Tried one for the first time about a year ago, but only for a few days. Bi poly woman, looking for any poly individuals of any gender. (Not interested in being a unicorn for bicurious couples.)

I figured Feeld would be a good choice since its kink/queer-friendly.

• within one day I had over 70 likes. Despite living in a small town and setting <20km range. Almost every single one was from a (gender declared as) man that hadn’t bothered to fill out their profiles with anything at all. Maybe a third didn’t even have a picture (not that it would’ve mattered, because I want to meet people not bodies, but who do they think is going to swipe right on a sunset, or on Wrath of the Lich King box art?)

• Plenty of couples looking for unicorns that listed themselves as one person to be on my feed anyway. Always with vague filler that tells me nothing about them or what they’re looking for, stuff like ‘connect and see where it goes’.

• plenty of (hypothetical) women that were theoretically looking, but actually the profile was their male partner, whom you had to talk to first, despite saying nothing about her. No photos, no hobbies, nothing about her as a person. Idk if he was standing guard to feel in control and soothe his relationship insecurities, or if she wanted him to protect her from all the risk/effort, but either way: nope. They’re almost never looking for a mutual experience, theyre looking for a volunteer to perform her fantasies for free

• I had every permutation of individual switched on: trans men, women (cis or trans), enbies etc included… but 99% of what I saw was cis men. I don’t know if they were promoted by the app or they really are almost all of the users, but the app would literally start looping through the same empty profiles of cis men without ever showing me a queer woman (that wasn’t a couple pretending)

• Once I stopped including cis men (which i felt very conflicted about but i was so fucking overwhelmed), I finally started seeing queer women (and more unicorn hunters ofc). Almost all of them had fully filled out profiles but the amount of likes dropped to like… 2 over the remaining 3 days I had the app installed.

• one pan man put a ‘super like’ on me which let me see him directly, he’d actually filled put his profile which was great because it gave me something to open with. We had a great conversation but I slowed down on meeting up in person right away because I needed to attend to some real-life needs and invited him to connect outside the app while that happened, which he agreed with but then kinda disappeared without doing so. Maybe he assumed I wasn’t actually interested or I would take too long, idk. A shame because I did like him

I have a (mostly) straight male partner and he showed me his app experience: most of the straight women didn’t bother filling out their profiles at all either, nor did gay men. It seemed only queer women filled it out almost every time? We theorised that the queer dating pool is really small so it’s understood you have to represent yourself to be seen, and women want to have an idea of who you are before they reach out.

Meeting other women is hard so I’d probably need to get back on apps at some point, but damn. Really do feel sorry for everybody out there. All of the people I’ve actually dated have been met in-person.