[ View menu ]

Why Hide?

A while ago I logged on OKCupid again, after about a year and a half. Meant to look at their accounts, of course, but then I decided to answer the questions that had been added in all that time, do some more tests, even read a few profiles and so on.
I left my profile pretty much unchanged, only adding a bit at the beginning saying that what’s written there is about two years old and a link to my “Too Much Information?” post in the “The most private thing I’m willing to admit here” section. And this is what I’m wondering about.
A few weeks ago, they added a “stalker” section, where you can see who has viewed your profile. You can choose to browse anonymously, but they actually made it fair: If you can’t be seen, you can’t see who browsed your profile either. Find that nice, seeing as I kept muttering that instant messaging programs shouldn’t let you see who’s on-line when you’re invisible, to keep things fair.
Now I just compared something and am puzzled. In the past 13 days I got 12 visits to that page coming from OKCupid. During the same 13 days, only five people have visibly visited my profile and only one of them was from the same country as a person that clicked that link that day. Assuming Google Analytics didn’t make mistakes when it comes to visitor location, that means at least 11 people were invisible when they looked at my profile during this time. And even if Google Analytics did make mistakes, that still means at least seven people. I’m saying “at least” because this only counts those who made it that far, since it’s a long profile, and clicked that link.
So it’s not only getting the benefits of being invisible anymore, there’s even a price to pay for it, yet most people still feel it’s worth it. I don’t get that, so I’m curious… If any of you make it to this post, could you please tell me why that is? What’s there to hide? You’re looking at somebody’s profile, what’s wrong with that? Why shy away?

0 Comments

No comments

RSS feed Comments | TrackBack URI

Write Comment

Note: Any comments that are not in English will be immediately deleted.

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>