fiddled with his clusters rather than doing any sort of machine learning improvement.
The Wired article is written by someone who doesn’t understand the first damn thing about maths, or stats, or even freaking programming. It’s like 50 Shades of Python.
*…say pseudo…*
You’d think Wired of all magazines would be able to find a writer who knows how to math.
It would be really interesting to get a female machine language programmer/journalist to do a write-up.
@Kiwi Girl, “incidental personal use” of computers/networks/peripherals is okay by UC policy. This is really a good thing (i.e. there are better grounds to criticize OP on).
Ewww, in public?
What kind of fucking idiot…how is it contentious that convicted sex offenders should have to disclose that if using dating sites?
Oh, and clustering – the results can strongly depend on the particular clustering method used (there are quite a few) as the first result tends to be the exemplar (i.e. the most different to the other clusters’ exemplars) and then each cluster builds based on inter-cluster and intra-cluster distances. Each clustering method has its strengths and weaknesses.
/sigh and rolls eyes It’s another “worship at the altar of naive machine algorithms” piece that focuses on *omigosh BIG DATA* and ignores anything associated at the science. It’s a breathless gush over him botting a website, faking his profile preferences (but mathematically based on clustering results, so that’s fine), and look pretty graphs.
http://simplystatistics.org/ has had some great posts on why BIG DATA still needs appropriate statistical treatment, an aspect completely ignored by the fawning Wired item.
Cloudiah — agreed but I would think incidental means email and online games, not something requiring that much processing power.
You know, I’d say that BIG DATA needs more analysis that little data, just because with small enough data sets you can sorta eyeball trends. Totally not a statistical method, but can help give you an idea where to start.
@cloudiah, botting and crunching “6 million questions and answers from 20,000 women” possibly is a bit outside of incidental personal use. And I have criticised the OP on other grounds too. As I have said before, I think this behaviour is unethical, and I find him creepy due to what he’s done.
Yelp, that’s an average of 300 questions per woman. Seriously? Or do people answer subsets of those 300 questions?
This thread is missing something… like a recipe! I’ve been craving these, so off to find some vegetarian short pastry so I can give them a try:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/collections/recipes/fly-cemeteries
And here I was thinking they were Cornish, all this time.
Last post from me, and … he’s written a book for sale on Amazon called “Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid” published 4 days ahead of the Wired item.
Marketing.
He’s creepy, but given the overall processing that is going on at the UCs this is kind of a drop in the bucket. I just think there are better grounds for criticizing him. (I am saying this as someone who’s had to spend time defending people using UC’s processing power for decent if not UC-endorsed ends. Given what I’ve seen, more transgressors “mis-use” that processing power for interesting/decent purposes than for creepy purposes.)
So just a PUA-via-maths type, really.
Blech.
@Kiwi Girl
There are thousands of questions, most of which are user submitted. But there are a bunch of questions (300 does sound right for those) which are from the creators of the site, and they are presented first, so most people answer those. It’s really easy to sit there and answer loads of questions without even noticing how many there are.
@Kim, thanks for the explanation. It sounds like a looooooooong Myers-Briggs test with the added bonus (!) that you get creepers hitting on you.
Hee.
I would just like to say, that at least two of you have dirty minds!
You just noticed? :P
A guy found a way to improve his matching chances. He went on a lot of first dates. He He didn’t present himself to be something other than what he was.
So big frigging whoop.
Where do you guys get the right to call this guy entitled, creepy etc.
There has never been this sort of backlash against Amy Webb, who basically did the same thing. Or for that Canadian girl who went on loads of dates just to get free dinners. So what are we looking at here?
**A guy found a way to improve his matching chances. He went on a lot of first dates. He didn’t like some, some didn’t like him. He says he didn’t lie about his answers. He didn’t present himself to be something other than what he was.
I’m just glad I don’t have to date anymore. The technology seems to make it even more tedious and exhausting than it used to be.
Shadow Nirvana perspicaciously points out that we have violated the cardinal rule of discourse: Any disapproval of a man must be accompanied by an equal or greater disapproval of a woman.
And Shadow Nirvana lies:
Yes, he did.
Actually, my first point is he did nothing to make him worthy of the denigration in Heaney’s article or this one and the comments.
But okay, let’s focus on that. If we are criticizing people who try to use the system to their benefit, but the criticism is of a guy whose crime is not even close to what has been done before him, we can assume it’s because of his gender. Otherwise there would be criticisms of the examples I’ve given.
Gaming the system is considered a bad thing by ethical people even when it’s not about dating.
Well, fuckaduck. I checked my denigration worthiness meter and everything! Maybe it needs to be recalibrated.
