All four models have real traction here at the same time, which sounds like luxury and behaves like noise. The community platforms are busy, the matchers are dense enough to deal you somebody every day, and the written boards still have readers. So most people run three at once, and so does everybody they match with. What that does to who you meet is simple: you meet people who are already mid-conversation with somebody else. The ones worth finding are the few running one app on purpose.
Where from
Posts here come from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and the Jersey side.
An app turns that into a radius slider. A board makes people say it in words, which is more
useful and considerably harder to fake.
Subs in New York
Submitting, with the terms set out before anyone opens a conversation.
Fifteen years, two arrangements, both of them long distance.
What I want is specific enough that in a metropolitan area this size I have met perhaps six people who share it. So I keep two presences. One on a local platform where the pool is enormous and the overlap is almost nil, and one on a written board that is national and slow, where a handful of people know exactly what I mean and not one of them lives inside three hours of me.
Wants: a different sort of person, to find out whether the place makes them
Five years, two arrangements, one good and one a lesson.
Everything I know about meeting people for this comes from one sort of platform, because it is the one a friend put me on in my first month and I never looked any further. Five years later I have no idea whether the way I do this is normal or simply the habits of a single product. That is an odd thing to realise about a substantial part of your life.
Wants: somebody who is present in one place rather than available in four
Four years, two arrangements, the better one lasted a year.
Everybody in this city is on three of these at once, and so is everybody they are talking to. I did it for two years myself. What it produced was a permanent sense of being one tab among several, on both sides, and a set of conversations that were all roughly fourth in line. I now run one platform, deliberately, and I say so at the top of everything I write.
Wants: somebody who has already decided that a train is not an obstacle
Six years, two arrangements, one of which ended over geography.
On the community platform nobody has ever mentioned where I live. People there met each other at things, or through somebody, and an extra half hour is simply part of the evening. On the products that sort by distance I am on the edge of everybody's world, and I have watched perfectly good conversations end the moment my neighbourhood came up. Same borough, same me, two completely different verdicts.
Wants: somebody I did not meet through four people we both know
Seven years, two arrangements, both from the same circle of people.
Every friend I have in this is on one platform, which is wonderful for company and impossible for dating. Anybody I approach there is two people away from somebody who will hear about it, and both of my previous arrangements came out of the same circle and both endings had to be managed in front of it. That is what happens when a whole social world shares one address.
Wants: the sort of conversation that opens with a question rather than a verdict
Four years of matching with people and one real conversation.
I clicked into a written board by mistake, from a link somebody had sent me for an entirely different reason, and read adverts for a whole evening. Then I answered one, badly, at two in the morning. She wrote back a paragraph asking me three questions about my own week, and I sat looking at it for a long time, because in four years of being dealt people nobody had ever asked me anything at all.
Wants: somebody willing to work out what is mine without a machine helping
Two years on a recommending product, six weeks off everything.
The product I used for two years learned what I lingered on and showed me more of it, and after a while I genuinely could not tell whether I liked what it was showing me or simply recognised it. That is the whole mechanism and there is nothing sinister in it, it is only very effective. By the end I had a set of preferences I could describe fluently and no idea which of them had started with me.
Wants: somebody who will let me describe it badly and then help me get it right
Two years on the mainstream side, four months reading the specialist kind.
I spent two years on the general products after my marriage ended, being perfectly pleasant to perfectly pleasant men, and never once found a way to say what I actually wanted. There is no word for it in that vocabulary. The nearest available phrase is old fashioned, which means something completely different and gets you a man who holds doors and expects to be noticed doing it.
Wants: somebody who reads adverts rather than running searches
A year on a community platform, one on a written board, no arrangement.
The platform everybody recommends has a proper search in it, and every search anybody runs begins with a role. Pick the box, get the results. That is a sensible feature and it has one consequence nobody mentions out loud, which is that a person who has not picked a box does not appear in anybody's results at all. A year on there and I am, in the most literal sense available, unfindable.
Reading a board tells you how people in New York write and what they ask for. Which platform
to write it on is a separate question, and the answer moves with the size of the place.
The method, run against wherever you actually live
Starting from zero somewhere you have just moved
When the nearest busy board is two hours away
The shortlist, ranked on pond size and model fit
The other 20 boards
Each city gets read on its own platform mix, not on an average.
A board you only read is an app you never opened. A post of your own, read by people who actually live near you, goes on the platform this site connects to.