Hong Kong Hitch

OkCupid is a free online dating site, focused mostly on the U.S. and the U.K..  However, it has a nice sized pool of users in cities in many other countries, including Hong Kong.  Again, it’s free, so read on you cheapskate.

First of all, OKCupid seems to be the second banana of free online dating sites, trailing Plentyoffish in terms of total users.  Where it does not trail PoF is in the design of its website and the quality of its members.  The site design is much more attractive than that of PoF, who’s site seems to have been designed by some junior high kid during study hall.  Not only does OKCupid look more professionally done, but most of the pages are relatively uncluttered compared to other dating sites, both free and pay.

This quote from the OKCupid site briefly sums up what they do, and it is a fairly accurate assessment of what you can expect:

“What is OkCupid? It’s a totally free matching service. It’s also extremely accurate, as long as (a) you’re honest, and (b) you know what you want. We don’t claim to evaluate you perfectly, but we do claim to find someone who claims to fulfill your claimed requirements, exactly.”

Your free membership will get you access to most of the sites basic tools, including quizzes and matching features, and sign up only takes about a minute.  However, you’ll be asked to provide a lot more information later on and this leads me to another point.  After I had initially signed up, entering very little information in my profile, I got a message from some guy named “Chris”, asking me about my experience so far with OKCupid.  The real purpose of this email was clearly to politely encourage me to add more information to my profile.  While I found this annoying, since many people do sign up for sites and take a few days or longer to get around to really fixing up their profile.  So I want to say “Back off Chris.  I’ll get arund to it next week.”  But, I have to admit that sending follow up messages is not a bad practice for two reasons.  First, they clearly understand that having nothing  in your profile is not helpful to people trying to figure out if you’re a good match.  Second, I think it’s also an attempt to limit the number of fake profiles put up by scammers/spammers who will generally just put a picture and a one or two sentence personal statement and wait for people to email them.   So, this proactive approach gets them a bonus point from me.

Another plus is the matching system they have developed.  While do use some algorithmic mumbo jumbo to match people, OKCupid’s is not as annoying and ridiculous as that used by E-Harmonot.  In fact, they take a more facebook-like approach, which I find somewhat annoying, because FB is a constant source of irritation for me, but I have to admit it is not totally misguided.  Essentially, they allow users to create their quizzes and tests in order to determine who might be a good match.  So, rather than asking questions like “Are you a caring person?”, the quizzes are more likely to ask you what your five favorite movies are.  Many people think that kind of esoteric information is unimportant.  Believe me, it absolutely is not.  Rather than focus on macro level criteria in order t figure out if you have the same life goals, OKCupid is more focused on letting you decide whether or not you want to go out with someone on Saturday and if you think you’ll have fun.  It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement over the methods employed by sites like E-Harmonot and Match.com.

Now, let’s get to the part where they try to get your money.  OKCupid is free, and therefore ad supported.  However, the ads are not too intrusive.  That said, I still recommend simply sticking with the free membership.  But OKCupid does offer you the option to get “A-List” privileges, some of which are as follows:

- using the site ad free

- attaching photos to messages

- creating public photo albums

- give awards to others members (wtf?)

- store up to 5000 messages (again, wtf?)

- send messages to members with full inboxes

- save multiple search settings

And there’s more.  Honestly, it’s mostly stuff you do not need one bit.  For example, If you are spending so much time on OKCupid that you have 5,000 messages (!), you need to get out more.  And if someone has a full mailbox, trust me, they haven’t been on the site in ages.  And do you really want to create a photo album?!  But OKCupid is adopting the facebook model and running with it.  The main reason I am not complaining too much about these upgrades is that the price is low ($9.95 a month) compared to other sites with similar options.  And it’s totally optional, unlike pay sites where the “upgrades” are really essential in order to use the site effectively at all.