Chris McKinlay was just like thousands of other graduate students. He spent most of his nights chiseling away at his PhD thesis—an arcane treatise on large-scale data processing with supercomputers—living on a couple hundred dollars per month, sleeping in his cramped cubicle, and scrolling listlessly through online dating sites in search of love or, at least, a worthwhile diversion.
That is, until he hacked OkCupid.
McKinlay, frustrated by months of online dating with meager results, began to think about the complex algorithms that OkCupid uses to match compatible users. “The first thing I did was gather a lot of data from OkCupid and mine all that data for patterns,” he told NOVA. But McKinlay’s passing interest in collecting OkCupid data soon evolved into an obsession. “I started using all of my supercomputing time analyzing OkCupid match question data.”
Within a matter of months, the unassuming 35-year-old math whiz was the top match for more than 30,000 women on OkCupid. He was receiving up to ten messages per day (most men receive zero) and occasionally scheduling two or three dates on top of each other just to keep up with the demand.
Although the project involved pretty heavy statistical modeling, McKinlay says that his general strategy was simple: He first created realistic bots to mine information about OkCupid users in his area, and then used the results to optimize his own OkCupid profile so that he’d be automatically matched with the sort of people whom he wanted to date. But the hack worked even better than planned—catapulting McKinlay to the top of OkCupid’s algorithm. “I was, like, trending globally on OkCupid,” he says.
Even after news of the hack broke in early 2014, not everyone was impressed with McKinlay’s stunt. Hacking OkCupid, “reflects a weird mathematician-pickup artist-hybrid view of women as mere data points,” Katie Heaney wrote for BuzzFeed News. “By viewing himself as a developer, and the women on OkCupid as subjects to be organized and ‘mined’, McKinlay places himself in a perceived greater place of power. Women are accessories he’s entitled to.”
Regardless, McKinlay does seem to have ultimately profited from what was either a brilliant hack or a relic of the patriarchy. On his 88th OkCupid date, McKinlay met Christine Tien Wang who confessed to him that she, too, had manipulated parts of her online profile. “I spilled my guts,” McKinlay recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh I changed my profile too, in fact I wrote a whole bunch of natural language processing software to optimize it, and then I hacked all the match scores and I’ve been going on a date per day and I’m not sure what I’m looking for anymore but I think you might be cool. Is that, like, weird?’”
Perhaps it was—but not too weird for Wang. One year later, the two OkCupid hackers were engaged, and they’re still together to this day.
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