Feel that all dating apps nowadays are an absolute scam so curious if anyone here has actually had any success with dating apps and if so what app what is it?
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Yes.
Met a partner of ~5 years ok okcupid some years ago.
Met a partner of ~8 years on ok cupid after that.
I get a fair amount of dates on Tinder now, even though I’m getting old and have at least one major deal breaker.
It turns out a lot of people are really bad at using the dating apps. People don’t write anything useful in their bio. They waste their first message with “hey”. When they get a question they dead end it. Like “hey your profile says you love NK jemisen. Have you read her new books?” -> “no”. And then they’re like "why isn’t this working?'. My friends please be better at this.
Tinder still sucks and you can see where they’re putting profit ahead of a good experience, but you have to go where the people are.
So true about the messaging issues. I had one woman get seriously pissed at me for asking a question about one of the interests in her bio. She said something to the effect of “Are you here to interrogate me or what?” I was just trying to start a conversation, but I quickly moved on, she clearly was crazy or stupid.
Probably both.
I disagree with the hey. It depends on the dating app.
If the app confirms that you’re both interested then hey is a bad opening. Okcupid, when I was originally using it, I would read through the profile and tailor a question to them. I found it pointless if they weren’t interested in me. So saying hey acted as a filter to find who would be interested in me.
I can see where you’re coming from.
However! Two counter arguments.
One. Saying “hey” changes their view of you. It’s very possible that opening with “hey” will actually shift their opinion of you towards negative. To me (and friends I’ve talked to) it comes off as very low effort, which is unappealed.
Two. You’re going to need to write a better message anyway. Some people might have success with the “hey” “hey” “how’re you?” “Good u?” flow but I really strongly recommend not doing that. It takes longer, a lot of people dislike it, and you’re going to eventually have to write something better anyway. Opening with a good message saves you time overall.
Sending a good initial message saves you time overall and increases your success rate.
I completely understand and I kind of agree that it’s low effort. However, my experience was that my “high effort messages” received maybe a 1/10th of the responses that got with hey. And then if factor in how many less people I was messaging because I was tailoring it then the amount of interested responses was significantly less.
Again, if it’s an app like tinder where you both have to show interest then I wouldn’t start with hey. Otherwise I view it as just showing interest and then if they respond then I can follow it up with something from their profile.
But I’ve been out of that scene for a decade so I have to imagine with enshitification that online dating is now even worse.
I met my fiancé on Tinder during the pandemic. We were within 1km of each other so I thought that counted as the same bubble. Now we are going to get married next year
That’s how I met my girlfriend of almost 4 years
Same for me (met in Aug 2020) but on Hinge, and we just got married.
Pre-pandemic I only dated by meeting women thru friends, so this was all new for me. Hinge worked really well for me, but Bumble and Tinder were nothing but bot matches and women who just 1-word-answered me.
Dating apps work fine if you know how to date. Met my wife on PoF. Never had any issues getting dates on any of the programs and I’m a 5/10 at best.
If you have a very unique profile and provide thoughtful engagement to potential dates, you will find a partner eventually. I know it can feel like a slog sometimes, but it’s still a lot less bullshit than you’d get dating random strangers the old way.
Met my wife on PoF as well about 7 years ago. Definitely a slog but I also now know that at the time I was a walking red flag factory
This!
You get what you put in.
If you made a basic profile and your messages are all “Hi” or “hi, you’re cute”
You’re not getting dates.
If you curate a profile with good content, good photos and send messages that prove that you read their profile you’ll get responses. You’ll never get a message back for every message your send. 10% is a good response rate.
It’s a skill to do all of those things, it’s okay ask for help on those things. Sit down with a trusted friend either a woman that’s of that age, or a man that gets dates from an app.
Then, the next skill is turning messages into meetings IRL.
Then after that is turning dates into a relationship.
Tried all the usual ones and they suck never got a match. Gave a chance to Boo and met my now fiancee on there. It’s a friend’s and dating app. Definitely be truthful about yourself and fill out the information. Worked for me.
I second this, I met my partner on Boo after years of having no success with dating apps, and they’re pretty much the perfect person for me! I feel like one lucky dude right now, honestly, and it’s a feeling I haven’t had in a long time. Funny thing is, I would never have found out about it if I had paid for the ad-free version of Boost, so thanks Rubén lmao
Will see if I can give this app a shot.
A decade or so ago? Yeah, totally, dating apps worked fine. Recently? No. Everyone wants to sell you something and they can’t do that if you actually meet someone, so it’s just constant “people totally like you, we swear, you just have to pay and we’ll show you who!” and bots. I got messages/intros (where it’s allowed pre-match) because I’m a woman and it’s borderline impossible not to if you have a pulse, but it was mostly from men who were way too old and/or people where the only thing we had in common was geography.
Yes this is true, I met my partner on OKCupid about 7 years ago, and I was reading where now they have removed the expected partner responses from their questioning so it’s just like all the others. Enshitification.
I met my wife on tinder, we were living in two different country 80 km from each other but it worked.
However it was almost a decade ago.
