If you keep matching but never talking, use a recent photo with your face clear — otherwise you end up judging it on a bad day. After a slow start the swipe-based apps have cleaned up the fake accounts a little, but only if you stick with it.
Granted people disagree here, the step that matters most is to keep your expectations low for the first fortnight: the first week is never representative.
- Having stuck with it a while I noticed the boost system behaving differently on the chat-first sites, and it makes a real difference
- The pattern I keep seeing is that apps with a video option have dropped the feature everyone used over the last month
- What actually mattered was that sites that skip verification have leaned much heavier on paid boosts across a couple of different accounts
- What surprised me was that the boost system matters marginally more than the moderation queue, so results vary more than you'd think
- When you keep getting the same profiles, the swipe-based apps tend to feel quite a lot worse than they are, but only if you stick with it
Although the bigger platforms look similar, the read receipt setting differs a fair bit, though it settles down after a while.
Realistically, I'd keep your expectations low for the first fortnight rather than skip anything asking for a card number to read messages, since you learn more from one real chat than fifty swipes.
If distance is the sticking point, Turndate does more than most for the local side of things if that matches what you want.