That's fair. I think Tinder these days returns your super likes to you if the bot you super liked ended up getting banned, but I might be wrong.

The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.

Bumble has a lot of professionals and will actually want to meet within a few messages back and forth. Tinder is a lot of people that "hate drama", ie they crave it.

I have met quite a few very pleasant people but we just mutually realized "not for me" after a date or two. We wished each other luck and parted ways. In the case of bumble in my experience there is an emotional maturity and interesting people. But apparently you are required to have a photo at Machu Picchu.

That gives me a great idea for a profitable new business: a website where you upload some photos of yourself, and it photoshops them onto a background of Machu Picchu so it looks like you went there for vacation, and can use this on dating apps.

I agree, it does seem ridiculous: here in the DC area, it does seem that every single professional woman over 30 has such a photo.

Stage two: T-Rex skeleton background.

Why do you say that? I haven't seen a lot of photos like that on womens' profiles; in fact, I don't think I've seen any.

But strangely, I actually have a photo just like that on my profile! It was taken at the NYC Natural History museum.

For women's profiles, the stereotypical photos are: 1) Macchu Picchu 2) at a bar with an alcoholic drink in-hand, frequently looking drunk 3) at a beach 4) in bed, cuddling with a big smelly dog 5) at a gun range These are pretty typical of 30+ white women in the DC area, though they're never seen all in the same profile (the women who like guns don't go to Macchu Picchu).

Also, you say that in your experience on Bumble, women are more emotionally mature. In my experience there, I'd say there seem to be more professional women there, but if you're not a big bar-goer and drinker, you're not going to do well there, at least in this city. Also, the women there seem to be almost all white and black; all the Asians seem to be on CMB, which is where I get the vast majority of my dates.

While I agree that the apparent profile quality seems better on Bumble, I get an order of magnitude fewer matches through that service. My bet is Tinder became the de facto dating app (and has taken on the generic name for dating apps), which brings the bots and the abuse. The bots will follow the community if it leaves Tinder.

This has been my experience as well. Although there's some sort of strange seasonality to it. I can go a couple of months with barely any matches on Bumble, followed by a few weeks of matching with everybody and their cousin. Can't tell if it's single people feeling bad for not bringing anybody back home for Christmas or simply Bumble messing around with their ELO rankings of users behind the scenes.

Bumble used to sort profiles by attractiveness and never remove inactive users. Their user base is too small and they have to get down to these tricks.

That's why you'd see so many great people and no match, they all left long ago. It's ghost town.

You probably get news matches when people sign up or come back, dating is very seasonal.

>dating is very seasonal.

So what are the best seasons for it? I'm guessing December, though my recent experience has been somewhat the opposite.