Christian Rudder
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Christian Rudder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I really appreciate y'all inviting me on. I was like, I was telling Lindsay when she let me in. At first I was like, is this a scam? Am I going to get mugged if I show up to this thing? Wait, why? Because I was just like, no, not for, I didn't think it was real.
It's just, it has been a while since I've done like any media. And I was like, you know, it was just very extremely flattering.
And what prompted that? I'm curious. I mean... And you almost have much, much, much, much, especially you, such a thick skin. Like, I just was just like, I just can't deal with Twitter and like all of this stuff, just like people talking at you and about, it just bothered me. So I was like, you know what? I'm good. Okay.
Yeah, for sure.
Oh, gosh. So we started OkCupid in 2003, which is obviously so old for the internet. And it actually had its origins, we all worked at SparkNotes, the study guide site before, and we had a little part of SparkNotes called SparkMatch.
which was just like, cause we were like spark notes is for kids who aren't doing well in school or like high school, college, like what else can we do to keep them occupied on our website? And so it was just, you know, you look at, you fill out a profile, almost like a bio type of thing, you know, old school and you can just browse human beings instead of like content on the internet.
And that's like, In 1999, that was something that just didn't exist, right? And SparkNotes was super popular. It actually crashed because we didn't know what we were doing. And so we kind of like bookmarked that in our minds. And then when we left SparkNotes, we decided to relaunch OKCupid, or launch OKCupid, which is basically just like the same thing with a different name.
And it was just, you know, a place to message and find other people, which in 2003... you couldn't really do online. I used to try to find someone I knew in high school or something in 2002 or 2003 and just couldn't do it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like chat. Like IRC. Exactly. AOL Messenger. Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, you had to put in some time.
Right, it's an interesting thing to watch happen because it's definitely the case that In kind of OkCupid's heyday. And just for, I guess, background, you filled out a profile, you write about your favorite books, you write about, I don't know, what do you want out of life? Just, I don't know, whatever, how you describe yourself, what you're looking for. And then there's photos.
And then there were also match questions where it could be things like, do you want to have kids or... how do you feel about abortion rights? And including also crazy things like what kind of humor you might like or whatever. And everything's sort of compacted down to just the photo with Tinder and Bumble. And I think the online dating industry is kind of hurting. And I think part of it is that
that you've lost so much. Yeah, it's compressed. Yeah, it made it like this quick hit, you know, and people can go through and look through tons of hot people and have these like pinging and all of this stuff. But it's delivering probably worse matches or something now. Mm-hmm. So it's an interesting topic of conversation with my friends, you know, who helped me start OkCupid.
If the time is right to try to do something else and kind of read like telescope it all back out again, where you actually ask people to do more and say more about themselves and just like a cool selfie or whatever.
I mean, first of all, online dating is way more popular than it ever was. Yeah. No, but I'm saying actually. I know, I just don't want to sound like a hater. No, no, no.
Hateration is a great word. Don't, don't, don't. That's the best new verb I've heard in a long time. You know, I would give it like a C minus, I guess. I think with points for being more popular, which is, there is something inherently good about that. Like more people are using it. It meets more people's needs to some degree, right?
But I feel like there's a lot of people that are very dissatisfied. And if you go look at like the monthly active user numbers, like Tinder was at I think 13 million in 2019. And this is like eight now, which is like a massive drop off, you know, that's like kind of Facebook levels of sort of becoming a dinosaur. And that's like, it's just interesting.
It's a weird thing because there's definitely just as many single people as there ever were. And it's not like there's a plan B. The other apps are not really absorbing those missing, say 5 million people. Like the industry is just shrinking overall. Whereas you have, if you look at say Facebook and it's declined, then you had Instagram to sort of replace it.
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