OkCupid gets better at making matches by manipulating user activity. (Screenshot)

Christian Rudder, co-founder of the popular online dating site revealed in his company’s first blog post  in three years that they too, conduct experiments unbeknownst to their users.

“It’s just a fact of life online…There’s no website that doesn’t run experiments online,” Rudder said, surprised as to the internet’s outrage over Facebook’s actions. 

Public outcry ensued after Facebook revealed in June that it conducted a psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 users without their consent. For one week, the site’s data scientists investigated whether they could manipulate users’ real-life emotional states and the content they post by using an algorithm that omitted content containing words associated with positive or negative emotions from users’ News Feeds. 

For example, OkCupid removed all pictures from users’ profiles on January 15, 2013, calling it “Love Is Blind Day.” Although overall site activity saw a marked decrease from that of a typical Tuesday during the photo blackout, OkCupid learned that people who did respond to first messages did so more quickly, the resulting conversations had more depth and contact information outside OkCupid was exchanged sooner. 

The post also describes, with accompanying graphics other experiments that the site has conducted.

“[We] don’t really know what we’re doing…Most ideas are bad, [and] even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out,” the post read.

Apparently, experiments like this are how social networkings sites figure out how to make their product better. Whether the Federal Trade Commission would agree, however, is a question left for another day. 

Reach Executive Producer Ashley Yang here, or follow her on Twitter.