How the new pass button works (2024)

You’ve probably seen a new button on profiles: the pass button. If you don’t like someone or don’t want to see them again for the foreseeable future, just press it. Ba-da-boom-ba-da-bing, they’re gone. You will no longer see that person on the Search page. Passing in DoubleTake works the exact same way. When you swipe left you’re letting us know you’re not interested in this person, and don’t want to see them again, on DoubleTake and in Search.

This does not mean, however, they’ll be gone forever. We will recycle your passes as the number of people visible diminishes. So that person you passed on may pop up again, and you can re-assess. Maybe they’ve added a pic with their dog, or bettered themselves at a local dog-grooming school. Or maybe you’ve decided that you are willing to date a lawyer or a distant cousin. You never know! It can be worth giving someone a second look after some time has passed. We know this maybe changes how you’ve been using OkCupid, and since we want you to be in control, you can reset your passes at any time in settings.

One thing you’re not in control of, though: now we’re having all members like someone before they can message them.* Why? Strangely, there are people on OkCupid who message random people to tell them things like, “I would never date a woman with children,” or “I can’t believe you voted for Donald Trump!” While these messages only make up a small percentage of the interactions on OkCupid every day, we want to cut them out completely. We know forcing a like won’t entirely eliminate this behavior, but we think it will help. We also think it just makes sense, and is more similar to the interactions you have in real life every day. You like someone, you interact with them, and if you’re feeling good about that interaction, you ask them out on a date.

Fortunately, you can still control when you message someone you like. After all, we want to reward people who take the time to write a thoughtful message. So if you’re the type who does your liking on the morning commute but saves your messaging for late nights with a glass of wine and a thesaurus, you can do that. After you like someone, they will appear on your Likes page, where you can find your likes filtered by Mutual Likes and Who You Like. This page has all the people you’ve liked but have yet to message.

When you are ready to write that thoughtful message, here are a couple tips: Message someone who already likes you — they’re over 3x more likely to respond (and they have good taste). You also up your chances of a response by commenting on something you noticed on their profile; our creatively named profile commenting feature makes it easy to do just that.

So once you’ve thought long and hard about our advice, it’s time for you to send that message and then leave it up to fate — and your writing expertise — for when you’ll see that person again because, once you hit send, they’ll no longer appear in Search and DoubleTake. You see, we’ve spoken to thousands of members about their OkCupid experience and we’ve heard the same sentiment, particularly from women, many, many times: that they receive too many messages, often from the same person they’re not interested in. So we’re making this change with the intention to drastically improve their OkCupid experience.

We have a few more changes coming to messaging on OkCupid soon. We’re pretty excited about them, but we recognize that change can be hard, especially in your dating app since dating can be hard to begin with. But we feel confident that these changes will make the OkCupid experience better for the vast majority of our members. And if we find that it doesn’t, we’ll think up some other changes and go from there. So thanks for reading all the way through; now it’s time to like someone on OkCupid, message them, and set up a date for this weekend.

*Coming soon to desktop and mobile web.

Story updated on Tuesday, October 24.