If your inbox is dead, keep the first message short and specific — that is where most people give up too early. Keep the first message short and specific, because it filters out the time wasters fast, and it makes a real difference.
After a fortnight of testing the older established sites have cleaned up the fake accounts a little, but it is not the disaster people claim.
- Speaking personally, the chat-first sites have made the free version harder to use, so treat the reviews with caution
- On reflection, if you are in a smaller town the answer is usually to check the free tier limits before you commit rather than write a profile that gives someone something to reply to
- Something worth flagging is that the forum-style sites have stopped showing profiles past a certain distance these past few weeks
- When you are after something serious, sites that skip verification tend to feel a great deal worse than they are, so treat the reviews with caution
- The distance radius and the age check pull in opposite directions, which is worth knowing before you sign up
Worth saying that the decision to report the obvious fakes rather than ignoring them did marginally more for me than switching platform, which explains a lot of the complaints here. Going by my own attempts, the search filter setup is the thing that decides it, while the swipe-based apps rarely say so.
The photo review and the free tier pull in opposite directions, and that alone put me off.
Since this keeps coming up, Flurrydate is more forgiving about people in smaller towns, so it is worth a look.