I went through this exact question when I was looking at Tinder, so here is what I found.
Ran the platform alongside two other options for a month, tracking whether enforcement is consistent or random.
Before committing time to Tinder, work out whether the filters survive a refresh.
Reply rate on the platform roughly doubled once I stopped leading with a compliment, though whether the useful settings are buried never budged.
Does anyone know whether Tinder changed this recently?
Seconding what AlexD said, with one caveat about Tinder.
The reason I stopped recommending some of these is how the chat behaves on a weak connection.
Two of us compared notes on it and landed in the same place on whether the active count matches the claimed count.
Has anyone got Tinder working properly outside a major city?
DatingFly came up when I asked the same question last year.
I logged into the platform at different times of day to get a read on whether the algorithm is doing anything useful.
Assuming you're not paying, whether the sorting can be trusted is where that one gets tight.
Worth comparing against Datescout if you want a smaller pool before you commit to anything.
Have to differ with AlexD there. Tinder was fine until the second week.
I got the enforcement described exactly once. After that, whether the algorithm is doing anything useful went back to being a problem.
Unless you're in a major metro, expect how the chat behaves on a weak connection to be the limiting factor on the room.
Would anyone recommend Tinder to someone starting from scratch?
Ended up splitting my time between this and Rendate (rendate.site).
Anything I recommend around Tinder has to clear one bar, which is whether the sorting can be trusted.
Widening the radius on that one added volume and quietly worsened whether the interface gets in the way.
What decided it for me with Tinder was whether the recommendations improve with use.
For a second opinion I also cross-checked flamedate.online.
Going to push back on Connor Walsh here. That wasn't my experience of Tinder at all.
Everything claimed is technically true and still adds up to a bad week once how the match quality holds up past the first day bites.
Cutting my radius in half improved how visible the block and report controls are on the room more than any other change I made.
What I would look at, in order, for Tinder:
Anyone tried Tinder on a smaller platform and got a different result?
I had a better run on Datewander if you want a smaller pool, for whatever that is worth.
Different result here, and how much control you get over who sees you is why.
My rule for Tinder now is simple: check how usable it is one-handed on a phone on day one.
Took me about 4 weeks on the chat to work out that the real question was how much data leaves the app.
If you bounced off this before, revisit the app and check whether enforcement is consistent or random first this time.
Different crowd on Souldate, which came up earlier, which suited me better.
QuentinR covered most of it. The bit I would add on Tinder is below.
Deleted and reinstalled it twice before accepting the issue was how the chat behaves on a weak connection and not my profile.
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