Feeld: Still Not Great

Feeld being the least awful of an awful bunch does not count for much.

I used to pay for Feeld, but the changes they made in this application put me off, and I stopped paying, for about a year. I recently resubscribed, and what I discovered is not pretty.

Now, I’ll be frank. All the online dating apps suck. Without exception. Yes, the people who think nothing of matching with you, only to string you along fruitlessly, are part of the problem. However, the apps themselves suck. A great part of this is due to their motivation towards making more profit.

All the dating apps have conflicting goals. They have the goal to help you find one or multiple partners. However, they also have the goal to make money. This second goal often conflicts with the first one. If you are monogamous, and you find a partner, what reason do you have to keep paying? So they have to find ways to keep you paying.

How it plays out in practice will vary from app to app. Some platforms have fake profiles that cause you to waste time and money. I don’t think I’ve often run into these profiles created solely for the purpose of keeping people on the platform, but from newspaper articles, I know that some platforms have engaged in this chicanery. However, on Feeld in particular, I’ve run into old profiles that should have been culled, and this amounts to the same thing as fake profiles, as far as I am concerned. I’ll discuss these more below.

Other platforms will make it harder to match with someone if you do not pay. Or they will make it harder to know who has been active on the platform versus who has created an account ages ago, but is no longer active.

My Demographics

Now, I’m certain that my experience of dating is colored by my own demographics. I’m an AMAB nonbinary individual. I’m also autistic, pansexual, polyamorous, and into BDSM. This makes me a member of a gender minority, and a sexual minority. I’m also 54. For a lot of people, this puts me over the hill.

I also live in a metropolitan area where there are a lot of people just passing through, which means that I’m wasting my interest on people with whom it wouldn’t work anyway.

Real Life Dating

Real life dating is truly not an option for me. Remember my demographics? I do not know of any dating events in my area that cater to people who are into BDSM. (There are events for people who are into BDSM, but they are not specifically dating events.) If I were to go to a bar, even a queer one, the chances I’d have to run into someone compatible with me would be infinitely small. Same for speed dating events.

Please do not make the mistake to think that every queer individual is also polyamorous, and into BDSM. Yes, someone who is queer is more likely to have those other identities too. However, there is no guarantee. The intersection of all these identities makes my dating pool very small indeed.

Add to this the fact that my autism causes noise sensitivity, that I don’t drink, that I am liable to experience post-socialization crashes, etc. Most traditional dating venues are not suitable for me.

I’m going to be rather conservative. If I were to do real life dating and would go to events on average once a month to a cost of $25 per event, this would amount to about $300 per year.

Feeld

A one-year subscription to Feeld costs $150 (yes, I’m rounding the price up). This is without taxes or any fees. So it costs about half the price of my real life dating estimate above. Of course, in real life, you have the option to stop at any point in time. If you buy a Feeld subscription, you can stop using the app at any point, but you won’t recoup your money. A monthly subscription is possible, but it costs much more per month than the yearly subscription.

I’ll note that neither my real life estimate, nor the price of Feeld include having real dates. The events I mentioned in my real life estimate are those designed to connect people initially, they are not dates, per se.

So I’d say that I’m saving money by using a dating app. Your own mileage may vary depending on your geographical location, the price of events in your area, your exact method of finding partners, etc.

Yes, I’m saving money, but Feeld sucks. I’ve been on it for years. I have to say that the changes they made over the years have definitely not made the app better. I’d actually say it made the app worse, but some of this is a matter of taste.

I’ve lived through the bug that prevented likes from reaching you. Yes, I discovered that bug when a bunch of people just showed up one day among my likes. I’ve also lived through GUI slowdown, and through bugs that would cause you to eliminate from your prospects or like the wrong prospect.

This article is a good cover of my previous gripes:

I No Longer Recommend Feeld

I’ve reread the article I just linked to… and man. I should point out that I recreated my account on Feeld, but that I never deleted it outright. Feeld is awful, but it is really my only options at this point. Yes, I’ve tried other apps. What can I say? They suck more than Feeld. I did return to OkCupid, but OkCupid is way waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too vanilla for me. Feeld, as much as I hate the app, is till the only game in town for me.

Okay, so what did I discover after resubscribing recently? I’ve discovered that Feeld does not cull ancient profiles from its app. See, when you pay you can see how long a person has last been on the platform. I’ve seen many profiles that hadn’t seen any activity in one year, two years, even three years!!! These profiles may technically have been created by real people, but they might as well be fake. What are the chances that someone will come back after being three years away just because you liked them? Zero!

Ha! I was going through my stack of prospects again, and I just ran into the profile of someone who hasn’t been on the platform in 2 years! Why am I presented with this profile??? It has one picture of someone with their head cut off, and no profile text. This is a shitty profile, and yet, Feeld thought nothing of presenting it to me.

The fact that old profiles are not culled is entirely to the benefit of the app. It inflates their “number of user profile” statistics, but ultimately it means nothing. The users who don’t subscribe to the app will waste their likes or their pings on those profiles. (Because, yes, it is possible to buy pings without being a subscriber.)

After resubscribing, I could finally see who had liked me while I was not a subscriber. I had about 61 likes. Roughly one sixth of those likes were sensible likes. By this, I mean that those that were not sensible were from cishet men, or from people I was clearly incompatible with but decided to ignore my profile and liked me. I furthermore discovered that the new LGBTQ+ filter is not as great as it should be.

What does this filter do? When you turn it on, it eliminates from your stack of prospects those cishet folks. For me, this means that I no longer have to eliminate straight men from my stack. This makes my life easier. However, it does not hide my profile from cishet folks. This is why I say this filter is not as great as it should be.

Again, this is to the advantage of the platform to let those cishet folks hit on queer folks. If you are not a subscriber, you know you’ve been liked, but you don’t know by whom. To know who liked you, you need to subscribe, and that’s more money for the app. This is true, even if five sixth of the likes you got are utter nonsense.

I’ve also recently discovered a bug in the LGBTQ+ filter implementation. For some unknown reason, I started seeing straight men into my stack of prospects. The LGBTQ+ filter was enabled. I had to disable it, and reenable it to deal with the bug.

There are also numerous other bugs:

1. Sometimes you’ll see profiles that you cannot like or eliminate from your stack. I deal with this by ignoring it for the time being, and then killing the app.
2. Sometimes the profiles will be slightly misaligned in the GUI.
3. Notifications get lost.
4. The distance bug that I reported years ago is still there. It survived reinstalling the app, clearing the cache, recreating my profile, etc.
5. The chat is buggy in all kinds of ways.
6. Etc.

Conclusion

If I were to want to increase my chances of finding partners, I should tell you that Feeld is the best so that you’d get on the app, but I cannot do this. The reality is that Feeld is crappy, but it is the least crappy option for me.