There’s one I’ve been on for… I’m not sure, could be more than a year, though I was inactive for a while during periods of that. I have a grand total of 4 likes and 3 of them were recently when I was inactive, which seemed like the app was giving me a bit more visibility to draw me back in. (And none of them are people I want to match with.)

Based on the things I’ve heard, the game seems to be that these apps tend to “rank” you early on and then from there, you’re mostly stuck where you are unless you pay to get more visibility. And because rejections are not something you “see” unless you match and then the other person unmatches, you have no way of knowing for sure if your interactions (likes, or on Hinge, messages without being matched) are being seen by anyone or if they are buried in the stack.

I know on Hinge, from the end of receiving attention, there’s a limited number of likes you can see at a time without paying. So presumably that means that if, for example, somebody gets flooded with likes/comments and gets 100 of them, they’d have to go through and match or reject with each one to see all of them if they are a free user. And because some women get flooded with more attention than they have the time to engage with, that effectively means you might never get seen at all.

I know that’s not exactly an encouraging way of looking at it, but considering the mechanisms of it helps remind me that it’s likely not something to do with me and is far more likely I got in a bad spot early with the “ranking” and can’t get out of it without paying. So sometimes I go through it for the hell of it to remove people in my stack, or send out the occasional like/message, but I try not to spend too much time on it when it’s designed to work against me.