A Facebook exec already apologized for the site playing with users' emotions, but OKCupid wants its users to know it's doing the same - and so is every other website on the internet.
The dating site published a bold blog post titled "We Experiment on Human Beings!" in which OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder explained that that's just "how websites work."
"OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing. Neither does any other website," Rudder wrote.
"Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out," he continued.
Tough love
The post appeared on OKCupid's blog OKTrends, on which the company has published statistics and information gleaned from analyzing and experimenting with the behavior of its users.
According to Rudder, Facebook didn't do anything wrong, and he seems to think the outrage over News Feed fiddling is both undeserved and overblown.
"Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," he wrote, citing several OKCupid experiments, including one in which they removed everyone's photo for a day and conversations subsequently went deeper than normal (even as usage plummeted).
In another experiment, they told people who were poor matches for one another that they were actually good matches, and those users got along great. It worked both ways, too: users who were actually good matches disliked one another when told they were incompatible.
Sure enough, that apologetic Facebook executive said much the same thing earlier in July.
"This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said while in India, admitting only that "it was poorly communicated."
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