A day ago this post went up on Reddit and then got reposted to Hacker News, both sites I lurk on. I’ve been watching the comments with much interest: some admire the way this guy hacked OkCupid (it’s a social engineering hack, not an attack on OkCupid) – and some are strongly saying that it is unethical. Calling the guy a liar, etc. There are thousands of comments on this. He just Tweeted that the girl he “got” has deleted her OkC profile as a sign of his success.
Here’s what he wrote on Reddit if you’re click-lazy (or if the post gets removed):
A few months ago two friends and I decided to do something interesting. We live in a relatively small town. Not tiny, but small. On OkCupid we saw about 30 women from here, but they would not respond often. So we decided to create 50 fake accounts, all of them beautiful women that would divert attention. We meticulously constructed the profiles to look authentic. Then came the day to set everything in motion. My two friends operated the 50 accounts while I found the prettiest (real)woman I could and after a while decided to hit on her.
It worked. With everyone, particularly the hunks, occupied with fake women I secured a date with a woman who was most certainly out of my league. Two dates. Sex. Still seeing her, but wouldn’t want her or anyone else to know about how I got her.
I’m planning on automating this with some coding in the future so it will scale for when I’m in a small city or something.
To the ones questioning the morality of it I guess I’ll jokingly say all is fair in love and war! [Link]
What do we think? Is this a total work of fiction, or is it possible? If so, is this kind of cool, or not cool at all? How would you feel if you found out this guy was your new boyfriend?
Image by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.
As someone who has used OKCupid for a year now I have to say this is likely fake. There’s not a way to “distract” people because there’s a plethora of choice and no barrier to entry. It isn’t the same as physical retail, with limited shelf space and the ability to direct your attention with end caps and featured displays.
Random profiles which “match” you will pop up, and it’s very easy to click on them and respond, wink, etc. Two real profiles amidst 50 fake ones may help your odds, but it won’t make you the proverbial “last man on earth” so that you’ll be able to hook up sans competition.
I think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve heard in quite some time. Revenge of the Nerds Circa 2010. He used his intelligence to shift the supply and demand into his favor and then made the most out of the opportunity. Maybe a little unethical at first, but pretty much everything is unethical in some way or another, so it really doesn’t matter. Besides, after 5 or so minutes into the first date, it ceased to be an online date and became all about him, her and their offline chemistry.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Just because you can exploit the system doesn’t mean you should. When you do, you weaken society’s fabric as a whole. This is endemic of the political exploitation which has come to characterize America, and those that look up to it. Witness the fall of Rome.
If I could, I’d take my ball and go home.
For-profit or not, if I now know this kind of cr@p is going on at this service, why would I spend a cent or a second on it? I think the credibility of OkCupid has now been totally distroyed.
@Ben:
Just to set the record straight, OKCupid is absolutely free. That is the beauty of it.
I think these responses are all really interesting. I personally don’t see wasting people’s time or being an asshole or potentially affecting a profit margin, etc. as synonymous with unethical, though.
Nothing that this guy did prevented any of those other men from approaching this woman. I think that’s key. Also, nothing that he did forced her to respond to him, and he didn’t mislead her about who he was or his apparent genuine interest in her. I think it walks a tightrope thin line (and, again, probably crosses over when he uses her as an anecdotal data point without her knowledge or permission), but I don’t think the method itself is unethical just because it’s assholeish (totally a word).
One thing to remember: OKC is a for-profit site, ad these guys (if they exist) undermined that. They wasted the time of who knows how many people as well. Unethical.
Not completely skeevy, perhaps — it’s not like he lied to the girl in order to get laid — but it fails the “What if everyone did that?” test, so ultimately it’s unethical. IMO.
I don’t think it’s ethical to deliberately waste other people’s time, but then I guess misrepresentation of oneself can do this as well (women wearing makeup, inaccurate descriptions of weight, men buying conspicuous consumption items on credit, etc).
Btw, it sounds fake.
All is fair in love and war, they say, and if the guy is clever enough to get the girl when dozens don’t, then his genes are passed on, while others are socked out. In this cyber age, such tricks and tactics may be the way of success. Faint heart never won fair lady, they also say, and is there anything much fainter than putting up a few words on a website and hoping it will lure a beauty into your bed?
I think this is fake. It’s a lot of effort to set up 50 fake profiles with pictures. Also, if they don’t respond then the guys will move on.
I think the “antisocial dickhead” is a 17-year-old virgin who is spinning a fantasy. His scheme is far more effort than is necessary.
All a guy needs to do is to approach single women, treating them with honesty and respect. Use a variation of the line from Lyle Lovett’s Give Back My Heart: “What’s your name, my name’s Lyle” Carefully substituted YOUR name for Lyle’s. Women who are interested in dating will accept, and don’t worry about the rest. If the date goes well, you end up in bed on the first date, because who has time to waste three dates on someone who may be lousy at sex?
Is it ethical for one person to screw with the hard work of dozens or hundreds of other users in order to improve their own chances? Of course not. How is that even a question?
I found my current girlfriend through OKCupid, and it was hard to find a good match. I spent at least 10 hours creating and revising my profile so it would say exactly who I was, and I was able to find someone who is a great fit for me because of that effort.
How depressing, to think that my efforts might have been fucked up by an antisocial dickhead who’s willing to screw up the entire system for their own advantage.
