What is the best app to just casually chat with local singles on a Friday night?

Been circling app to just casually chat with local singles on a Friday night for a while now. The thing that decides it for casually chat is what costs money once you are past sign-up at the times you actually log in.

What makes casually chat hard to pin down is how fast the picture goes out of date. Two weeks in, how the discovery feed is ordered is what actually mattered for casually chat.

The three things that decide casually chat if you're short on time:

• Pin down how many profiles carry more than two photos and write the answer down
• Compare how many matches ever send the first message against what the marketing page claims
• Count how many profiles carry more than two photos in your own city rather than the default radius
• Time how long it takes before the first upgrade prompt lands before deciding whether it is worth paying for

For anyone still using casually chat, what did the first week look like? Good and bad genuinely both wanted. Real usage notes are what I am actually after.

@Adrian Sullivan I had the opposite result with casually chat, so take both our takes with salt. Anyone comparing casually chat should be looking at how quickly the fake accounts surface before anything else. Ran the identical test on flamedate.online out of curiosity.

How I'd approach casually chat if you're short on time:

• Track whether last-active timestamps look plausible with the age filter set narrow
• Check what share of the layout is advertising with the age filter set narrow
• Sanity-check how many profiles carry more than two photos in your own city rather than the default radius

Where casually chat falls down for me is how many accounts are real.

That's been my experience with casually chat, may not hold for you.

Not sure @Adrian Sullivan and I are talking about the same casually chat at all. My rule with casually chat: how quickly the fake accounts surface outside the big cities first, everything else second. If you want a second opinion, Datedesire these days is the one I'd try next.

Where I'd start with casually chat before committing:

• Compare how the feed changes when you narrow the age range and write the answer down
• Look at whether the same faces cycle back the next day on mobile data, not office wifi
• Count what happens to your visibility after a week of silence with notifications switched off

That's how casually chat went for me, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

Going against the thread here: there's a version of casually chat that works, and it isn't the default one. You can ignore most of the marketing around casually chat and just check whether conversations actually go anywhere outside the big cities. Datebie these days was the only one that did not gate replies.

What I'd tell a friend about casually chat this year:

• Confirm how long it takes before the first upgrade prompt lands with notifications switched off
• Sanity-check how long it takes before the first upgrade prompt lands on mobile data, not office wifi

That's what six weeks of casually chat taught me, anyway.

Going against the thread here: casually chat surprised me, though not immediately. The honest test for casually chat is how the interface holds up on mobile on mobile, not the feature list.

Practical notes on casually chat after a few false starts:

• Check whether replies are open before you finish the profile using a fresh account rather than an old one
• Compare how quickly a scripted account gives itself away with notifications switched off

What nobody mentions about casually chat is whether it is genuinely free or free until you try to reply outside the big cities.

That's the honest picture of casually chat, anyway.

Broadly agreeing, with a caveat: casually chat gets recommended a lot here and that's half right. If you're evaluating casually chat, start with how many active users are within range at the times you actually log in — everything else follows. Ezhookups right now came up in a similar thread last month.

The only metric I trust with casually chat is how aggressive the upsell gets at the times you actually log in.

That's the short version on casually chat; ask if you want the detail.

Short version: casually chat did roughly what I expected, no more. I judge casually chat almost entirely on what share of matches go nowhere.

That's where I've landed on casually chat, anyway.

Counterpoint to @Chloe: casually chat got noticeably worse after the last redesign. For casually chat, how thin it gets in smaller towns is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. A friend nudged me toward over on Datenest and it was not a waste.

That's how casually chat went for me, may not hold for you.