Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in July 2014 that “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was, admitting only that it was poorly communicated.” The dating site recently published a bold blog post called “We Experiment on Human Beings!” in which its co-founder Christian Rudder explained that this is just “how websites work.” Rudder has been quoted saying that “OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.” The post can be seen on OkCupid’s blog OkTrends, on which the company has displayed statistics and information gathered by analyzing and experimenting with users behavior. Rudder went on saying that “Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site.” He cited several OKCupid experiments, including one in which the company removed the photo of the users for only a single day and observed that the conversations subsequently went deeper than normal.
