I’m sure it’s different everywhere, and I’m more or less a cishet man, but I used Tinder, Bumble, Okcupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Taimi, Tumblr (not a dating app but hey I love crazy women so), and briefly Grindr, all in 2023, and I will say, Hinge at a glance seemed interesting and different, but it quickly became my absolute least favorite app–INCLUDING cesspools like Grindr or scam-filled PoF. It had the most incessant stream of painfully personality-less daddy’s money people I have ever seen. I can’t remember the specifics why but, it was also painfully difficult to match and actually talk to people because of artificial barriers and horrible location matches (recommending me people 500 miles away even when I try to set otherwise).

Enshittification of everything, paywalls, and our toxic social/dating culture ensures all these apps suck to find love or friendship, but if I had to say the best, my personal recommendation would be Tumblr, Taimi, Okcupid, and Bumble in that order.

Tumblr is not built to be a dating site but you meet all sorts of amazing people on there consistently. It would take a long time to get the ball rolling and actually finding people though.

Taimi is touted as a queer website but is very straight friendly too. Many cool people on there. There’s also an actual POC presence as opposed to most other dating apps.

Okcupid is kind of libby and filled with 30+ year old white artisan hipsters into therapyspeak and ethical non monogamy, but people actually have reading attention spans on there.

Bumble doesn’t have a distinct flavor but it feels like the least-worst-of-all-worlds.

Nothing beats vibes and happenstance, but sometimes it happens online, even in these sundowning days, I can attest to that several times over. Best of luck friend.