Is Hinge Dead?

Not as an app. Hinge is still running, still taking new members and still showing women to men. Whether it feels dead where you live depends on your city, your settings and your own results, and Hinge does not publish how many women are active near you. Test your own area for two weeks before you decide, because the usual causes of a dead feed are fixable.

Almost nobody means the company has closed. They mean one of three things. The feed ran out of women. The matches stopped coming. Or the matches that came never answered.

Each of those is a real experience with a different cause. Treating them as one problem is how a man quits an app that was working in a city that was fine.

Your filters shrank the pool. Tight preferences on age and distance describe a small group in an ordinary city, and the same women come around again. Hinge suggests showing profiles just outside your preferences, and it says widening lets you see more people and lets more people see you.

Your own results dried up. A weak lead photo or a flat written answer gives you silence on any app, and silence feels like a dead app. The same page that gets nothing on Hinge will get about the same elsewhere.

Your city is thin. In a small town there may be few women inside your range, and no setting fixes that. That is a fact about the place, not about Hinge.

a dating coach has said online dating is kind of dying, and he lays out his reasoning. By his figures, worldwide monthly active users are down by 17 million over the last few years, and yearly dating app downloads have fallen by 50 million over about the same stretch. Those are numbers for dating apps overall, not for Hinge alone.

His explanation is that the apps became a victim of their own success. He compares it to online poker. Early on, ordinary people made honest pages. As the apps grew, men started to treat them as their main plan, got better photos and better written pages, and began to take most of the results.

The practical reading is that it is harder for the average man than it was, because more men are good at it. That is not the same as a dead app, and it is not the app's fault.

Run the app properly for two weeks before you call it. Open it most days. Like only women you would take out, and put a short comment on each. Keep your filters as wide as you can live with.

Write down four numbers. Women you liked. Matches. Matches that answered. Dates set. If matches are thin, change the first photo. If matches come and go quiet, change your first line. If almost nothing moves in either case, your city may be the limit.

My advice is to test more than one app, because he has seen men fail on one and do well on another. Hinge is his favorite for New York, with the caveat that he says his pick can change.

A slow Tuesday. Hinge hands out one Most Compatible pick a day, so a day with nothing new is not a verdict.

An empty Likes You tab. That tab shows women who liked you, and if your page gives them little, it stays empty on any app.

A pile of old matches that never answered. Hinge hides a chat after 14 days without activity, so a quiet list is partly a list of conversations that ended on their own.

First, widen what you can. A few more miles and a few more years on either side cost you nothing.

Second, use the app steadily instead of in binges. Hinge says its system learns from your activity, and a man who opens it once a week teaches it very little.

Third, add a second app and compare. If the numbers on the other app are better with the same photos, the city is not the problem and Hinge is simply not your app.

And if both are quiet, put some of your week into meeting women in person. coach calls online dating a supplement to going out, not the only thing a man should do.