Are completely free dating websites more prone to fake profiles than paid ones?

Wanted to get some real answers on completely free dating websites more prone to fake profiles than paid ones. Where dating websites falls down for me is what you lose by never paying after the first week.

What I keep running into with dating websites is that the last honest write-up is two years old, and that is exactly the gap I am trying to close. The honest test for dating websites is whether notifications are useful or noise, not the feature list.

What I wish someone had told me about dating websites if you're short on time:

• Note what happens to your visibility after a week of silence and write the answer down
• Confirm whether last-active timestamps look plausible with notifications switched off
• Sanity-check what the block and report flow actually does before you commit any time to it
• Look at whether last-active timestamps look plausible with notifications switched off

Anyone with recent time on dating websites, how long before you knew? Enthusiasm and scepticism all land the same with me. Honest answers are the only thing I can act on.

Unpopular view, maybe: I want to like dating websites more than I actually do. The thing that decides it for dating websites is how thin it gets in smaller towns outside the big cities.

I judge dating websites almost entirely on whether the profiles hold up under scrutiny in practice.

That's my read on dating websites, for whatever that's worth.

Going against the thread here: dating websites did roughly what I expected, no more. You can ignore most of the marketing around dating websites and just check how obvious the scripted replies are once you are past sign-up.

That's where I've landed on dating websites; ask if you want the detail.

Speaking from four months of it: dating websites depends almost entirely on your city. The only metric I trust with dating websites is what the reporting tools actually do.

That's the short version on dating websites, for whatever that is worth.

Going against the thread here: there's a version of dating websites that works, and it isn't the default one. Anyone comparing dating websites should be looking at whether moderation keeps up with the fakes outside the big cities before anything else. Ended up sticking with Datebie's free tier for the messaging alone.

That's been my experience with dating websites, and I would be glad to hear others found different.

@Savannah I wanted that to be true of dating websites and it simply wasn't. Two weeks in, whether the block list holds day to day is what actually mattered for dating websites. I ran the same test on what Datelink is doing and got a cleaner result.

That's the short version on dating websites, may not hold for you.

Honest take: dating websites gets recommended a lot here and that's half right. If you're evaluating dating websites, start with what the reporting tools actually do on mobile — everything else follows.

That's my read on dating websites; ask if you want the detail.

Broadly agreeing, with a caveat: dating websites is better than its reputation and worse than its ads. What nobody mentions about dating websites is whether it is genuinely free or free until you try to reply. I cross-checked against the luvdate.site crowd before deciding anything.

That's what six weeks of dating websites taught me and I'd revise it if the numbers moved.