Hi, My Name is Kia.

Extremely Flawed Social Experiment: Day One and Two

Monday night at 7:30 or so, I uploaded Erin’s pics, answered about 30 or so of the match questions, and copy and pasted my exact profile, omitting a few things like a reference I made to South Park, which a few people have commented on in the past. Didn’t want to immediately tip people off - “Hey haven’t I seen this before?”

I was originally going to create a new profile, but the “results” wouldn’t be “comparable” since new profiles always get more traffic, you know, the whole fresh meat thing. So to “control” for that, I used my dummy OKC profile that, up until last night, had no profile info, no photos and was more or less invisible. What’s a dummy profile you ask? A profile made for the sole purpose of viewing certain people’s profiles without them knowing I’ve looked at it. It’s a stalker’s bread and butter.

But how will people see Erin’s profile? When you are active on the site, you show up in other users’ front page timelines. So, whenever you upload a new pic, answer a match question, or edit the text of your profile, you show up in a “recent activity” feed.

After uploading Erin’s pics and my copied profile, I also uploaded and new picture and answered some questions on my real profile so that I too would show up in the timelines.

Some numbers (I am only counting IMs and messages where the guy made first contact; any IMs or messages on my real profile from guys I had talked to in the past or who I contacted first are not counted)

1.5 hours Elapsed

Erin: 25 profile views, 2 messages, added to 2 favorites lists, 2 IMs

Me: 2 profile views, 1 IM

4 Hours Elapsed

Erin: 41 profile views, 3 messages, added to 2 favorites lists, 4 IMs

Me: 2 profile views, 1 IM (no change)

How many ever hours Elapsed between 7:30pm Monday and 5 minutes ago (I told you, completely sound scientific methods here)

Erin: 99 profile views, 10 messages, added to 3 favorites lists, 9 IMs, 1 Wink (a passive-aggressive way to contact people)

Me: 13 profile views, 1 IM, 1 Wink

The numbers aren’t shocking and really, don’t seem to be that outrageous, right? Well it’s not really the numbers that surprised (and enraged) me, rather the content of the messages. But we’ll save that for tomorrow.

Also, feel free to comment or ask questions or tell me how fucking dumb this is.

[Day Three]

[Day Four - Data]

[Day Five and Beyond]