POF : when did POF die?
i go on POF from time to time in sydney and i swear this site has become a depressing wasteland. the only users left are either bots, scammers or a handful of girls who i have been seeing online for years. i get no replies to anything i write, whether its low effort (hi) or high effort (which is hard to do given how awful most profiles are and how impossible it is to spin something interesting out of thme). no girls want to talk and you get ghosted instantly after one / two innocuous messages. this site actually makes OK cupid look ok in comparison, which is saying a lot.
i really feel like smartphones killed online dating more than ever. not only by making ‘apps’ like tinder the only games in town, but because they have made people more distractable, low-attention span and impossible to talk to (since typing on a smartphone is a pain).
By. [deleted]
POF went down hill after Markus sold his site to Match.
When Markus sold it and people stopped trying to develop new things for it.
POF is ridiculously and fundamentally broken. There is some methodology, some wildly gaping API available that allows mass production of fake profiles. Reporting them is a wild waste of time as most of the profiles drop off again within hours.
The bots with the links to russian sites are all over the place. It’s almost tragic how you can only tell real profiles by pictures of non IG looking women.
Match clearly doesn’t give a damn and are probably making a fair chunk of cash off of the page clicks so I don’t presume they’ll be doing anything about it soon.
We wanted dates, we lost out to greed. Time to go outside and actually meet people again. This game is finished.
Probably years ago in reality.
POF is a stagnant wasteland in my area, just as you described, spam, people who can’t even be bothered to fill in a profile, girls who seemingly intend to spend the rest of their lives as a bitter, single, witch on POF (I have genuinely seen some of the same girls on POF consistently over the 5-7 years I’ve tried it (on and off).
So either they have incredibly high standards (that 99.999% of POF’s male userbase doesnt meet), Or they don’t actually care about meeting someone and more than likely use it to stroke their ego every time they log-in to see 100+ new messages.
About 3 years ago when Markus sold out to Match.com
Yup i prefer okc lol
I’d say when all the people who used to mock anyone for using online dating started using online dating. Expectations got higher, effort got lower. The quality of and commitment to conversation flatlined. Bitterness and resentment grew. Cynicism and opportunism replaced positivity and fairness.
Around the time they stopped advertising on television. And Tinder beat them in the word of mouth advertising game. POF became know as the dating site for trashy women. Single mothers, lower. Class, uneducated, illiterate, etc.
I’d more blame the people on it than the site. I also live nearish sydney but I find it’s peoples attitudes and general laziness that make the experience bad. It’s not the sites fault if users are lazy. They won’t be strict woth females because they need them to stay.