OkCupid, an online dating website and app, admitted to lying to its users and creating bad matches as an experiment to help improve its matchmaking system.

One of OkCupid founders, Christian Rudder, explained in a blog post that OkCupid isn't the only one running experminets and lying to its visitors.

"Guess what, everybody: If you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," Rudder said. "That's how websites work."

He even discredits his own website:

I'm the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing. Neither does any other website... Experiments are how you sort all this out.

He explained that OkCupid ran three experiments on its users to try and improve their matchmaking system.

One of the experiments was a public blind date experiment. It was announced as "Love is Blind Day," and it involved all of the pictures of users being removed. Less new conversations were sparked, but people answered more of the messages they received.

Another experiment had OkCupid displaying profiles differently to certain users. Some users saw profiles with just pictures, and others saw profiles with both pictures and text. The experiment revealed that people preferred pictures more than words.

"So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth ... almost nothing," Rudder said.

The final experiment is probably the most controversial. OkCupid took users with low match ratings and changed them to 90 percent (100 percent is a perfect match). It also took users with high match ratings and lowered them.

The results of the experiments found that users messaged those that they thought they were compatible with based on the ratings. They also sent messages to matches that they thought they were compatible with regardless of the rating.

In the end, OkCupid did lie to its members and performed experiments without their knowledge. But it ended up helping improve the website's rating system, and it might provide better matches in the future for users of the site.

What do you think about OkCupid's experiments? Is it OK for them to run these experiments if the website gets better because of them?