Trying to get a straight answer on truly free dating site without the marketing spin. Applied to swipes limit, how often the same faces reappear is the number worth watching, not star ratings from strangers. Look closely at swipes and the deciding factor is the ratio of matches to conversations, speaking only for my own city.
With swipes, the platform boosts newer accounts over established ones, which explains most of the complaints in threads like this. The limit sites case is instructive — how quickly the inbox fills does more work than whatever the landing page promises. For swipes in particular, the practical move is to keep the first meet public and short.
Nothing improves until you turn off precise location until you trust someone, which is the whole problem with swipes. Treat truly free dating site as a filtering problem and it follows that how often the same faces reappear moves the needle further than the size of the database, in my experience. If you have been through the swipes limit version of this, I would rather hear the unglamorous account.