The "You are Hot!" Email

Variations on a theme

One of the things that happens when you're a girl on OKCupid is you get bombarded with a million messages. Many of these messages are 10 words or less. Now for the first 2 weeks, all I did was delete these messages. The below messages are all distinct messages from different guys. And these are the entirety of the messages I received...

hi

hi :)

Hi :)

Hi

Hi!

Hi! How are you?

Hi, how are you?

hey there. How are you?

How are you?

Hi there, how are you? 

Hi there. How was your weekend? 

Hey there hows you're weekend going?

Hi! How is your week going? 

Hey! How's your week going thus far good looking? 

Hey how's it going?

Hey what's up how are you doing??

Hi how are you? What are you up to?

well hello there

hello beautiful how are u doing

Hello beautiful

odelay!

Wasssup

I was curious what these guys were thinking. Did this actually ever work for them? What kind of girls responded to these messages? So yesterday's experiment was to respond to messages like this and see what happened.

Well hello there

By the time I had gotten into work, I had 2 such messages in my inbox - "Good morning" and "Hey beautiful... how are you?" So I responded with "Good morning" and "I'm doing well. How are you?" They both responded back. It was obvious that they had only looked at my photos and not read my profile. One was in the midwest when I was very explicit that I was only interested in guys who lived in the actual city of San Francisco (rather than the broader Bay Area), and the other's profile photo was a shirtless selfie. My profile was also very explicit that you'd better be doing something pretty awesome and active to have a photo with your shirt off. No selfies in the mirror while you're flexing.

So I engaged these guys for 2-3 messages before I sent them a few questions...

"I don't usually respond to messages that are just 5 words. I have a few questions if you don't mind... 

Did you read any of my profile or just look at the photos? Do you generally send short messages? If so, why? Do you usually get many girls responding to short messages? Do you ever meet up with these girls? 

Have a great day!"

They didn't like this so much. The first - "Yes I read ur profile." I'm calling BS on that one, buddy. "Maybe ur trying to teach a lesson of sorts." Hmm... are you perhaps perceptive just a bit? And the second - "Yes, i read most of your profile, but it,was a bit long...and i did look,at your pics, more than once...lol". Well, at least he's honest. I told them both, "Thanks for answering my questions. Best of luck with online dating." They didn't like that too much either.

It was very obvious that both had written such short responses because they were incapable of writing longer responses of any substance. Both were attractive, if you were into what they were putting out there, so I assume this tactic actually works if all they're trying to do is go home with a girl who isn't so smart. Good for you for figuring out how to get what you want with the least possible effort.

Gaming the system

After posting on Facebook about how terrible most of the messages I've received have been. A former coworker told me it should get better after the "You are Hot!" email comes. What is this? This is new information. I haven't heard about this before. She said it took a couple of weeks. I was intrigued. I wanted to see if I could game this system somehow.

First I deleted all of my "this is what I look like when I'm not dressed up" photos and toned down any mentions of wanting a serious relationship. Then I signed up for OKCupid's premium service - A-list. With A-list you can filter your matches on more options like attractiveness. I started a new search. I filtered on guys with a high income, 28-40 years old, at least 6' tall and average rating of 5 stars. First thing that jumped out was all of the guys under 30 were looking for younger girls. Many of them had age preferences of women 18-25. I was not going to get 5 stars from them. I had to narrow my search.

I changed my search to guys 30-35. Then for all of the guys who actually lived in SF and I found at least moderately attractive, I rated them 5 stars. As expected, many of these guys who know they're attractive are also quite self-absorbed. If you have A-list you can see who rates you highly. All of the guys who were online who I rated as 5 stars almost immediately rated me highly back. This was working perfectly. In the span of about 10 minutes I had 30 new guys in my "rated you highly" list. A few minutes later I got the "You are Hot!" email. It also happened to be almost 2 weeks to the minute after I signed up so I like to think I would have gotten the email regardless.

The "YOU ARE HOT!" email

This seriously exists.

We just detected that you're now among the most attractive people on OkCupid.

We learned this from clicks to your profile and reactions to you in Quickmatch and Quiver. Did you get a new haircut or something?  

Well, it's working! 

To celebrate, we've adjusted your OkCupid experience: 

You'll see more attractive people in your match results.

This won't affect your match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match's answers. But we'll recommend more attractive people to you. You'll also appear more often to other attractive people. Sign in to see your newly-shuffled matches. Have fun, and don't let this go to your head.

Supposedly I will now get fewer "hi" messages from unattractive men. I will let you know whether that's true or not. For now, I'm totally letting this go to my head.