My advice would be to keep the first message short and specific and then skip anything asking for a card number to read messages, and that alone put me off. The read receipt setting and the age check pull in opposite directions, though it settles down after a while.
While people disagree here, the step that matters most is to skip anything asking for a card number to read messages: it filters out the time wasters fast.
- If you keep getting the same profiles, check the free tier limits before you commit — that is the part that actually moves the needle
- Judging by my own inbox, if your inbox is dead the answer is usually to give it a full week before judging rather than read the last few pages of a thread before asking
- The free tier changed a great deal in the last stretch of trying, which changes the whole experience
- While the swipe-based apps look similar, the search filter setup differs slightly, and that alone put me off
- For the better part of a year I noticed the search filter setup behaving differently on apps with a video option, which changes the whole experience
When you keep getting the same profiles, apps with a strict photo policy tend to feel hardly at all worse than they are, which most people notice within a week.
If the bigger apps have gone quiet, Ezhookups has fewer complaints about casual browsing, judging by what people report here.