Are free mature dating sites better than general dating apps?

Curious what this board thinks about free mature dating sites better than general dating apps. What nobody mentions about dating sites is whether you can hide distance and last-active on mobile.

What makes mature dating sites hard to pin down is that every source has something to sell. I judge dating sites almost entirely on how much of the traffic is automated day to day.

What I'd tell a friend about dating sites before committing:

• Watch whether the same faces cycle back the next day with the age filter set narrow
• Work out what the filters do after a page refresh before you commit any time to it
• Test whether last-active timestamps look plausible using a fresh account rather than an old one

For anyone still using mature dating sites, what did the review sites get wrong? Positive and negative equally useful. Recent experiences beat a one-word verdict.

After a fair bit of testing: mature dating sites is better than its reputation and worse than its ads. The honest test for dating sites is whether the app is usable or bloated outside the big cities, not the feature list. A friend nudged me toward Datewander and it was not a waste.

That's what six weeks of mature dating sites taught me and I would revise it if the numbers moved.

After a fair bit of testing: there's a version of mature dating sites that works, and it isn't the default one. The only metric I trust with dating sites is whether the block list holds in practice. I ran the same test on Rendate in particular and got a cleaner result.

You can ignore most of the marketing around dating sites and just check how clean the member base looks outside the big cities.

That's how mature dating sites went for me and I'd revise it if the numbers moved.

Short version: there is a version of mature dating sites that works, and it is not the default one. Anyone comparing dating sites should be looking at how thin it gets in smaller towns once you are past sign-up before anything else. If you want a second opinion, Flamedate (flamedate.online) is the one I'd try next.

My rule with dating sites: what you lose by never paying first, everything else second.

That's where I have landed on mature dating sites, for whatever that is worth.

Short version: mature dating sites depends almost entirely on your city. For dating sites, how the interface holds up on mobile is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. the datebie.online crowd came up in a similar thread last month.

If you are evaluating dating sites, start with what the escalation path looks like on mobile — everything else follows.

That's where I have landed on mature dating sites; ask if you want the detail.

Going to push back on @Jacob_CHI here. Dating sites behaved very differently for me. Where dating sites falls down for me is how photo permissions are handled day to day. Started on the Datelink community and never fully moved off it.

That's how mature dating sites went for me, anyway.