This is a version of the “tragedy of the commons,” in which a shared resource is destroyed for everyone by individuals who don’t act in good faith.
Lol, very interesting.
I don’t think I see a huge ethical problem with it, though it does seem like kind of a douche maneuver. A super-creative, kind of hilarious douche maneuver that sort of brilliantly skewers the politics of dating.
Ultimately, he didn’t mislead the woman or misrepresent himself. If she hadn’t liked him on his own merits, she wouldn’t have gone on the dates with him, and if she hadn’t been into him and attracted to him on the dates, she wouldn’t have slept with him.
But…the part where he’s using her and some intimate information as a data point in all of these conversations without her knowledge or consent is sort of another story. I’m not quite as comfortable with that.
Stupid, and quite possibly fake.
Stupid, because for all the effort you put into a strategy like that, the most you can accomplish is that your target doesn’t have the option to decide between you and someone else. Your target still has the option to decide between you and no one at all. That strategy can’t assure you that your target finds the note you sent him/her interesting enough to answer, that they find your conversations interesting enough to meet up or that they find you nice enough in person to pursue this further. I also seriously doubt that it would work. Sending a message is almost no effort, documented by that fact that usually women get a serious amount of ‘first contact’ messages on OKCupid. So this whole strategy fails if your competitors simply contact *all* women in their area, the 50 fake ones and the 30 real ones.
As for the second part, I think it’s probably fake because someone who thinks that certain women are “out of (his) league”, who thinks he needs an elaborate scheme like that to get a date, and who doesn’t realize that not all women are interested in “hunks” must have a serious lack of self confidence and would appear as creepy in person as that scheme sounds, which makes the ‘success story’ highly unbelievable, as most people would pick the “no one at all”-option over someone like that.
Not ethical in the least.
Essentially what he said he did was commit fraud. When users sign up for an online dating service, there is the reasonable expectation that the people on the other end at least exist, even if we all know they fudge their profiles at least a little. By creating bogus profiles, (which is against the Unique and Bona Fide Profile section of their TOS) he essentially ruins the integrity of the service for everyone except himself for no other reason than not being able to compete against (in his opinion at least) more attractive men.
You can argue that his actions didn’t amount to much damage. His love interest may be livid at the fact that she missed out on potentially better suitors, but she can always dump his sorry ass and hop back online. What happens though, when every desperate guy makes his own plethora of profiles? We’ll have users creating fake profiles so that they can drown out the competition and focus on one specific user who is also fake because that profile was created by another desperate user. The utility of free dating sites grind to a halt.
I can’t see anything wrong here. As long as he didn’t Lie to her. All he did was make sure he had an open playing field for himself so he wasn’t lost in the noise. She met him and liked him enough to go out with him again. Liked him enough to have sex with him. Liked him enough to continue seeing him. Sure, he cheated but he didn’t make any one Go to the fake accounts. He set them up. The guys all swarmed to them. that was their choice. Of course if she finds out he should be upfront with her and tell her everything. then it’s up to her to decide if she could have met someone better, or someone worse or if she’s happy she met him.
It’s a little far-fetched… those two friends are two helluva wingmen but as long as the guy didn’t’ misrepresent himself it’s ok. No different from inviting sub-par or taken men and single women to a party/dinner, just on a bigger technologically driven scale. I’m not sure I’d be pleased if I were one of the women and found out, but theoretically it’s not the worst a guy could do.
Just because you can muck up something doesn’t mean you should.
Online dating is difficult enough as it is. For guys, it’s difficult trying to design a profile that balances being honest and truthful about yourself and your interests, against retaining some measure of attractiveness in a setting that thrives on anonymity and is inherently subject to system manipulation anyway (i.e. I really don’t think any human being is as artistically inclined or as charitable as the dullest OKCupid profile claims to be). I’ve heard women complain that the issues they face with online dating is just an onslaught of men who will contact them with almost generic-seeming emails, as if though they’re messaging every single woman on the site hoping for any kind of a response (which, I’m sure some of them are). But considering so many profile’s for women exist solely for data mining and spam, this only encourages men to fall back on mass-messaging, whether they want to or not. It’s just about the only way to get any responses.
So I don’t know. Internet dating is great in theory, because it gives you an opportunity to meet people based on their interests, rather than becoming attracted to them physically THEN finding out they’re devout Christian fundamentalists who support book-bashing and gay-burning. But in reality, the whole thing is subject to too much manipulation. I think what these guys did with their “hack” is really not that different than anyone who posts a woman’s profile to lure men to a particular website, or to obtain their information for marketing purposes. With that said, I also believe there’s a special level of hell reserved for anyone who takes advantage of another’s desire for companionship to their own ends, and that’s what these people do. Acts such as these only reinforce to most people that internet dating is a bust, and make it that much harder for people to meet one another.
I’d have to know more about this “hack” in particular, but I think much of life is “social engineering”. I also think the proof is in the proverbial pudding. He successfully got the dates. To me that means he got a woman to take look at him, that from his description, wouldn’t normally have. Maybe true, maybe not. So much of life is also about perception.
I suppose it might be cool, if it happened. Securing a date by creating phantom competition. As long as he never lied to anyone I can’t seem to find it morally reprehensible. Does creating phantom competition constitute lying? If his accomplices behind the fraudulent accounts can be considered “wingmen” in a large, online bar… maybe not.