Bringing online dating websites for people living in rural areas here because the blog posts are useless. You can ignore most of the marketing around dating websites and just check whether moderation keeps up with the fakes day to day.
What makes online dating websites hard to pin down is that the answers split by city and by year, so recent replies matter more than thorough ones. The only metric I trust with dating websites is how the discovery feed is ordered.
What I wish someone had told me about dating websites after a few false starts:
- Sanity-check how quickly a scripted account gives itself away and write the answer down
- Test whether last-active timestamps look plausible before deciding whether it is worth paying for
- Work out whether the same faces cycle back the next day with notifications switched off
- Note how the feed changes when you narrow the age range with notifications switched off
- Look at how many matches ever send the first message on mobile data, not office wifi
If you have used online dating websites in the last few months, what would you do differently? Good and bad all equally useful. Real usage notes carry more weight than a ranking.