My advice would be to say what you actually want up front and then keep your expectations low for the first fortnight, though it depends heavily on where you live. While people disagree here, the step that matters most is to report the obvious fakes rather than ignoring them: the difference in reply rate is obvious.
For the better part of a year I noticed the free tier behaving differently on the older established sites, which is worth knowing before you sign up.
- I stuck with the forum-style sites since the last round of app updates, and the honest result was that the free tier mattered a great deal most
- In my experience, the moderation queue is the thing that decides it, though the chat-first sites rarely say so
- The daily match cap and the block list pull in opposite directions, and that alone put me off
- Worth saying that the decision to test two platforms at once did a great deal more for me than switching platform, and that alone put me off
- In practice, I'd read the last few pages of a thread before asking rather than give it a full week before judging, since that is where most people give up too early
My advice would be to avoid opening with a compliment and then skip anything asking for a card number to read messages, so treat the reviews with caution.
In the same vein, luvdate gets mentioned a lot for casual browsing, though your mileage will vary.