Oops. forgot to ask some random dude on the internet if we had his permission to mock again.
Also “using the system to his benefit” is a lovely euphemistic way to say cheating.
Do you guys know what else is “using the system”? Updating your profile a lot by small amounts, rotating your pictures, using 97 words instead of 110 etc. All of these will get you to show higher on compatibility lists. Even above people who have higher compatibility than you. The system isn’t some sort of infallible entity that gives you the best or even optimal results. The guy just showed that he worked out a good portion of how things work.
Also, you guys can choose to use your criticisms with as much bias as you can. Just don’t be surprised when someone accuses you of intellectual dishonesty.
Cheating? No. Not cheating. Cheating would imply that what he did actually worked. What he did was a bunch of pseudoscientific bullshit. Then he wrote a book about it. Then his publisher sent a press release to Wired. And one of the writers at Wired was feeling too lazy to do real journalism. And then we read the article the lazy author wrote about the bullshit artist. At no stage in this process did anyone with credentials actually verify that what he did worked.
Shorter Shadow: two wrongs make a right.
Not a strong argument there dude, either from a formal logic or ethics standpoint.
“Also, you guys can choose to use your criticisms with as much bias as you can.”
Fucking words. How do they work?
k-modes clustering = lets the computer algorithm decide the number of clusters, as well as naively filling each cluster with “like” observations. Then, like factor analysis, look at the results and come up with some *post hoc* naming summary as to the fits. It’s also going to find a lot of accidental correlations of attributes within the groups.
I mean seriously:
Even bloody horoscopes give more groups than this. So “heterosexual and bisexual women between the ages of 25 and 45″ can can each be categorised into 1 of 7 groups.
With the results, his noise-to-signal ratio was really bad. Which suggests that, as delphi has pointed out, that the algorithm was shite.
/eyeroll
But Shadow, I wouldn’t expect you to understand any of this, or the (lack of) ethics either.
Uh, yeah he did? That was the entire point of what he did, misrepresenting himself to get matches. “B-but a woman did a bad thing somewhere” doesn’t actually make him go away, y’know? Why try to change the subject from discussion of him? Why be kneejerk defensive of him? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world but it is somewhat creepy to game results like this. What about those 90+ women who went on a date with him thinking he was a genuine match when no, he had played with the system to get a date where he otherwise wouldn’t? Does it matter that he wasted their time and got their hopes up? Again, not the worst thing, but misleading, and it raises flags among commenters here because there is a worrying tendency for women to be depersonalized while they’re being pursued. She’s part of a data cluster, or she’s a nice ass to be stared at regardless of her discomfort, or she’s identical to all other women who all run on the same algorithm that can be cracked it you do it right (PUA scripts), not an individual person with feelings. “It was to get dates” isn’t a good justification for anything.
Sorry, you’re right. I should have said *tried* to game the system.
shayla, great comment.
Presumably shadow nirvana doesn’t see what the problem is with lying to and dehumanising women. It’s not like we’re people, after all.
I have a feeling we both do the same kind of work, kiwi girl. Your criticisms are the same ones I have. I’ve just seen so much of this lazy “Big Data” pseudoscience, dissecting the specifics of it makes me want to put my fist through a wall.
Do you know about “boosting”? Cause that’s another buzz word he used with a lot of bullshit behind it.
thanks kittehserf!
And comparing things like frequent updates, rotating pictures, and so on with this… as with everything else there is a range of behavior that runs from completely innocent to awful, and those little strategy tips are waaay closer to the completely innocent side than this is, which some people have said starts crossing a line for them. Taking a photo on your best day from the best angle and using a stock photo may be in the same category of “present your best image” but they are different actions and people are allowed to feel differently about them. A pretty good measure is… would your dates be unsettled to know what you did to get that date?
It seems that he was just trying to get more matches and his algorithm was set up to agree with things he may have had a more neutral feeling about so it didn’t matter to him much. That’s not really the same as lying besides the fact that many people sort of lie themselves about what they like probably because they can’t figure out what they really like when filling in the questionaire and just have to answer in some way.
These dating site are ridiculous anyway because on paper it may appear that two people are compatible, assuming that they both answered honestly, but in person they can’t stand each other. Then you have people who appear to be opposites but get along perfectly. You can waste a tremendous amount of time going on dates and it probably makes more sense to just talk to people in real life who appeal to you.
“Taking a photo on your best day from the best angle and using a stock photo may be in the same category of “present your best image”
That would depend upon how much the photo deviated from what you really look like. If it doesn’t look anything like you or if you use a stock photo then that’s lying. It doesn’t make any sense because when you meet the person they’ll see you were lying. It may be better to use a picture that looks worse than you really look so the other person is pleasantly surprised.
