Sometimes, I love it when people take vast amounts of data and run trends on them. It’s amazing what sort of things come out of it. This is especially fascinating when a dating site does it such as OKCupid.
In all honesty, there’s definitely some things that you could generalize from both race and stereotype and it’s proven through data such as this. I’m willing to bet that if Match.com and eHarmony both ran trends on their own data, it would probably strike most of the same major points in their own tag clouds.
So in the area of “Stuff Asians Like,” you find that Asians like to mention their heritage (Taiwan, Chinese, Korean, Singapore, etc.) , the fact that they’re simple, and the usual stereotypical jobs along with mentions of food. Honestly, do Asians really go around talking about how they’re a simple Chinese guy who loves gaming and sashimi? Crap. I guess I fall into these categories. But what really caught my attention when scanning through the keywords, was the word “swingers.” Now, I suppose this could be the 1996 movie starring Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, but is it? Or is it dealing with sexual orientation and promoting the fact that Asians are in general a bunch of promiscuous pervs? I’ll let you make the call.
What is interesting from this particular data stream is that the breakdown consists of their own user base, but is vast enough that it can probably be a pretty accurate statistical analysis. I mean, over half a million users at random is actually a pretty good lot to choose from, wouldn’t you say?
