<story><title>The Tyranny of the Marginal User</title><url>https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lr4444lr</author><text>I met my wife on OkCupid.&lt;p&gt;The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that&amp;#x27;s a real shame.</text></item><item><author>wbobeirne</author><text>I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It&amp;#x27;s not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.&lt;p&gt;OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder&amp;#x27;s trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes &amp;#x2F; no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.&lt;p&gt;I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sneak</author><text>A big thing to consider is the fact that everyone got online all the time during the enshittification phase of OKC - it wasn&amp;#x27;t just OKC&amp;#x27;s userbase, but it was the median of the whole internet that got dumber and less sophisticated&amp;#x2F;more basic.&lt;p&gt;When OKC was great, the random median many-hours-on-the-internet-every-day user was a lot better than it is today.  Now that&amp;#x27;s just a median member of the general public, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Tyranny of the Marginal User</title><url>https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lr4444lr</author><text>I met my wife on OkCupid.&lt;p&gt;The original format attracted a much smarter and more worldly crowd of women, to put it bluntly, than the other services. I exited the dating game before Tinder, but if OkCupid lost that quirky, artsy, college educated crowd in the chase to compete, that&amp;#x27;s a real shame.</text></item><item><author>wbobeirne</author><text>I worked at OkCupid from 2013-2017 and totally resonate with the author that mid-2010s OkCupid was a really special product, and that it took a steep decline as the decade went on. It&amp;#x27;s not entirely fair to say that the Match acquisition immediately caused that decline; I started a couple years after Match got the company in its hands, and only two of the original founders were still focused on OkCupid full time. But the product continued to improve and grow for years after that. There was very little top-down directives about how to develop the product during that time.&lt;p&gt;OkCupid had excellent growth in the first half of the 2010s, but as that growth started to plateau, it was pretty clear that the focus moved to following Tinder&amp;#x27;s trends in an effort to match their level of growth. But OkCupid was a really healthy company with great profits and low burn, being only a team of 30-40 people. It could have stayed the way it was and continued to turn a profit. But Tinder had shown that the market size for mobile was way bigger than the desktop-focused product that OkCupid used to be. The focus towards acquiring more mobile users meant stripping down and simplifying a product that previously demanded hundreds of words of essay writing, and answering hundreds of questions. The essay prompts became simpler, multiple choice asymmetric questions got deprioritized over reciprocal yes &amp;#x2F; no questions. And as a user, I felt the quality of conversations I had went down as most messages were sent on the go from people just trying to line up their weekend plans, instead of a deeply invested audience trying to form meaningful connections first.&lt;p&gt;I really miss working on the product OkCupid was when I started, and often day-dream about starting another dating app closer to its original long-form vision. But the worst part of trying to do that is bootstrapping users, and seems like the only ways to do that are either have a lot of capital, or shadier methods like fake profiles or scraping data off of other sites. Not really interested in raising or setting my morals aside to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>Yup. It basically started as a dating site by Brooklyn grad students, for Brooklyn grad students.&lt;p&gt;Grad students love writing essays. But if you want to expand, you have to face the fact that most people aren&amp;#x27;t grad students and don&amp;#x27;t love writing (or reading) essays.&lt;p&gt;The trajectory to &amp;quot;just another dating app&amp;quot; was inevitable.</text></comment>