Are you trying to not be taken seriously? Like Delphi said, “fucking words, how do they work?”
“Also, you guys can choose to use your criticisms with as much bias as you can.”
Impossible to diagram and yet carries and indignant tone. What a winning combo.
So this dude worked really hard, not smart, trying to game a system that didn’t need gaming in the first place. I bet he’s a joy to work on a project with IRL.
Shadow Nirvana: whine moar. Did you read the header of this site?
This Chris fellow sounds like a Nice Guy who gets put in the Friend Zone a lot. Poor Chris! Fortunately, he managed to hack the esoteric mechanisms by which a Nice Guy can get a date with Women, those strange things from planet Venus. Now far less women will want him in their Friend Zone!
Ya know I was going to do a post trying to get Shadow Nirvana to see things from a different point of view but I don’t think it’s worth it.
This person answered the questions based on how his computer told him he would get the best results in his target group. Whether they were blatant lies or just stretching the truth he still manipulated the system to get women to do what he wanted, in this case go on a date with him. He didn’t tweak his profile to attract someone, he changed it based on what he thought they wanted to hear.
Manipulating the system to get other people to do what you want is wrong. It’s wrong if you use a computer to accomplish it, it’s wrong if you use negging to accomplish it, it’s wrong if you tear down their self esteem to accomplish it.
Heh. As other people have said, no. Pretty much one of the only ways that profiles can be blocked from being seen is this. If you identify as a queer person on the site, there’s a box you can check so that you aren’t seen by straight people. And that button is like magic in making sure the type of “Roosh is my God” assholes who message every woman on the planet never see you.
So unless the “algorithm” told him to pose as a bisexual, then he got no “benefit” out of this other than subjecting a bunch of women to some asshole trying to “game” his way into getting a Manic Pixie Dream Girl like on the TV.
Also, what is with geek culture still pretending that dating is this mystical and impossible to navigate unknown land you need to use guile and trickery to navigate?
A huge number of big geeky things have gone mainstream. There’s a massive number of geeky women out there and non-geeky women who like geeky men. “Geek gets date” is not a news-worthy event and hell, probably never was a noteworthy occurrence even back in the days that geek interests were viewed akin to satanism.
And it’s extra amusing that him trying to game the system nearly fucked him over with the woman he actually did end up having some chemistry with, because if he’d just presented himself as cynical and as shallow as he was right off instead of trying to pose like someone interesting because he thought that would magically capture MPDGs who would fix his fucking life, then the person who was actually interested in what he was would have been more likely to find him faster and he would have had more dates with people who would appreciate his cynicism and height/eye color/location instead of wasting his and everyone he dated’s time and energy.
And in case some “drifting into PUA” idiocy is reading this, hey, you know how you can get a date with myssttteeeerrrrious dating sites like okcupid? Go on OkCupid, be brutally honest with every question you can and be honest on your profile about who you are and what you are looking for. Don’t game, don’t front. Be who you are. And take that fucking risk with your self-esteem for once in your fucking life.
And you know what? You’ll start finding the algorithm pushing you towards some people that look pretty cool and who see you as pretty cool. You’ll even have people messaging you and asking if you want to go somewhere sometime.
It’s not effing magic. It’s not sorcery.
Anymore than getting friends requires trickery, guile, and acting like it’s totes for real the hardest thing ever.
So updating your profile by small amounts is comparable to hours of math? Cuz it seems to me that going through other profiles and going “how did I forget to add that movie? I love that movie!” is nothing like this.
Oh and I just did some quick math, if each question takes an average of 20 seconds, which feels about right as a LOT of them are instant answers (a quick look at my answers and the first four are whether you’d consider a poly relationship, are you Hindu, can atheists have morals and do you have kids). That works out to a bit under two hours. And that’s my high end guess in average times. If you hit skip quickly on ones you have no strong feelings on and average more like 10 seconds, it’s 50 min.
Not really a terribly long time if you’re actually trying to find someone who you have shit in common with. Less time than sitting through a movie it turns out you hate!
Kim-
Pretty much. A lot of the algorithm matching you see is based on what you put as important and what they see is based on what they see as important.
So, to point out the fact more directly for some of the doubters on Mr. Douchebag, that means he couldn’t have at all made himself “look more appealing” by futzing with the “importance settings”. He could only do so by changing his answers from what were true to what he thought his intended prey would like.
In short, he invented a way that flattered his l33t hacker skillz to essentially lie about having a metaphorical big penis on a dating site. Revolutionary. And yeah, completely counter-productive even to himself.
