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Dating site OkCupid has four million messages every day. The co-owner of the portal, Christian Rudder, one of the few who has access to the content and can see the content of the correspondence (yes, yes, here it is, privacy on the Internet), decided to analyze all this unimaginable flow of information, full of timid expectations, unexpected revelations and desperate flirting. And what did he discover?
Since dating site OkCupid appeared long before the era of social networks and smartphones, the first messages posted there looked like real letters. The current messages, on average, «weigh» 100 characters, and site users have long been accustomed to this. The best messages, that is, those that received the most responses, consist of only 40-60 characters. And the time of their creation is calculated … in seconds. This was the first thing that surprised Christian Rudder (Christian Rudder), — how can you write so fast?
Explore the system
To understand this issue, he chose 100 messages: from the shortest, one character long, to the longest, 10 characters (do not be surprised, there are several “writers” on every dating site who are ready to bring down streams of lyrical revelations on the interlocutor about anything). The graph turned out to be revealing: the top corner was occupied by a love letter written in 73 minutes. It has never been edited and took about four printed pages. Note that it did not receive a single response. In the opposite corner of the graph — the bottom left — was a message that was edited and rewritten a total of 373 times until it took on its final form: «Hey.» It also remained unanswered.
Of course, these are extremes. Between them is the bulk of the messages, and the system shows that they were created by two keystrokes, but at the same time they consist of hundreds of characters. How can this be? That’s right, copy-pasteurs work in this territory, and their name is legion. Having once created some text, they saw that it works, and from now on they send it out to many women (or men). Sometimes, of course, slightly editing the message.
- Can true love be found on the internet?
Get a response
Not very pretty, right? But our second discovery is that such messages receive responses! Here is one of them — simple and artless, but very personal (if you do not know that it was sent to 42 women): “I also smoke. But I gave up when I went camping in May. And now I wake up and fuck — I want a cigarette again. Sometimes I dream of working in Mad Men’s office. Have you seen Le Corbusier’s latest exhibition at MOMA? Sounds intriguing. I recently saw Frank Geri (sp?) in Montreal and how he used computer modeling for a house in Ohio. The creator of the message wanted to make an acquaintance with a woman who, like him, smokes and is interested in art. What is «(sp?)» is indecipherable and undoubtedly adorns this uncomplicated text. What is the upshot? Five answers from exactly the type of woman he was looking for!
When Christian Rudder told his friends and acquaintances about the triumph of copypaste on his site, he was told that it was uninteresting, ugly and even dishonorable to do so. But language changes, writing and its genres change, like all living things, it takes on new forms, sometimes unexpected, sometimes ugly. There is the pinnacle of the epistolary genre, and then there is “Wanna talk?” (“Do you want to chat?”)… Or is the essence and form of human communication changing?
“Let me say that almost everything in my house and everything that is on my desk is a copy, one of the many created by someone in factories,” says Christian. — For breakfast, I wandered around among the same as me, and chose one of the same burgers. Templates work. Our smoking lover of the arts and hikers is doing what they did before him: streamlining effort, saving time, and harvesting his crop.
For more details, see the book Ch. Rudder «Who We Are When We ThinkNo One’s Looking» («Who We Are When We ThinkNo One’s Looking», Crown Publishers, 2014).