Well, this is disgusting.
I joined a dating site, OKCupid, early last week. (Stop chuckling. That’s not the disgusting part.) I’m not a big dating site fan, but a friend said it was fun, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m a explorer by nature. I try stuff. Anyway, OkCupid allows users to rate profiles they see on a five-star scale.
On Sunday, this message appeared in my Inbox signed by “OkCupid! Interns”. The subject line read, “We have data on your attractiveness”.
I’ll let you read it for yourself:
I am kind of floored that people have such low self-esteem that they respond positively to this kind of arrogance.
I’m not going to let popular opinion dictate what I might find attractive. After all, I’ve been known to have a taste for the eclectic. And I hate associating myself with any organization that professes such an elitist, shallow worldview. But to openly have this sort of structured vanity as part of your programming model? To assume that physical beauty is the only measure worth sorting by? It’s revolting.
When I received this message, I happened to be out to dinner with friends. “Go ask an ugly friend and see,” I read aloud. Everyone around me gasped in disgust. Then one friend said, not a little wistfully, that he’s on OkCupid but he hasn’t received that message. I felt simultaneously slimy and shallow.
Segregating the “ugly” people from the “most attractive” ones?
What are they thinking? This made me want to hurl my iPhone across the room.
A good friend of mine quit OKCupid.com the minute he got this message last year. And he’s hot! So much hotter than all those other hideous people.
Now he’s mad at me because I haven’t quit right away, too. I tell him that I’m having trouble penalizing all the nice people who use the site just because the site administrators have a crumbling value system. This makes me feel like a bad person.
So, well done, OKCupid. You’ve insulted my friends and diminished their respect for me. If there’s any consolation, it’s that all those real, substantive people in my life will be replaced by apparently prettier ones.
Well, that is disappointing. There is so much that I do like about the site (it is fun, approachable, unintimidating, and self-deprecating, and their blog is fascinating and edgy in intriguing ways), that it surprises me they would let something this offensive slip through their filters. While I met my main squeeze through other means, I have made friends through OkCupid, and am in the process of making a couple promising new ones this very week.
Hopefully they can smooth out this wart and stick to the parts of themselves that are pretty and good.
To summarize what I replied on your blog, how disappointing. I generally like them so!