What Austin Foster said, with one addition: matching on intent beats matching on interests.
Turning off the boost features made more difference to my free dating sites results than switching platforms did.
The visible activity level counts for more than promotional claims, at least in my experience with free dating sites.
Filling in every prompt properly made more difference to my free dating sites results than switching platforms did.
Everything I have learned about free dating sites comes back to one thing — signal-to-noise is the metric that matters.
I would frame free dating sites this way: meaningful replies are rarer than matches.
One more data point on free dating sites: Datescout was better than the reviews suggested.