Katie R
Katie R
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

It seems to me that the overwhelming negative response here belies your claims of successful beta test. But beyond that, you seem to significantly misunderstand the number of ways that visitors was used by your client base. Visitors weren’t just about identifying people interested in us.

  1. It helped users track and pre-emptively block creeps who continually create new accounts.
  2. Once messaging started, it helped us have an idea as to whether we’ve been ghosted or should give a little more time for a response before we give up.
  3. It gave us a sense of whether a mutual match was worth exploring. OKCupid has been around for over a decade and many of your users are long term. Which means that we have literally YEARS of likes built up. Being able to scroll back through visitors could give us some semblance of an idea as to how likely it is that the like was still meaningful vs. being a match that we received six (or sixteen) profile revisions ago.
  4. For many of us, even A-listers who can see likes, it helped us figure out if even a recent like had any validity. As i’m sure your research will confirm, people are known to try to “game the system” by swiping right on just about everyone until a mutual match appears. A like plus a visit helped us assess whether we’d been part of a rapidfire swipe fest or a more selective browsing that was more likely to have included reading profile details.
  5. And yes, it gave A-listers a lower pressure way to initiate interaction by revealing our visits.

I have to wonder who, exactly, you think your user base has been and who you expect it to become. There’s already been a massive proliferation of accounts who don’t bother providing any information beyond a single sentence. As a user who has been on OKCupid since the beginning, I am really disappointed that you continue to move toward a Tinderesque model that seems to prize rapid fire swiping over anything else. You have definitely made it less likely I’ll find value in the site, and more likely that I will delete my account. And I doubt you’ll have that much success pulling market share from your competitors, since plenty of people are already non-exclusive in their approach to dating site use.

    Katie R

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    Katie R