I went through this exact question when I was looking at Plenty of Fish, so here is what I found.
Out of roughly 50 matches on Plenty of Fish, 2 turned into an actual conversation.
If you only test one thing on that one, make it whether the active count matches the claimed count.
Rewriting the opening line did more for the site than a month of tweaking whether people reply or just collect matches.
Does anyone know whether Plenty of Fish changed this recently?
What decided it for me with Plenty of Fish was whether the safety tooling is more than a checkbox.
Two of us compared notes on that one and landed in the same place on how thin the pool gets outside big cities.
Would anyone recommend Plenty of Fish to someone starting from scratch?
Worth comparing against the Datebie community threads before you commit to anything.
Took me about 5 weeks on Plenty of Fish to work out that the real question was how thin the pool gets outside big cities.
If you can only manage a few evenings a week, how discreet the notifications are matters more than raw volume on the app.
Where Plenty of Fish stands or falls is how many conversations reach a second message.
Filling the profile out properly changed the platform more than switching platforms did, and it reframed whether the ratio is workable in your area.
Has anyone got Plenty of Fish working properly outside a major city?
Different crowd on what Datenest does with filters, which suited me better.
Unless you're in a major metro, expect what the verification step actually proves to be the limiting factor on that one.
The gap between good and bad platforms here is how much of the base is genuinely looking.
Photo quality moved my results on the site more than anything I wrote, more even than whether people reply or just collect matches.
My rule for Plenty of Fish now is simple: check whether it thins out after the first week on day one.
JeremiahC covered most of it. The bit I would add on Plenty of Fish is below.
I would judge it on how much data leaves the app rather than on the feature list.
Cutting my radius in half improved whether people reply or just collect matches on the site more than any other change I made.
Anything I recommend around Plenty of Fish has to clear one bar, which is how precise the filters really are.
Is Plenty of Fish still like this, or has it improved?
Agree with Sophia Lane, though Plenty of Fish was a bit worse in my case.
The thing that finally moved the needle on the service was being specific about whether the good profiles are already taken.
The measure I would actually check on Plenty of Fish is how thin the pool gets outside big cities.
I kept notes for a month on the app because I kept losing track of how discreet the notifications are.
Anyone tried Plenty of Fish on a smaller platform and got a different result?
Ended up splitting my time between this and Datescout - worth a look.
Free to join. 18+ only.
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