I’ve been trying out OKCupid recently, and while entire essays, if not books, could be written about the experience, the questions it asks, and the way it asks them, is an issue for me. It’s not that the questions are weird or repetitive, or seem bizarrely unlikely to result in reliable rankings, all of which is true, but that the manner in which the questions is phrased is technically poor.

First thing to review is how OKCupid asks questions. There’s a bunch of questions, you pick one answer for you, then pick as many answers as you like that are acceptable for a potential match to give. My first issue is simply with the phrasing. Many questions ask if I would “consider” doing something. There seems to be a wide range of interpretations of what consider means.

The next issue is that many questions are too indirect, like “Would you date a smoker?” I don’t smoke, but I may say yes. But another non-smoker may only put no as the acceptable answer, rejecting me even though I don’t smoke. The direct version, “Do you smoke?”, seems like a major improvement. Lots of questions are like this. They seem designed to determine not just how intolerant I am, but how intolerant my match must be. The fact that people who are 100% compatible but differ only in their tolerance for incompatibilities could be rejected seems like a flaw to me, but maybe that’s the magic to a good matching algorithm.

Another drawback of some questions is the frequent necessity to invert the question when picking acceptable answers. A question about height that can be answered “I like to be taller” or “I like to be shorter” is a good example. The acceptable answer should be the opposite of the picked answer. In fact, there shouldn’t be a need to identify acceptable answers for such questions. People don’t seem to do a good job with the logic here. Arguably, I shouldn’t be concerned because I’m not much interested in people who fail at logic, but it clearly reduces the efficiency of the matching system as a whole.