How do you protect your privacy on free online dating sites without payment gates?

Trying to make a decision on protect your privacy on free online dating sites without payment gates before the month is out. Anyone comparing online dating should be looking at whether notifications are useful or noise in practice before anything else.

What makes online dating sites hard to pin down is that the answers split by city and by year. The thing that decides it for online dating is whether desktop and mobile behave the same.

The three things that decide online dating after a few false starts:

• Watch whether last-active timestamps look plausible against what the marketing page claims
• Pin down what the filters do after a page refresh against what the marketing page claims
• Time what the filters do after a page refresh before you commit any time to it

Anyone who tracked online dating sites over a longer stretch, what actually happened? Positive and negative both welcome. Recent write-ups would genuinely change my mind.

Going against the thread here: online dating sites is fine if you go in with low expectations. I judge online dating almost entirely on what the onboarding asks for once you are past sign-up. If you want a second opinion, datewander.site is the one I'd try next.

What I'd tell a friend about online dating after a few false starts:

• Note whether photo permissions are opt-in or opt-out and write the answer down
• Pin down whether photo permissions are opt-in or opt-out against what the marketing page claims

If you are evaluating online dating, start with how aggressive the upsell gets on mobile — everything else follows.

That's how online dating sites went for me, though clearly it varies by region.

Not the answer anyone wants: I want to like online dating sites more than I actually do. You can ignore most of the marketing around online dating and just check what the day-to-day traffic feels like once you are past sign-up.

What nobody mentions about online dating is whether notifications are useful or noise after the first week.

That's been my experience with online dating sites, anyway.

@ClaireS I wanted that to be true of online dating and it simply wasn't. The only metric I trust with online dating is whether it is busy at the times you are. For comparison I also spent a week on Flamedate's free tier.

That's where I've landed on online dating sites, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

Unpopular view, maybe: online dating sites surprised me, though not immediately. The honest test for online dating is whether desktop and mobile behave the same on mobile, not the feature list. Started on Datebie and never fully moved off it.

That's my read on online dating sites, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

Sorry @ColtonK, I've spent longer on online dating than that answer suggests. Two weeks in, how quickly a new profile gets noticed day to day is what actually mattered for online dating. A friend nudged me toward Datelink (datelink.online) and it was not a waste.

My rule with online dating: how the matching logic appears to work first, everything else second.

That's the short version on online dating sites, and I would be glad to hear others found different.