Ask Lemmy

I met my fiancé on Tinder during the pandemic. We were within 1km of each other so I thought that counted as the same bubble. Now we are going to get married next year

Yes.

Met a partner of ~5 years ok okcupid some years ago.

Met a partner of ~8 years on ok cupid after that.

I get a fair amount of dates on Tinder now, even though I'm getting old and have at least one major deal breaker.

It turns out a lot of people are really bad at using the dating apps. People don't write anything useful in their bio. They waste their first message with "hey". When they get a question they dead end it. Like "hey your profile says you love NK jemisen. Have you read her new books?" -> "no". And then they're like "why isn't this working?'. My friends please be better at this.

Tinder still sucks and you can see where they're putting profit ahead of a good experience, but you have to go where the people are.

A decade or so ago? Yeah, totally, dating apps worked fine. Recently? No. Everyone wants to sell you something and they can't do that if you actually meet someone, so it's just constant "people totally like you, we swear, you just have to pay and we'll show you who!" and bots. I got messages/intros (where it's allowed pre-match) because I'm a woman and it's borderline impossible not to if you have a pulse, but it was mostly from men who were way too old and/or people where the only thing we had in common was geography.

Tried all the usual ones and they suck never got a match. Gave a chance to Boo and met my now fiancee on there. It's a friend's and dating app. Definitely be truthful about yourself and fill out the information. Worked for me.

Dating apps work fine if you know how to date. Met my wife on PoF. Never had any issues getting dates on any of the programs and I'm a 5/10 at best.

If you have a very unique profile and provide thoughtful engagement to potential dates, you will find a partner eventually. I know it can feel like a slog sometimes, but it's still a lot less bullshit than you'd get dating random strangers the old way.

Only if Grindr counts as a "dating" app.

I personally recommend that people (men especially) stay away from them.

I always struggled with confidence and self-esteem, so for me dating apps were just making that worse. I spent months swiping and the breakdown for me was something like 200 swipes before I'd get a match, then out of those matches, at least half were spam bots or fake profiles, then out of the other half, probably only 1/5 would answer my messages. The ones that did answer either weren't very engaged or just never responded at all often the initial interaction. All of this just contributed to lower self esteem and more bitterness and depression.

I found the women on these apps would put in 0 effort at conversation, and yet would say things like "We should get to know each other first" when I tried to set up a date.

Then the dates that I did get, I felt catfished but more likely it was my own wishful thinking and being willing to overlook obviously misleading photos. I had at least one date with a girl who matched her picture but then was a complete psycho.

I don't really blame the women, it's just market forces at work. These apps tend to have way more guys on them than girls, so the women are (generally) able to just sit back and the men are expected to wow them with fantastic opening messages or have the exact right physical characteristics. For this reason, Bumble was the only app I had success with and would have recommended.

For me, I had hoped dating apps would be a useful tool for meeting other singles in person to get to know them, but I ended up with the impression that many women were just using them to inflate their own self esteem, and loved to chat and get compliments but never actually wanted to date.

Anyways, it sounds cliche and I'm sure someone has said this to you, but you should work on building yourself. What worked for me was to find an activity that I could be secure and confident in and also meet women in that setting. I found two different long-term relationships through coed rec sports, and it's not like I was some superstar at sports impressing the women or anything. Just go into it thinking about improving your own mental and physical health, work on getting better and meeting more people.

Both women I met through coed sports told me that I was much more appealing in person than my dating profiles, so maybe some profile improvements were warranted, but I concluded that it's just not possible to get a good sense of someone you might want to date through pictures and a chat. Dating apps are only useful if they lead to meeting people in person, so if they aren't enabling you to do that then you just have to get out there and meet people without them.

I met my wife on POF. Before that, I paid for a a different service and got absolutely no where. Really hope that service is fucking dead.

Yes, on OkCupid about ten years ago. Met. My wife that way.

Not me but I have a friend that got married like two years ago now to someone she met on tinder like two or three years prior to that. Apparently, the first date she asked if he was going to kill her if she went in his car.

My other friend is now living with a guy she met on tinder two years ago. He is still saved on my phone as [His name](in case he kills [friend]) from when they went on their first date and she sent me his info in case anything happened.

I'd say that's some success for relationships and maybe for not getting killed also.

I met my wife via tinder, way back when that shit was free.

Met my current gf of 3+ years on OKCupid. Before that I had met up with maybe 3 matches. I wouldn’t have even called them dates as whist we chatted for a little bit it was just meeting up. Am still friends with a couple of people I met from there. But the majority of people would just either stop talking after a few messages or just never reply. I was also finding towards the later end of me using it just way too many scammer and bots. In the end I’d just mess with them if I could be bothered.

Worst to best:

Meet(.)com worst piece of crap ever. It’s on level of human trafficking.

Plenty of fish should be renamed to plenty of flakes.

Okcupid was rough. It took me so many dates and I managed to meet one or two decent people out of say…50 dates. We ended up as good friends and nothing more which was actually really cool. Nice meeting friends. But still, too many people to find one or two decent people to interact with is exhausting.

I had a decent relationship from bumble back in the day.

