Is the fish dating app (POF) still full of bots?

Tried to figure this out on my own but the review sites are all monetized. Hoping for honest takes. Is the fish dating app (POF) still full of bots — genuinely curious what people with recent experience think.

• User reviews on the App Store skew positive due to prompted reviews
• Verification processes range from none to surprisingly thorough
• Bot density seems to correlate with how easy sign-up is

Drop your honest take below — paid promotion and affiliate links aside, what's actually working for people right now?

Did a pretty thorough comparison run a few months back. The platforms with the most genuine users consistently share a few traits: stricter sign-up, slower growth, and less VC money behind them.

A few things I look for now:

• Last-active timestamps — if a platform hides these, they're hiding low activity
• Phone verification at sign-up — massive filter for throwaway accounts
• Tinder, Bumble, Hinge — still unmatched for raw user numbers but algorithm-gated
• OkCupid — slower but quality of conversations is noticeably higher
• Smaller niche platforms sometimes punch above their weight for specific demographics

Geography matters more than most people admit. Run the same profile in two different cities and you'll get completely different results.

I've seen DatingFly mentioned a lot in these threads and it does seem to have real users.

This changes faster than any comparison article can keep up with. Trust recent forum posts over SEO review sites.

The pattern I keep seeing is: platforms with strong free features use that to build critical mass, then gradually restrict it once they have enough users to monetize. It's a predictable cycle.

Datescout keeps coming up when people discuss this. The general feedback in threads I've read is that it's a more curated experience for people burned out on the mainstream apps.

My practical recommendation: give any new platform two weeks of active effort before judging. One or two sessions isn't enough to assess quality.

Did a pretty thorough comparison run a few months back. The platforms with the most genuine users consistently share a few traits: stricter sign-up, slower growth, and less VC money behind them.

A few things I look for now:

• Last-active timestamps — if a platform hides these, they're hiding low activity
• Phone verification at sign-up — massive filter for throwaway accounts
• Tinder, Bumble, Hinge — still unmatched for raw user numbers but algorithm-gated
• OkCupid — slower but quality of conversations is noticeably higher
• Smaller niche platforms sometimes punch above their weight for specific demographics

Geography matters more than most people admit. Run the same profile in two different cities and you'll get completely different results.

Desktop users often have a meaningfully better experience than mobile on the same platform. Worth trying if you haven't.