until i quit dating apps three months ago (before lockdown happened actually) i used hinge, bumble and tinder quite extensively
edit: WARNING long post holy shit
tinder: the first one I used. Of the three I had the best ratio of good:boring dates on there, but it does mean sifting through a LOT of garbage. It also means having to develop a strategy to suss out the dud profiles before you invest too much time. Chatting to strangers and trying to find a rapport is tiring. I quit it as part of a general scaling back of using dating apps because they were lowering my mood, which resulted in several good conversations and dates going badly because I didn't have the energy for them. Which then made me feel worse. It's a horrible vicious cycle. Tinder seemed like the easiest to cut out because you literally have to make all the effort unless you're in the top 5-10% of men (which I am not).
bumble: the worst of the three, by far. You have to wait for women to message first only to get a "hey" 90% of the time, forcing you to take intiative AND change the mood. I struggled to get any sort of rapport going with anyone on there. The two dates I went on lacked any sort of chemistry. There's something about Bumble that completely kills any sort of mood for me. I quit this pretty early on. I also used it early on, before I had that much self-awareness
hinge: definitely a winner for me. It does an excellent job of allowing me to filter out low-effort users: you're forced to fill in 3 questions and 6 photos otherwise they can't respond. So if you don't see that it's an easy swipe left. And those who are putting in the bare minimum effort are pretty obvious. I got a lot of dates, but they were mostly terrible. However I had enough "success" meeting people that I could hone my approach a bit better and understand more what I want out of these apps (as well as understand what kinds of women I got on best with). It's definitely the best platform to meet people, but my lack of success finding someone I like is mostly down to two things:
1. the illusion that something better is always around the corner, which an app that brings 1000's of people to your fingertips is very good at tricking you into believing
2. london. everyone is too fucking busy. nobody is willing to spend time getting to know someone.
I'd say I was "active" on dating apps for about 2 years in all. Over that I learned a crucial lesson: my ability to meet someone I like has a lot to do with knowing what I want, and that's not something I learned until much later on. At one point I went through a long string of meh dates that varied from agonisingly boring to frustratingly nice, and I realised that part of the problem was jumping too quickly into dates. Which is something guys do because the dating world out of desperation, among other reasons. But once you actually start getting regular conversations with women you suddenly have to change your strategy to be more picky, which is something that took me a while to get used to.
Oddly enough I did develop a great amount of empathy for women who are dating - I'm not proud to say that I was resentful of women who weren't interested in me, and it's easy to wallow in the fact that men generally have to take more initiative still. The first step was not making those feelings their problem, but the feelings themselves are still problematic.
And then I had this one date where the girl wouldn't stop talking and I had to leave early, when I realised that she probably went on a date in good faith and just finds it as hard as I do. And yeah dating is unfair on men but that's kind of life. Not to mention that for women, dating still carries somewhat of an existential threat unfortunately. Emapthy is a hell of a drug. It finally allowed me to look past the systemic inequities of dating for the better.
One last thing I'll say in this rambling post is this: if you're not looking inward while dating, and instead blaming the state of play and/or others for your lack of success, you're doing it wrong. Of all the failed dates you're the common denominator. That's not to say that that woman you saw last week wasn't a complete tool, but you can't change that. What you can change instead is who you choose to meet, how you react to people and how you behave around them.