Eharmony was best so far. You have to pay so it really does prefilter out the flakes and I felt like my time wasn’t wasted as much as other apps. Perhaps it is because people paying for something take it a whole lot more seriously.

Met my wife on coffee meets bagel. Used other apps, and had lots of great experiences on all but bumble and shadii (tinder, match, pof, perhaps others).

My suceess got a ton better after one of my first matches helped me take new photos and update my text. She said I wasn't selling myself well, and was 1000% right based on the results.

It's how I met my wife, 6 years together.

It's a good way to meet and connect wity people I guess in general. I was far away from home and used it to meet people.

Yeah, they work. To a certain point. Over the last decade or so I got dozens of dates. If you are engaging in conversation, asking interesting questions and are generally nice to talk to (and your profile and picture show this upfront) you can get dates.

But it gets increasingly harder to get matches as a platform gains popularity. Apps usually put newcomers to the top of the stack to make them visible and get them matches. The older your profile, the more profiles are newer then yours and you slowly fall down the stack. When the app grows in size, you are quicker to go down the stack.

In addition to that it seems every app has a certain demographic progression: At first more women use a new app. They don't get that much matches and are more likely to match. As time goes on this changes, as men are joining and making up 70% of the user base. Now woman are flooded with people wanting to match and you are unlikely to stick out or, what happens more often: people are overwhelmed and just stop interacting.

My extensive use of apps showed me that you can be most successful in fairly new apps. Bumble used to be really awesome until it got popular.

I met a woman on one back in 2008. She’s been my wife for 13 years😊

Short answer is 'No.' Long answer is a lot more complicated. Had limited success on a few apps, but I had hardly any matches over the past year and a half since I became single. Modern day dating apps are definitely a scam. They're all enshittified Tinder clones that charge you upwards of £40 a month just to see likes.

Meanwhile, every woman is like "6ft, 7 figures and 8 inches or GTFO"

Out of my four past relationships, two were LDRs that fell apart the moment we actually closed the gap and met in person, one I ended because my then-partner had no personality and conversation with her was really dry, and the most recent one used me for my money.

I'm 32, below average in terms of my looks, and that's regardless of how I present myself: I have tried all kinds of hairstyles and outfits and nothing seems to work.

Shit's depressing.

Depends on what you’re defining success as.

Yes! My girlfriend of a year has just moved in and I couldn't be happier!

Also, we used Hinge.

Facebook Dating is the only one that doesn't try to sell you premium to do anything all the time. It seems like all the other apps are just out there trying to make money off of you.

Yes. I hooked up with a few girls and settled with my (now) gf.

We are together for 7 years by now and when we met the scene was already pretty harsh. I'd only imagine it's way worse now

Met my husband on Tinder. We both had it for like a month, never before.

In spite of it, I hate that app like every dating app, its too toxic

I work with two recently divorced women and they are certainly having success with Tinder if you define it as dates. Which I guess means it's working out for the guys they are hooking up with too. So the middle aged people seem to be doing ok. They do say there are guy-bots on there, scams aimed at women.

Both these ladies say they will talk with someone for a few days only then want to meet IRL otherwise won't continue to engage; my husband said that was also his rule when using the dating apps. We met online but not through a traditional dating app and I wasn't really looking for anything serious it just worked out that way. About 10 years together now.

About half of our grown children got long term boyfriends/girlfriends on the dating apps and half by luck in real life.

I've had next to no luck with the dating apps. I think the longest relationship I got out of them was 2 months, and the majority of conversations ended before ever meeting. The dating app world doesn't seem to accommodate my kind of person, where I want to get to know a person before we bed each other. It seemed like every match wanted to have a single date that ended in sex. Fuck that.

My sweetheart and I met on OKCupid, albeit I am neurodivergent and didn't use the app typically.

Before that I had lots of success finding less-than-three-year flings on Craigslist before the moral panic.

Yes but I follow rules 1 & 2 so the fact that I don't know how to start conversations with people doesn't matter, I get so many matches that eventually someone will put up with my bs and I can get laid

Understand the incentive model.

Dating apps are like every other app - they make money by keeping users engaged and using the app. If you find a good relationship, you don't need the dating app anymore, and they lose two users.

People who have success on these apps do so in spite of the app.

You can still use the app to meet people who are also looking to date, but don't expect the app to help you do it. In fact, expect the app to get in your way and mislead you. Take any advice the app gives you about who is a good match (or a bad match) for you with several large grains of salt.

my partner of more than 4 years is sitting across the room from me, in the house we jointly rent and share with two small furry creatures.

She's from Brazil, I'm NZ. We met on OKC and she flew over to meet me late 2019, then after border restrictions had eased she moved over to be with me around the same time in 2022. just slightly less than 3 years long distance.

Met my wife on Tinder about 9 months before the pandemic.

I had several successful dates and met my partner on OKC, but I'm also gay, so my experience probably doesn't match the straight experience in dating apps.

I wrote a full profile, was honest, had several pictures that represented what I looked like truthfully and answered the OKC questions that I though actually mattered, as there's a lot of nonsense BS questions on there too.