Dating app advice: matches, messages, bans

Almost always one of three things: the app changed how it decides who to show, the app moved where its free tier ends, or the number of active people near you dropped. The first two are the app changing around you and the third is not your fault either. Working out which one happened tells you whether to change how you use the app or leave it.

Nobody outside the company can answer that, and any site claiming to test it for you is describing something that cannot be observed from outside the platform. What you can do is rule out the things that produce the same symptom, which are discovery settings, a thin local pool, and an ordinary drop in visibility. A real ban is different and the app tells you about it.

A match needs three things in order: your profile is shown to someone, they like you, and you like them back. A match rate of zero means one of those stopped. If the people you like still match with you, you are being shown to fewer people. If nothing at all happens, the profile is the likely cause, and photographs decide more of that than anything written.

It depends entirely on which action the subscription unlocks. Paying to see who already liked you is a shortcut to matches you were going to get anyway, which is worth it to some people and not others. Paying to message people who have not matched with you is a genuinely different product and is the one most people actually want.

One, or two at the most. Attention is the scarce thing, and splitting it across four profiles means none of them gets used enough to work. Running several also multiplies the amount of admin without multiplying the number of people you meet.

There is no general answer, and any site giving one is describing what suits the average reader rather than you. What decides it is whether the pool near you is deep enough on that app, which changes by city and by season. The useful question is which app is best for your situation, which is what the alternatives pages are written to answer.

They are built for different things rather than one being better. Hinge limits how many people you see in a day and asks you to respond to something specific, which suits someone looking for a relationship. Tinder shows you far more people and optimizes for reach, which suits someone who wants to see as much as possible. Neither is a worse version of the other.

The strongest signals are a refusal to video call, a push to move the conversation onto a messaging app quickly, a story that explains why meeting is impossible, and eventually a request for money, gift cards or cryptocurrency. Photographs can be checked with a reverse image search. Any request for money is fraud, regardless of how long you have been talking.

No, and it carries real risk. It breaches the terms of most apps, discards your history, and the new account gets a short burst of exposure that people mistake for the trick having worked. That burst fades on its own and you are left where you started with less.

The exposure a new account gets is widely reported to be wider than what the same account gets later. The usual explanation is that a new profile is an unknown quantity, which is an interpretation rather than a published rule. Either way it is not a penalty, and knowing the pattern explains the common experience of a busy first month followed by a plateau.

Plenty of Fish is the closest, because messaging has historically been free there rather than sitting behind a subscription. It makes up for that by doing almost no filtering for you, so the work of deciding who is worth talking to falls entirely on you. Free and low-effort are not the same thing on any app.

Frequently, and almost always in one direction. The most common changes are an action that was unlimited becoming capped, and a feature moving from free to paid. Both usually arrive without an announcement, which is why a comparison like this one can go stale and why pages here carry the date they were last reviewed.