According to you guys, what are the best rated dating sites of the year?

Made an account specifically to ask this one — best rated dating sites of the year, and where people actually land on it.

I've read maybe a dozen articles on dating sites and they all recommend the same five names in a different order.

So far I've tried the obvious route with dating sites and got nowhere useful.

Narrowing it down, here is what matters to me about dating sites:

• Whether anyone has tested year properly on dating sites
• How quickly dating sites puts a paywall in front of a conversation that has started
• Whether dating sites is honest about year up front

Happy to be told I'm asking the wrong thing about dating sites.

Worth splitting dating sites into two questions, because the answers pull in opposite directions.

Disagree with Samantha Cook slightly here on dating sites. The honest answer on dating sites is that it varies, which is unsatisfying but true.

Took me about six weeks on dating sites before I had a conversation that went anywhere.

Not affiliated with anyone, but the Flamedate free tier solved the messaging-paywall part of dating sites for me last year.

For anyone else researching dating sites, I would put Flurrydate on the list — free messaging on it, no card up front.

Since we're comparing options around dating sites, the Datenest community came up when I was looking at the same thing.

Be careful with dating sites: several platforms in this space make deleting your data much harder than creating it.

Ezhookups is what I ended up using while working through dating sites — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

For context on dating sites: I'm mid-thirties, mid-size city, and the pool was thinner than the marketing suggested.