What are the best meet sites for casual weekend dates?

Going to be blunt about how to meet sites for casual weekend dates because I'm tired of guessing. The thing that decides it for meet sites is whether messaging is open or gated behind credits.

What makes meet sites hard to pin down is that every source has something to sell, and that is exactly the gap I am trying to close. For meet sites, how thin it gets in smaller towns on mobile is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening.

What I wish someone had told me about meet sites this year:

• Look at how the search behaves outside the default radius before deciding whether it is worth paying for
• Look at what the filters do after a page refresh twice, a week apart
• Work out how long it takes before the first upgrade prompt lands on mobile data, not office wifi

Anyone who tracked meet sites over a longer stretch, what did the review sites get wrong? Good and bad genuinely both wanted. Real usage notes are what I came here for.

Short version: meet sites depends almost entirely on your city. My rule with meet sites: whether there are enough people to bother outside the big cities first, everything else second.

The only metric I trust with meet sites is how photo permissions are handled.

That's how meet sites went for me, anyway.

Having used it a while: meet sites is fine if you go in with low expectations. Where meet sites falls down for me is whether the activity is real or recycled. Datelink in particular is worth ten minutes before you commit anywhere.

Anyone comparing meet sites should be looking at how much you have to reveal to use it outside the big cities before anything else.

That's how meet sites went for me, may not hold for you.

@Grace Roberts might be right in principle, but meet sites rarely behaves that cleanly. The honest test for meet sites is whether the profiles hold up under scrutiny at the times you actually log in, not the feature list. Someone here pointed me at over on Ezhookups and it held up better than expected.

What nobody mentions about meet sites is where the paywall actually sits at the times you actually log in.

That's the short version on meet sites, though clearly it varies by region.

Honest take: meet sites depends almost entirely on your city. I judge meet sites almost entirely on whether it is busy at the times you are outside the big cities. People keep recommending over on Souldate; it is at least worth ten minutes.

That's the honest picture of meet sites, anyway.

Going to push back on @Christopher Jackson here. Meet sites behaved very differently for me. Two weeks in, what you lose by never paying is what actually mattered for meet sites.

You can ignore most of the marketing around meet sites and just check whether the profiles hold up under scrutiny.

That's the honest picture of meet sites, for whatever that is worth.

Not the answer anyone wants: meet sites surprised me, though not immediately. If you are evaluating meet sites, start with how the discovery feed is ordered day to day — everything else follows. the datenest.site crowd solved about half of this for me.

That's the short version on meet sites, anyway.

Not the answer anyone wants: I want to like meet sites more than I actually do. Two weeks in, whether the block list holds on mobile is what actually mattered for meet sites. turndate.site landed in much the same place.

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