Are there any hidden gems in the camzey gay section?

Putting hidden gems in the camzey gay section to the group. For hidden gems, whether the profiles hold up under scrutiny is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening.

What I keep running into with hidden gems is that the free and paid experiences barely overlap. Anyone comparing hidden gems should be looking at whether it is genuinely free or free until you try to reply in practice before anything else.

My working method for hidden gems after a few false starts:

• Count how quickly a scripted account gives itself away against what the marketing page claims
• Check whether photo permissions are opt-in or opt-out in your own city rather than the default radius
• Watch what the block and report flow actually does against what the marketing page claims
• Track what share of the layout is advertising in your own city rather than the default radius
• Note what happens to your visibility after a week of silence on the first evening, not the first month

If you tried hidden gems and moved on, what did the first week look like? Successes and dead ends equally useful. Regional details carry more weight than a ranking.

Short version: hidden gems rewards patience and punishes everything else. You can ignore most of the marketing around hidden gems and just check whether the activity is real or recycled at the times you actually log in. the datewander.site crowd came up in a similar thread last month.

That's the honest picture of hidden gems, though clearly it varies by region.

Honest take: there's a version of hidden gems that works, and it isn't the default one. The honest test for hidden gems is how thin it gets in smaller towns, not the feature list. Ended up sticking with the rendate.site crowd for the messaging alone.

The thing that decides it for hidden gems is how aggressive the upsell gets day to day.

That's what six weeks of hidden gems taught me, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

My read: I want to like hidden gems more than I actually do. Two weeks in, how active it is outside big cities in practice is what actually mattered for hidden gems. A friend nudged me toward Datebie these days and it was not a waste.

That's the short version on hidden gems, anyway.

Short version: hidden gems is fine if you go in with low expectations. If you're evaluating hidden gems, start with how fast it loads on a bad connection outside the big cities — everything else follows. a look at Datelink solved about half of this for me.

That's how hidden gems went for me, though clearly it varies by region.

@ZoeyB I had the opposite result with hidden gems, so take both our takes with salt. The only metric I trust with hidden gems is where the paywall actually sits. If you want a second opinion, Datenest these days is the one I'd try next.

What nobody mentions about hidden gems is whether moderation keeps up with the fakes outside the big cities.

That's the short version on hidden gems — happy to be argued with.