created 2025-06-25, & modified, =this.modified
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History of Dating, Calling
From OkCupid dating history 2014. In the book Dataclysm.
OkCupid had a decrease in message length, corresponding with the release of the app store. Message length dropped by over two-thirds.
The messages that get the highest response rate are only 40 to 60 characters long.
The time spent composing,
I’ve added a diagonal line, and it marks the place where the two axes are equal — meaning that for the red dots along it, the text matched the keystrokes that went into it. Essentially, the sender typed what was on his mind and hit Send, no backspace, no edits.
I found it took the sender 73 minutes and 41 seconds to hammer out those 5,979 characters of hello — his final message was about as long as four pages in this book. He did not get a reply. Neither did the gentleman sender of B, who wins the Raymond Carver award for labor-intensive brevity. He took 387 keystrokes to get to “Hey.”
Crossing over to the top left you get physical impossibility, where the individual typed less characters than the message contained. They likely copy and pasted.
When the opacity of points is changed, you can see the divide between those two compose and those who copy and paste.
The messages themselves, even if templated seem idiosyncratic and difficult to imagine applying across multiple people (42 women)
I’m a smoker too. I picked it up when backpacking in May. It used to be a drinking thing, but now I wake up and fuck, I want a cigarette. I sometimes wish that I worked in a Mad Men office. Have you seen the Le Corbusier exhibit at MoMA? It sounds pretty interesting. I just saw a Frank Gehry (sp?) display last week in Montreal, and how he used computer modelling to design a crazy house in Ohio.
Copy and paste underperforms from scratch messages, but it always wins in replies by unit effort.