Which are the most popular dating apps in my area for students?

Spent the weekend reading about most popular dating apps in my area for students and came away more confused. What nobody mentions about popular dating apps is whether moderation keeps up with the fakes once you are past sign-up.

What I keep running into with popular dating apps is that it works differently by region, which is why I want firsthand accounts. Where popular dating apps falls down for me is whether it is busy at the times you are on mobile.

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

• Compare what the filters do after a page refresh against what the marketing page claims
• Time how the search behaves outside the default radius before you upload a second photo
• Check how the web version differs from the app against one platform you already trust
• Track how the feed changes when you narrow the age range with the age filter set narrow
• Count whether last-active timestamps look plausible against one platform you already trust

Anyone who tracked popular dating apps over a longer stretch, where did it fall over? Cheerleading and cynicism all worth hearing. Firsthand accounts help far more than opinions.

@Savannah makes a good point, though I would qualify it — popular dating apps shifted a lot last year. My rule with popular dating apps: how quickly the fake accounts surface first, everything else second.

The only metric I trust with popular dating apps is whether it is busy at the times you are on mobile.

That's been my experience with popular dating apps — happy to be argued with.

Broadly agreeing, with a caveat: popular dating apps gets recommended a lot here and that is half right. For popular dating apps, whether conversations actually go anywhere is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. For comparison I also spent a week on Souldate's free tier.

The thing that decides it for popular dating apps is what the free tier really covers.

That's what six weeks of popular dating apps taught me, may not hold for you.

Going against the thread here: I want to like popular dating apps more than I actually do. Anyone comparing popular dating apps should be looking at how aggressive the upsell gets at the times you actually log in before anything else. Datescout in particular is worth ten minutes before you commit anywhere.

That's where I've landed on popular dating apps, anyway.

@CamM I wanted that to be true of popular dating apps and it simply wasn't. If you're evaluating popular dating apps, start with how active it is outside big cities after the first week — everything else follows. I ran the same test on what Datebie is doing and got a cleaner result.

Two weeks in, how fast it loads on a bad connection is what actually mattered for popular dating apps.

Worked for me on popular dating apps — happy to be argued with.

Unpopular view, maybe: popular dating apps works, but not the way the marketing implies. I judge popular dating apps almost entirely on what the bot ratio feels like day to day.

You can ignore most of the marketing around popular dating apps and just check how much you can do before being asked to upgrade in practice.

That's how popular dating apps went for me — happy to be argued with.