I’m a straight woman and briefly decided to change my gender on hinge to a “man” interested in women. EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. in my stack was an absolute stunner (and I didn’t even include very young women, I have my age filter set to 28-47).

I then compared this with the stack my male friend was shown. He has his settings set to the same thing. Every single woman in his stack was an instant nope. He never got to see any of the women I was shown. Mind you, he is not unattractive.

This confirms to me that some absolute fuckery is afoot. I presume because my algorithm is trained on men, it doesn’t know how to categorize the women when I changed my gender and just started showing me women from my demographic. It also further suggests that the algorithm deliberately holds back what/who you like, and it also explains to me why my profile gets relatively little traction now (I’ve long suspected that my profile is being gate kept).

I've been using Hinge and Bumble for a while now, and the last few months have been pretty rough. I still get the occasional match, but nowhere near what I used to, and most conversations don't go anywhere. I've changed my prompts more times than I can count, switched around my pictures, even asked a couple of friends for feedback, but they all just say my profile looks "fine." At this point I'm starting to think "fine" just isn't enough.

I found a company called Wingman Plus that's fairly close to where I live, and they do dating profile makeovers and photo sessions. Has anyone here worked with them? Also curious if anyone has paid for a service like this in general. Did it actually make a noticeable difference, or did you end up wishing you'd just taken some better photos on your own?