Amy Webb Wasn't the Only One who "hacked" Online Dating

[fifregister]

So here's the woman who "hacked" online dating (thanks to those who gave me this link): link removed

 

And now a "lanky 35-year-old math nerd" REALLY hacked it by going on 88 first dates from OKCupid and finding a fiance: link removed

 

Very intriguing. Goes to show that men are much better at math. KIDDING. Chill people.

[deejay74]

So here's the woman who "hacked" online dating (thanks to those who gave me this link): link removed

 

And now a "lanky 35-year-old math nerd" REALLY hacked it by going on 88 first dates and finding a fiance.

 

Very intriguing. Goes to show that men are much better at math. KIDDING. Chill people.

 

Are you kidding about men being much better at math or that a "lanky 35-year-old math nerd" REALLY hacked it?

 

If you're serious about the former, care to share a link?

[FlashEng1]

If you're serious about the former, care to share a link?

 

link removed ;-)

[fifregister]

Oh sorry haha, in my excitement I forgot the link.

 

I need to hire this guy to run some algos for my own purposes LOL.

[FlashEng1]

Apparently he also has a book that just came out?? link removed It's only $3, so definitely gonna order it and check it out. Great article too.

[fifregister]

Whoa! $3 is a steal.

 

But to be successful in his approach, you actually need to know data mining, statistics, and be an amazing programmer to write all those bots. All of those skills could be applied to make millions, at which time you just have to sit back and wait for females to ping you. Females that are much hotter than the ones on OKC. At a faster rate than OKC.

[mfan]

Two things strike me here:

1. Is it possible to learn about online dating without creating fake profiles? Both Amy Webb and Chris McKinlay had to create some and even though they didn't "use" them, they probably both risked getting banned.

 

2. Why didn't Chris McKinlay write a program to scan women's profiles and generate responses? Did he really stay up all night and read through all those hundreds of profiles and sit there writing messages to the women by hand? No wonder his Ph.D. thesis was relegated to a side project. Seems like this guy could have easily generated a program that scans any profile and generates a human-sounding response. (e.g. "I see that you like [X] - me too! I have a funny story concerning [X] - I'd love to tell you sometime"). This would require just a list of topics and some canned responses concerning each topic. Profiles not mentioning any such topics would be routed through to Chris for manual processing.

[FlashEng1]

Whoa! $3 is a steal.

 

But to be successful in his approach, you actually need to know data mining, statistics, and be an amazing programmer to write all those bots. All of those skills could be applied to make millions, at which time you just have to sit back and wait for females to ping you. Females that are much hotter than the ones on OKC. At a faster rate than OKC.

 

Exactly my job ^_^. Minus making the millions lol.. But back when I was making a crazy salary for programming, exactly that happened, women at every turn. Course they were all there for the wrong reasons but hell so was I lol.

[deejay74]

I don't know, both techniques are fascinating but seem, "forced" or "not genuine". sorry, i can't find the exact words for it.

 

As far as the guy is concerned, after all that work, he admitted that his girl found him. So all that work was just for science?

 

Also, I'm having a hard time finding women that interest me on Match and OKC. It's amazing that he found over 80 women interesting enough to go out on a date with. Maybe I am too picky or he's not picky at all. All I know is, some days I scroll through hundreds of women and I can't find one that interests me enough to want to message. Maybe it's my area. I had better luck a couple of years ago. Not sure what happened.

[FlashEng1]

1. Sure, of course it is! But it's a very slow process as you have to do it manually. Aka - what everyone else on the site is doing. In order to run any form of a script or "batch process" the entire thing, you need Data, information. All of which is encrypted and protected from, say a hacker, who can connect to the servers and collect all the data.. if that were possible, Facebook for example wouldn't be worth $100 billion.

 

2. He spent his time coding the scripts to do so. He then wrote two generic first message templates that would be sent out to all of the women according to their segment. And the example you gave is basically what he did do. But before you can do that, it does take manual work.. Surveying if you will.. Before you can program a script to say something, you need to know what to say and how you can mathematically "say it." If that makes sense??

[mfan]

As far as the guy is concerned, after all that work, he admitted that his girl found him.

He optimized his profile so he would appear to be a 91% match for her. Otherwise she would not have written to him.

 

Also, I'm having a hard time finding women that interest me on Match and OKC. It's amazing that he found over 80 women interesting enough to go out on a date with.

Agreed - he must have very common values, because even with Match, OKC, eH, etc. I'm lucky to find 10 women every month that meet my search criteria, and that's before reading their profiles. There are lots of great women on there but they want children so I won't date them.

 

And anyway, he and Tien Wang have a long-distance relationship and she lives in Qatar??? This doesn't sound ideal to me at all, but I'm glad he's happy.

[deejay74]

So, don't you have to inject code into the programming of the site to do this? Wouldn't the security team at OKC detect Java script or any other code used in the profiles?

[FlashEng1]

So, don't you have to inject code into the programming of the site to do this? Wouldn't the security team at OKC detect Java script or any other code used in the profiles?

 

Nope You want to inject code typically for control. Either to control the site, or to (eventually) control the user visiting that site (think spyware).

 

Instead, what was done here is link removed. To get the data (aka, the answers of another woman), you will scrape the information from that page.

 

So for example, if I wanted to grab all of the people's usernames (if answered), age (if answered) and gender (if answered) in this topic alone, I would set up a script that will view the source code, sift through all of the outputted information (all the html code), and collect and save only the username|age|gender. Problem here is, the script will just scrape this page (page 2). So I then need to figure a way to connect to the server, and "follow the links" within this topic only, and not every link listed on this page. A site like OKC requires a user to be logged in to view the information. So you create a profile to allow the script to connect to and run, BUT, another issue you run into are server and security limitations like you can only run so many requests per minute before being kicked out/logged off automatically, etc. Hence the need for more profiles.

 

I hope any of this is making sense.. It's always been hard trying to break down technical things like programming.

[deejay74]

Totally makes sense. Thanks!