Matching

OkCupid Adds Super Like Feature

OkCupid has made a lot of changes to its platform over the past year, especially as activity and subscribers on the app increased during the pandemic. Among the most notable changes are a new pricing structure, added features like DealBreakers, and the ability to match with someone from across the world.

The popular dating app adjusted its pricing tiers and did away with its “A-List” membership in favor of Basic and Premium paid services. (The free service is still available for those who don’t want to upgrade.) With a Basic membership, you can Like an unlimited number of profiles instead of waiting for Likes to reset. You also get an ad-free experience, according to the company’s blog. 

The company ditched its Intros feature, which means that non-paying members can no longer message another user until they have both Liked each other.

Tinder announced the launch of Vibes, an all-new event feature that presents pop-up questions on the app for limited periods of time to drive user engagement.

According to The Verge, Vibes events will occur once a week for about 48 hours. During the event, users are asked a series of questions on a range of topics, from pop culture to personal habits. If they decide to participate by responding, their answers will populate their profiles for other participants to see and only for a limited time (about 72 hours) before they disappear. 

The questions are intended to be conversation starters as well as fun and a bit insightful, like: “are you always 20 minutes early or ten minutes late?” Or this one revealed in an article by Tech Crunch: “How do you feel about cooking?” Participants can choose answers like “a nicer Gordon Ramsay”, “Low-key would rather starve”, or “For survival only”.  

Artificial intelligence is part of the dating app experience, but what most online daters don’t know is that it could be influencing your decisions about matches and who grabs your interest more than you know.

Researchers from the Universidad de Deusto in Spain conducted a study to find out how much of our current decision-making is driven by the information we are fed – specifically when it comes to AI. AI is the driver in matching algorithms on dating apps, monitoring your choices and preferences to better understand who you are, and then suggesting who might be a good match for you.  

According to the study’s press release, researchers provided participants with images of fictional potential dates as well as political candidates, and asked each person to choose, based on the images provided, who they would vote for or who they would consider dating, respectively. In some cases, AI would explicitly favor certain candidates by how accurate the match was – for example, offering that one candidate or potential date had 40 percent compatibility while another had 90 percent compatibility. 

Image: OkCUpid

OkCupid has launched a new profile badge for users to advertise their views on climate change in honor of Earth Day.

The dating app company will prompt its users with the question: “Are you concerned about climate change & want a profile badge to show it’s important to you?” For those who choose to answer in the affirmative, a Climate Change Advocate badge will be automatically added to their profile. 

In addition, these users will be featured in the Climate Change Stack (categories where users can easily search potential matches according to interests), and OkCupid also plans to donate $1 per profile badge to EarthDay.org, up to $25,000. EarthDay.org is the world’s largest recruiter of for the environmental movement, which began on the first Earth Day in 1970. 

WooPlus, an inclusive dating app for curvy people, is testing out its new live feature ‘Love Advisor,’ which aims to help its users find love and curb bad behaviors like ghosting and endless messaging that leads nowhere, according to the company’s press release.

Love Advisor is a live support feature that will help users better communicate when they are using the app, offering real-time guidance so they can avoid some common dating pitfalls. 

According to the press release, Love Advisor will provide:

Tinder has announced it will bring back its popular paid premium feature Passport for free, but only for a limited time. The promotion advocates for users to take advantage and enjoy “fantasy flings” while they can. 

Passport lets users to set their current location to any zip code or city in the world, allowing them to match with users in the same areas. The feature is usually a paid premium service, but Passport will be free for all users during the month of April according to CNet. 

The company said of the promotion: "it could be a way of testing the international waters while [users] wait for a vaccine passport.”