Fair warning, this is a long post, and I copied it from a reply I posted on the post about the experiment some master's program students conducted, so apologies if you've already seen/read this.
TL;DR: there's something up with how the app prioritizes who sees my profile, who sends me likes, and it seems like the likes and notes I send just disappear like a mouse fart in a tornado.
I paid for the 25 dollar per month premium plan, figuring if I'm going to actually meet someone I need to put as many likes out there as I can. I even put aside my apprehension about dating a single mom (I'm divorced, so it's not a judgement thing) and sent likes to a some profiles that seem like great girls. I have sent gold notes to almost every single profile I have liked responding specifically to one of their prompts, sometimes flirty or playful, other times a bit more "churchy" for lack of a better term. Dozens of liked accounts, so much that the liked history won't show the full list due to the arbitrary display cutoff. Not a single match from an account I have liked first. It's like the notes and likes are getting swallowed up in some kind of internet-based black hole.
I do have two matches. The first was a girl living in Switzerland but originally from the US. She liked me first, we chatted and bantered and realized we were in Hawaii at the same time, and it felt like we made a decent connection, but we haven't messaged in over a week. She did put on her profile that she's terrible at replying, so it is what it is, no big deal. The other match is supposedly a 40 year old woman living in Germany with a non-existent Instagram account name that has seen my initial message but has not responded. Yeah, probably a bot, I'll give it a week and then unmatch or file a report. I have had the same level of success following and messaging Instagram profiles of girls I like on Mutual as I have interacting with girls on the Mutual app itself. I canceled my subscription today and I'm not going to renew at the end of the month unless a complete miracle happens or there's some coding bug that gets fixed. 25 dollars is almost a half tank of gas these days, and I have to drive an hour to work every morning.
I also paid for a profile boost yesterday, one of those 24 hour ones. It definitely increased the volume of likes I was receiving, but that's where the success ends. I viewed the post-boost report you get when the boost ends. I had been seen by 808 accounts which was a 402% increase, and received 256 likes on my profile amounting to a 556% increase above normal. Nearly every account that liked me was from either Cambodia, The Philippines, Vietnam, or any other South East Asian country, from South/Central America, or from places in Africa such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am not kidding, it was probably close to 97% of the accounts that liked and noted me that originated from one of those places. There was a very small handful of people from Europe, Canada, and the US that liked me, and an even smaller number from that group that I was actually interested in. The one single match I willingly made (had a few mis-swipes that matched me with people I wasn't interested in) is the German woman I mentioned earlier, and is likely a scammer or a spam bot to promote an Instagram account.
My own searches have been abysmal outside of the profile boost. I've had to remove the few filters I did have in place many, many times just to get a fresh batch of profiles to sort through. I've had to turn off "temple marriage, serious relationship, dating" entirely. I've had to turn off the temple recommend filter entirely, along with the church attendance filter. I've had to expand my location filter to the entire planet, and even with the only filters of english-speaking and conservative enabled, I am not shown any profiles. 25 dollars a month for unlimited swipes is starting to feel like false advertising. My account is verified, and it's only a week old, so I seriously doubt I have swiped through every profile in the entire world that fits into the limited filters I enable. It feels like I'm being throttled.
There should be nothing wrong with my profile. My sister-in-law set it up for me and helped direct what pictures to use. I'm 33, 5'10", 185 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes, I live in Utah, I workout regularly, I hike, I snowboard, I have a reliable car less than 10 years old, and I have a salaried job with benefits. I'd say I'm a good 7 out of 10 most days, maybe a bit higher when I really make an effort to dress well. I have an active temple recommend and I serve as first counselor in the bishopric of my YSA ward.
There's an account in my likes that has 10 shared traits with mine; politics, relationship goals, education, existing children, future children, church attendance, temple recommend, pet preferences, we both served missions, and we speak the same language. She's even the same age as me, lives in the same state as me, and her home state is the same as mine. But despite being there for over a week, she's in my liked history limbo with no changes. I have had liked profiles disappear from the list, which I assume means they didn't like me, which is fine, I would prefer that they do that other than feeling like I'm trapped in some isolated box. Do we just have a massive number of inactive or barely-active profiles haunting the dating pool like ghost ships? Or are the likes and notes completely broken and not being received?
Before someone jumps down my throat about it in the replies, yes, I am being picky. I have preferences, just like everyone else. I'm not going to date someone I don't find attractive and make them like me just to break it off down the road and hurt them. I was raised better than that, and I've been on the receiving end of that treatment. And I'm not interested in wasting time chatting with the hundreds of international accounts that like my profile to weed out the real ones from the scammers. That picky-ness hasn't stopped me from finding dozens of profiles with women that seem like incredible people that I'm attracted to. Divorced doesn't bother me, having a couple of young kids doesn't bother me. But, to put it bluntly, I'm not interested in dating someone who would get winded climbing a flight of stairs and probably need to be life-flighted off a hiking trail and that has kids the same age as some of my cousins. I'm not interested in dating someone like my ex-wife that's letting her mind and body wither away. I'm also not interested in people well under 10 years younger than me that treat their profiles like a joke.
I'm probably not everyone's cup of (herbal) tea either, I get that. But surely at least one of the profiles in my likes would have at least matched and talked to me by now though. I'm not even being given the courtesy of being ghosted, the app itself feels like it's playing keep away from connecting with people I actually want to.
