I'm 35, Ive been using them since they were new, around 21 until right around the pandemic, so around when I turned 30. My impression is that they have gone downhill a lot. I don't consider myself a very handsome man, but I'm pretty well read and I have a lot of hobbies and I can hold a conversation. Early on, it was literally just a list of people and profiles. You could start a conversation with anyone, I did pretty well. I would say in this era, (maybe between 2011 and 2014) I would rate OKC the best. Tinder showed up and I gave it a try and I would say its the worst (and remained the worst). The gamification even then was insane. Pay for higher placement. Pay for 'super likes.' None of these were guarantees she would reply back or even see it; you could have been throwing your money in a void. Like a skinner box for incels.
I won't pretend there isn't a physical dimension to dating; but the way Tinder was set up, it was inevitable it was going to become a "hook up" app. You had the option to post something like 8 pictures and eventually they let you post a short bio, at first it was just a few words (which most people left blank anyway). It was designed to be a meat market. I know people have met their partners there and I am not trying to take that away from anyone but come on guys, that's not what Tinder is. I honestly had better luck meeting women on 4chan than Tinder. And it doesn't help now that the Match group has a crushing hold on the entire industry, so the gamification model has basically spread everywhere. All of the things about Tinder in this thread are true; the gender imbalance, the bots, the scammers. I ended up deleting everything in 2020; I had a girl ghost me and everything after that just felt so fake.
I wonder about this sometimes. moot was a child, started an anime website, and drew aggro from some of the worst weirdos on the planet; ancap, nazis, pedos, etc. After more than a decade, they finally broke him, with an epic thread where btards in the ground proved with photos that his girlfriend was cheating on him. He sold the site something like six months later, in 2013 or 14, I want to say. and then 18ish months after that, Trump descends a golden escalator.
I wonder sometimes if moot knew he was holding back the end of the world. I do think that Trump is the final metastisization of something that was already festering. I do think if not him, then someone. But this vanity run for president in 2016 was intended to be a negotiation tactic with NBC for the apprentice; the channer nazis were who elevated him above a gag candidate.