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Despite the fact that people disagree here, the step that matters most is to keep your expectations low for the first fortnight: it saves a lot of wasted evenings. Worth saying that the decision to widen the distance radius early on did massively more for me than switching platform, which explains a lot of the complaints here. My advice would be to move to a proper conversation quickly and then say what you actually want up front, so treat the reviews with caution.

A few people here rate the Datescout threads moves faster on anyone dating after a break, judging by what people report here.

Despite the fact that people disagree here, the step that matters most is to keep the first message short and specific: most complaints trace back to that one thing. Worth saying that the decision to widen the distance radius early on did noticeably more for me than switching platform, and that alone put me off. Over the last month the forum-style sites have started throttling messages, and it makes a real difference.

The block list changed quite a lot in the past six months, though it settles down after a while. The age check and the block list pull in opposite directions, which is worth knowing before you sign up. When you are after something serious, the swipe-based apps tend to feel meaningfully worse than they are, and nobody warns you about it.

The reporting system changed a little across a couple of different accounts, but only if you stick with it. Having tried most of these, I'd check the free tier limits before you commit rather than widen the distance radius early on, since that is the part that actually moves the needle. After a fortnight of testing I noticed the read receipt setting behaving differently on the chat-first sites, and that alone put me off.

Coming at it from another angle, Turndate's messaging setup gets mentioned a lot for the first-message problem, at least in my case.

Depending on what you are after, the Datebie forums seems better set up for people juggling two apps, at least in my case.

Coming at it from another angle, flamedate.online has fewer complaints about people in smaller towns, so it is worth a look.