I personally recommend that people (men especially) stay away from them.
I always struggled with confidence and self-esteem, so for me dating apps were just making that worse. I spent months swiping and the breakdown for me was something like 200 swipes before I’d get a match, then out of those matches, at least half were spam bots or fake profiles, then out of the other half, probably only 1/5 would answer my messages. The ones that did answer either weren’t very engaged or just never responded at all often the initial interaction. All of this just contributed to lower self esteem and more bitterness and depression.
I found the women on these apps would put in 0 effort at conversation, and yet would say things like “We should get to know each other first” when I tried to set up a date.
Then the dates that I did get, I felt catfished but more likely it was my own wishful thinking and being willing to overlook obviously misleading photos. I had at least one date with a girl who matched her picture but then was a complete psycho.
I don’t really blame the women, it’s just market forces at work. These apps tend to have way more guys on them than girls, so the women are (generally) able to just sit back and the men are expected to wow them with fantastic opening messages or have the exact right physical characteristics. For this reason, Bumble was the only app I had success with and would have recommended.
For me, I had hoped dating apps would be a useful tool for meeting other singles in person to get to know them, but I ended up with the impression that many women were just using them to inflate their own self esteem, and loved to chat and get compliments but never actually wanted to date.
Anyways, it sounds cliche and I’m sure someone has said this to you, but you should work on building yourself. What worked for me was to find an activity that I could be secure and confident in and also meet women in that setting. I found two different long-term relationships through coed rec sports, and it’s not like I was some superstar at sports impressing the women or anything. Just go into it thinking about improving your own mental and physical health, work on getting better and meeting more people.
Both women I met through coed sports told me that I was much more appealing in person than my dating profiles, so maybe some profile improvements were warranted, but I concluded that it’s just not possible to get a good sense of someone you might want to date through pictures and a chat. Dating apps are only useful if they lead to meeting people in person, so if they aren’t enabling you to do that then you just have to get out there and meet people without them.
Yeah this about sums up my experience with dating apps as a single male. I generally just gave up on them because it just takes a lot of time and energy to keep swiping on these apps and I just really couldn’t be asked for it.
Worst to best:
Meet(.)com worst piece of crap ever. It’s on level of human trafficking.
Plenty of fish should be renamed to plenty of flakes.
Okcupid was rough. It took me so many dates and I managed to meet one or two decent people out of say…50 dates. We ended up as good friends and nothing more which was actually really cool. Nice meeting friends. But still, too many people to find one or two decent people to interact with is exhausting.
I had a decent relationship from bumble back in the day.
Eharmony was best so far. You have to pay so it really does prefilter out the flakes and I felt like my time wasn’t wasted as much as other apps. Perhaps it is because people paying for something take it a whole lot more seriously.
eHarmony is really expensive and for me… I couldn’t find anyone on there.
Bumble did eventually work out though, in a relationship for ~7 months now
Yeah it’s very expensive but ngl the people I did end up meeting took dating so much more seriously than the free apps. The conversations had a lot more honesty and such a relief after the bullshit I had gone through on the free apps. Made them look like a joke. I only joined it for a month but for me it was all I needed at that time.
Bumble was decent too. But the selections can be up or down.
I met my wife via tinder, way back when that shit was free.
Same
Yes, on OkCupid about ten years ago. Met. My wife that way.
Same. Will be 10 years ago next February that we met. Married for 7. Kids. Etc. Success! Definitely lucky.
I met my wife on POF. Before that, I paid for a a different service and got absolutely no where. Really hope that service is fucking dead.
Ditto, coming on 11 years dating, 7 years married
POF?
Plenty of Fish! Met my now husband of 8 years on there.
That’s awesome! We’re coming up on 10 years.
Understand the incentive model.
Dating apps are like every other app - they make money by keeping users engaged and using the app. If you find a good relationship, you don’t need the dating app anymore, and they lose two users.
People who have success on these apps do so in spite of the app.
You can still use the app to meet people who are also looking to date, but don’t expect the app to help you do it. In fact, expect the app to get in your way and mislead you. Take any advice the app gives you about who is a good match (or a bad match) for you with several large grains of salt.
Only if Grindr counts as a “dating” app.
Grindr is a dating app for only gay people right?
It’s mostly just for hookups and not actual dating, but yeah.
I had a gay housemate and like every other day he was bringing this random guy to the house who he hooked up with through this app. I was just like damn man! You get so much success with this app lol.
My gf’s roommate was flipping through his phone one night and said “I’m feeling like Indian tonight.”
She said “Oh, get me some chicken biryani!”
He said “Not that kind of Indian” and showed her he was flipping through Grindr
Fucking basically counts as dating
It’s how I met my wife, 6 years together.
It’s a good way to meet and connect wity people I guess in general. I was far away from home and used it to meet people.
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I’ve had next to no luck with the dating apps. I think the longest relationship I got out of them was 2 months, and the majority of conversations ended before ever meeting. The dating app world doesn’t seem to accommodate my kind of person, where I want to get to know a person before we bed each other. It seemed like every match wanted to have a single date that ended in sex. Fuck that.
