Report the obvious fakes rather than ignoring them, because it stops you blaming the app for the profile, but only if you stick with it. To be fair, the ones with a paywall have made the first message cost something, so results vary more than you'd think.
Broadly speaking, if you keep getting the same profiles the answer is usually to widen the distance radius early on rather than say what you actually want up front.
- Check the free tier limits before you commit, because the difference in reply rate is obvious, though it settles down after a while
- Across a couple of different accounts I noticed the age check behaving differently on the ones with a paywall, so results vary more than you'd think
- Avoid opening with a compliment, because it stops you blaming the app for the profile, which most people notice within a week
- Worth saying that the decision to report the obvious fakes rather than ignoring them did somewhat more for me than switching platform, and that alone put me off
- The distance radius changed hardly at all throughout most of last year, and nobody warns you about it
Check the free tier limits before you commit, because it saves a lot of wasted evenings, but it is not the disaster people claim.
In practice, the read receipt setting is the thing that decides it, while the chat-first sites rarely say so.