The problem with OKCupid is the problem with the social web
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week. — On Monday, I tried to list some reasons why OKCupid's self-acknowledged experiments on its users didn't seem to be stirring up the same outrage that Facebook's had.
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece lands two months after Facebook's emotional-contagion study ignited public fury over experimenting on users without consent, and days after OKCupid openly acknowledged running its own experiments on users without asking — a confession Tim Carmody, guest-hosting kottke.org, treats less as a scandal than a symptom. His framing: the missing outrage at OKCupid exposes something structural about the social web itself, where platforms treat their user bases as test populations by default.
The timing sharpens the point. Facebook had just handily beaten analyst estimates for Q2 (reported July 31), the same week it forced Messenger downloads worldwide and pushed its Buy Button commerce push — evidence that user backlash over experiments was not denting the advertising machine. Concerns about Facebook's hold on its users go back years in this corpus — Doc Searls flagged the too-much-face(book)-time problem back in 2007 — but 2014 is when the platform-as-laboratory question moved from privacy circles into mainstream commentary.
First-order effects
- OKCupid's candid acknowledgment puts it under the same consent microscope Facebook faced, with the added awkwardness that it admitted the practice rather than being caught.
- Facebook emerges from the controversy commercially untouched — its Q2 earnings beat and aggressive moves like mandatory Messenger downloads show advertiser and investor demand absorbing the reputational hit.
Second-order effects
- Rival social and dating platforms now face pressure to differentiate on consent and transparency around product experimentation, since 'everyone does it' is no longer a defensible public posture once a peer says so out loud.
- Advertisers gain leverage from the earnings picture: with Facebook's numbers proving outrage doesn't move spend, platforms have little financial incentive to self-restrict experimentation.
Third-order effects
- If unconsented experimentation remains the industry norm, the likely endpoint is external imposition of research-ethics standards — disclosure rules or regulator attention to platform studies on users — rather than voluntary restraint.
- Trust itself risks becoming a market segment: platforms that can credibly commit to informed consent could charge for it, splitting the social web between surveillance-priced free tiers and consent-guaranteed paid alternatives.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are industrializing experimentation on their own users faster than consent norms, public outrage, or regulation can keep pace.