Matt you have some great points.

I have lurked so far in this subset of the open thread and am now willing to throw in a couple remarks on my view of OKCupid.

1.) The OK trends blog to me cannot be read as serious social statistics analysis. It's intent is to get hits and keep their sky high google page rank. It is almost entirely a marketing ploy, and I find it impossible to source them on topics like "what makes a good picture?", "what makes a good message?", "are you all a bunch of racists?", &c.

2.) I have used their site for a little more than a year. My experience there is almost entirely positive, but my expectations for it are small. I find the website gaudy and slowly loading, and have arrived at a practice of logging on once a week, on Sunday morning; I update my journal, answer any messages, and do a quick search. Many Sundays I see no point in sending anybody any messages at all. I only contact somebody if there is something in their profile which genuinely interests me and inspires me to write them a message which has at least one sentence in it which I like.

The vast majority of profiles have no such content. At least 80% of the time I go through a woman's profile and she does not have one item in there worthy of a comment. I read ten profiles this morning and sent messages to none.

3.) I have a theory that most of the women on OKCupid put almost no effort into it; they are not genuinely interested in meeting any of the OKCupid men; they are participating by some complex motivation somewhere between playing around in a virtual world and window shopping what might be out there on the off chance, extremely remote, that they decide they want to buy; and also to compare what is advertised in the virtual world with the reality that they see around them in the real world.

4.) If anybody wants to look at my profile, I am tgroupguy. I would link to it, but there are a couple things in my profile which are obviously not LessWrong mainstream. If you want to see it anyway, I would be interested in reading what you have to say. You may not want to post it here; if you send it to my okcupid box I will not see it until next Sunday morning, but I will respond.

(SarahC and Relsqui's profiles are very far above the OKCupid standard.)