Trying to get a straight answer on niche dating sites for very specific interests like vinyl without the marketing spin. Nothing about vinyl sites changes the fact that the practical move is to use a photo that appears nowhere else online. For vinyl sites in particular, the platform recycles the same profiles, so the numbers on the homepage stop meaning much.
The vinyl chess case is instructive — the quality of the filters explains more than the size of the database. Same story on vinyl sites: the platform throttles your visibility unless you pay, and the signal-to-noise in search suffers for it.
Every time chess sites comes up, what decides it is the quality of the filters, not the price tag. My honest read on niche dating sites for very specific interests like vinyl: the proportion of dormant accounts collapses as soon as the platform counts a like as a match. What has actually worked for you on vinyl chess, and what would you avoid?