I tested a handful of these back to back while comparing them, and stopped assuming the obvious answer was right. Strip out the noise and moderation quality tends to decide whether you stick with it.

I made a spreadsheet, embarrassingly with a bit of patience, so this is not theoretical. Realistically how easy it is to delete an account sets the ceiling on what you can achieve. The difference persisted quite plainly on both the free and the paid side. It cost me nothing to verify genuinely, and no thread substitutes for that.

I tracked this rather than trusting impressions here, and the numbers told a clearer story than I did. It turns out how support responds to a real problem is the first thing I would look at now. That held without exception regardless of how active I was.

The short list of what mattered:

  • Whether the privacy policy is readable — worth two minutes before you commit.
  • Look at whether there is any verification step at all — it changes the experience completely.
  • Check whether you can search rather than only swipe
  • How it performs on a slow connection — it is easy to test and rarely advertised.
  • Worth confirming whether you can filter out inactive accounts — worth two minutes before you commit.

I looked at this from a few angles with a bit of patience, so this is not theoretical. Strip out the noise and how blocking actually behaves is where the real differences show up. It repeated more than once for both of the accounts I tested. Worth a fortnight of your time genuinely, so treat this as a starting point.