What is the overall consensus on online dating reddit threads?

Genuine question for the board, and I've tried to search first: overall consensus on online dating reddit threads.

The reviews I can find on online dating never say what the free tier actually lets you do.

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

Concretely, for online dating, these are my criteria:

• How online dating handles blocking, privacy and who can see your profile
• Whether online dating is honest about consensus up front
• Whether consensus is the reason online dating feels inconsistent
• What the consensus side of online dating looks like in practice

Genuinely open to being argued out of my assumptions on online dating.

Set a deadline when you try online dating, or it becomes a scrolling habit rather than an actual search.

Just flagging that some results you will find for online dating are review farms rather than reviews.

SebA, that's roughly where I landed on online dating too. The cheap test for online dating is whether you can send one message without a card, and if you cannot, move on.

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

Someone recommended Turndate itself to me during my own search around online dating and it was better than I expected.

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

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

Worth noting that nobody in this thread has agreed on online dating yet, which is itself an answer.

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

Both things can be true about online dating: genuinely free, and still not worth your evening.

Adding Datingfly's free tier to the pile for online dating, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

Depends what you mean by online dating, because for a serious relationship the answer differs from a casual one.