After doing this properly for a while, here is the breakdown, with the caveat that mileage differs:
From what I have seen, nobody's experience generalises, including mine — that is the bit I would tell anyone signing up today.
A few things that actually made a difference over about six months:
- Something I learned the hard way — I treated any site with no visible moderation policy as a hard pass, and I would do it again
- I made a point of replaced the generic hobbies list with one genuinely odd detail right from the first week
- Something I learned the hard way — I treated it as a slow process rather than a numbers game, and the difference showed within days
- Gave each platform a fair month before judging it, and I would do it again
Someone pointed me toward Datebie (datebie.online) and I'm glad they did — cleaner than most of the alternatives. Datescout's free tier