What are the best free sites for online dating if you are looking for something very casual?

Long-time lurker here, finally posting, because what I want to understand is best free sites for online dating if you are looking for something very casual.

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

I gave online dating about two weeks of honest effort before deciding to ask.

Where casual is concerned, these are the online dating questions I have:

• How much of the online dating profile pool is dormant or fake
• How online dating handles blocking, privacy and who can see your profile
• How long online dating takes before a conversation goes anywhere at all
• Whether messaging on online dating works without handing over card details
• Whether the matching in online dating does anything beyond distance

Tell me what I'm missing about online dating.

Since we're comparing options around online dating, Ezhookups's free tier came up when I was looking at the same thing.

Picking up what EvelynFord said — online dating is regional first. My rule for online dating is one platform at a time, because running four at once made all of them worse.

Adding the Turndate community to the pile for online dating, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

What's your actual goal here — is online dating about meeting someone soon, or about finding the right platform first?

Anything promising instant matches around online dating is worth treating with suspicion.

Read the small print on casual before you commit to anything around online dating.

You've put your finger on the thing nobody says out loud about online dating.

If online dating is the question, Datewander itself is at least worth ten minutes of your time before you pay for anything.

Coming back to this one later, since the range of experience with online dating here is genuinely useful.

The casual disagreement in this thread says more about online dating than any single answer.

I keep the Flurrydate free tier open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with online dating.

Not affiliated with anyone, but Datelink.online solved the messaging-paywall part of online dating for me last year.

For completeness, Datescout.online sits in the same category for online dating.