POF : What was PoF like pre 2011?
I have been lurking on the site on and off since 2011 and at first I did actually manage get into some covos with some girls. I had a couple of dates off there in the past but nothing lead to anything serious. I did notice a change after 2013 however when all of a sudden the number of girls using the site increased dramatically. Lots of attractive women who probably did not even need to be on there where taking up the search feed and if you refreshed the page new profiles would appear.
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It seemed to have become pretty mainstream and a lot of people where talking about it. I once even overheard a conversation with some girls on a bus talking about it. I think it was seen as a new craze where it was an easy excuse to message people and was not taken seriously. I know some people had been dabbling in it before I was possibly as far back as 2009 but it did not seem mainstream back then. Up to that point practically all of my relationships had been through people I met offline or through other people (being set up with someone over MSN or Facebook)
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What was PoF like before the whole thing went mainstream?
By. smoogie7
In the early 2000s, POF was very user-friendly, felt homey, and the chat boards were awesome. Over time, there were various chat-board « scandals » as happens on any chat board – but the value was in having discussion about the dating world with other people. The chummy-ness was not unlike Reddit, but without the snarkiness. *POF really was the best dating site before the era of smart phones.*
[POF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website)) always had a rep for users being cheap or low-grade. This is because it was FREE, and people assume FREE means low-grade. The stigma stuck despite the fact that low-grade people and cheaters also used pay-sites and swipe apps.
POF never really updated it’s generic DOS/TEXT look – because it wasn’t a flashy site. It was popular because you could talk to people without paying a fortune in fees. People really used to send a lot of messages and talk a lot before dating. This is a lifetime ago when people on the web were still trying to be sincere. *After the wave of all the swipe-apps, sincerity has left the world of online dating, so communication is difficult now.*
When MATCH bought POF they killed the chats, killed the search filters, killed any kind of user control of what you see. Adding the « meet-me » feature did more harm than good, turning the site into a low-grade dumpster fire version of Tinder.