But that’s pretty much how all PUA type shit sustains itself, ignoring the massive reality of how it doesn’t work to glomp onto the one or two exceptions that roll around for reasons other than the toolbag method he used to justify the system and justify promoting the system among other lonely people who want a way to avoid the vulnerability and emotional risk that comes from putting yourself out there honestly even though that’s the thing that actually works.
Argenti-
Yeah, you’d think so, but you’d be shocked how many people give the rapist answer anyways. I remember when niceguysofokcupid was still a thing, the number of assholes who had something complaining about the rape question being an obvious weeder question for rape in their profile or in the comment of the questions who nonetheless answered it in the rapist way because… reasons.
It’s not perfect, but as weeder questions it definitely provides very good warning signs in the form of low compatability scores people who are likely to be boundary-testers and other harassers or rapists.
Kiwi Girl:
You mean cats aren’t supposed to have standards as long as you act nice at them? What do you think they are, pet animals?
Shadow Nirvana-
The only way you can improve matching percentages for other people is to answer a different answer than you did before.
If you are answering differently than you would normally just to get around weeding questions and things that are important to people in order to get dates with people who are going to hate you, then yes, you are presenting yourself as something other than what you are.
And that’s just fucking stupid because the way OkCupid works, the thing that makes it better than going to a bar is that it lets you know whose like you and like what you are looking for and lets them know if you are like what they are looking for.
It’s a tool to let you see profiles and meet people who are more likely than average to be people you can have a good time hanging out with and seeing if you have romantic chemistry or sexual chemistry with. That’s it.
So yeah, he’s putting a lot of spin and way too many unethical manhours to stumble on the idea of just lying on your okcupid profile. Whoa, radical.
Yes! That’s the main point about this for me… he took the big draw of the site, that two people can meet based on mutual compatibility, and broke the compatibility system so he could date based on his wants only, not giving the women a chance to decide based on his honest profile. And surprise, it didn’t work.
Shadow Ninja-
No. It really won’t. Those factors are not counted as part of your compatibility rating, because frankly, why would they be. What do they have to do with whether you are similar people who are probably going to like hanging out.
You are actively lying to defend something that it’s really, really weird for you to be defending this personally and this vociferously.
Hey, SN, you know how you can get a date using OkCupid? Present yourself honestly and state what you are looking for in clear terms. Don’t try and shape yourself into what you think people want. Just be honest.
For fuck’s sake, if you can’t be honest on a site where you have a layer of pseudonym and protection from immediate bodily response protecting you, then you as a person are not ready to date anyone.
And you don’t need “game” or “mathematic tricks” to make up the difference, you just need to actually be willing to be the minimum amount of emotionally vulnerable.
Clearly, OkCupid needs a new category: “Men Seeking Putative Data Clusters”
shayla-
But-but-but women aren’t real people, so like it shouldn’t have affected the data. The data is perfect. The sorting method is perfect. He is perfect! I mean, it’s not like there’s a giant red flag here that reveals his main problem with women. Like his treatment of women as pokemon cards to be collected or his over-estimation of his own abilities or inability to understand the point of a system he wants to claim to be an expert over?
Nope, the problem must be in women acting in a “outlier” manner from the system by doing stupid meaningless latent variable shit as being actual human beings whose desires matter in a real and fulfilling romantic relationship.
I’m just in general disturbed by the concept of ‘hacking OKCupid’. You’re not supposed to beat the system. It isn’t a mate-bank withholding sex from customers unless they guess the right code or come up with some complex bank-robbery plan.
Although, with regards to the brutally honest thing, I answered honestly and publicly that I was a virgin (a 27 year old woman), and that got some interesting results. And boundary crossing. Creeps can be very polite and patient when they have a virgin fetish.
And of course I ask myself why people find it so hard, and then I read through the creepypms sub and remember that some people have the developed the equivalent of a mating call and dance that involves beating themselves senseless with a brick after flinging feces. Those people don’t need a hack, they need to learn some basic respect and boundaries.
rotating your pictures?
Do you mean like actually tilting the photos or changing them up? How does that get better results? Or do you mean camera angle? So many questions…
Anyway, what this guy did doesn’t rate too high on my scale to get pissed about. It’s sorta just dumb to me and perpetuates this myth that awkward or nerdy guys can’t get dates. It is a bit weird that it’s being portrayed as this dude’s triumph over the evils of online dating through his uber intellect. If your goal was 90 first dates, I guess he won. But, I think to a degree this speaks more to our societal conceptions of dating in general, that it’s some kind of game that you either win or lose at and I don’t think online dating helps that at all.
So you’re trying to use meaningless tweaks to get ahead of people with whom the woman actually has more in common with.
In other words, cheating.