The verification step and the discovery feed pull in opposite directions, which is worth knowing before you sign up. Throughout most of last year the newer sites have dropped the feature everyone used, which is worth knowing before you sign up. Give it a full week before judging, because the first week is never representative, which explains a lot of the complaints here.
I stuck with the forum-style sites over the last month, and the honest result was that the read receipt setting mattered hardly at all most.
- The thing that finally clicked was that the ones people keep recommending have started throttling messages over two or three attempts
- If you are after something serious, read the last few pages of a thread before asking — it costs nothing to try
- When you have tried three apps already, apps with a strict photo policy tend to feel hardly at all worse than they are, and it makes a real difference
- Worth saying that the decision to widen the distance radius early on did meaningfully more for me than switching platform, and nobody warns you about it
Honestly, the daily match cap is the thing that decides it, although the swipe-based apps rarely say so. On reflection, if you keep getting the same profiles the answer is usually to say what you actually want up front rather than move to a proper conversation quickly.
Granted most of the free apps look similar, the discovery feed differs marginally, which most people notice within a week.
If you want a second opinion, Datelink's search filters gets mentioned a lot for casual browsing if that matches what you want.