No one likes dating apps, especially the people who use them. Mounting fatigue with ghosting, swiping, situationships and talking stages has led to a general downturn in usage. In February, Wired reported that dating-app use among US adults plateaued during COVID and dropped from 18 to 15 percent between 2020 and 2022; in a recent Forbes survey of people who use dating apps, nearly 78% of the respondents reported some degree of burnout, with millenials and Gen-Z users reporting the highest instance of same.
Instead, people are taking heed of a piece of wisdom you often hear on the internet: “Everything’s a dating app if you try hard enough.” Reports continue to rise of people getting laid off LinkedIn and getting slutty via Strava. As is grimly predictable, these come-ons range from the respectful and successful to hail-Mary horny DMs that are desperate if not outright slimy.
It prompts the question: if online dating really is migrating to less obvious lands, which apps are the best (and least) equipped to help people find love? Putting aside places like Instagram and Snapchat, which are more or less dating apps already, here are some of the more unexpected ones, ordered by their romantic potential—with a few first-hand accounts of life in this brave new world thrown in for good measure.
11. Pinterest
Remember Pinterest? The place where users pin photos they like? Usually in service of aggressively mood-boarding their upcoming wedding? This is not a place for love nor lust. Users can message each other, sure, but about what? Heirloom tomatoes? Embroidery? Pass.
10. Twitch
Hmmmm. The vibe here is to watch internet celebrities—Hasan Piker, Anthony Fantano and the like—play video games, listen to music, cook, and pontificate on politics in real time. Viewers can heckle in the comments, but chatting up the streamer in question, or each other? Seems technically very tricky. Some Twitch streamers will pull up their dating apps on screen and publicly go through their matches, which is pretty gross.
9. Slack
We cannot in good conscience recommend looking for love here, given the myriad HR issues which could arise. Slack probably is involved, in some way, in most modern workplace romances. But don’t go trawling through distant departments trying to hook up. In 2017, the kink-forward dating app Feeld released a downloadable Slack bot with which people could signal romantic interest in their colleagues. If two people went for each other, they were notified about it. A formula for pure chaos—and given that Slack has a policy of removing any apps “a reasonable person would consider inappropriate for the workplace,” the Feeld bot unsurprisingly got swiftly deleted.
8. TikTok
Although it’s an extremely popular platform, TikTok is also largely responsible for social media becoming anti-social media: rather than interacting with friends (or potential lovers), users just scroll, slack-jawed, through their For You feed. Which isn’t to say that love can’t find a way: commenting and DM features make seduction possible, and there is a steady trend of people soliciting “boyfriend/girlfriend applications” for themselves or for friends and families by essentially posting lonely-hearts vids. But are these really intended for love, or for engagement?
7. Goodreads
There’s nothing like a shared hobby to bring people together, or at least provide a plausible pretext with which to sidle into someone’s DMs. The book-review platform Goodreads surely has potential here, given its messaging function and the opportunities for striking up conversations based on someone’s review. I couldn’t help noticing you liked that Annie Ernaux book—let me tell you about my own French autofiction favorites—etc, etc. But there’s scant online testimony around about any Goodreads romances actually taking place. Try harder, bookworms!
6. Letterboxd
Can this film-bro paradise also help you neck with someone in the cinema? At first glance, no: though users can follow each other, and comment on each other’s reviews, there’s no DM function. That hasn’t stopped people, though: Recall the viral story from a few years ago of a couple getting together after coming across each other’s five-star reviews of David Fincher’s Mank. Back-and-forth comments escalated to email, and things went from there.
Sarah*, a 29-year-old New Yorker, had a very similar experience recently: she followed one (non-binary) user with a similar taste, they followed her back, and the pair “bonded over a shared interest in pre-Hays Code films,” she says. “They started commenting with this very sort of… disarming familiarity,” she says, “but not in a way that made me uncomfortable. I reviewed Local Hero and they were like, ‘I’m Peter Riegert, and you’re Burt Lancaster’ or something.” After at least six months of this, Sarah commented her email address, and the pair eventually met up at a screening of Educating Rita at New York’s MOMA. It didn’t spark anything immediately—Sarah had just started seeing someone else—“but there’s an energy there that probably exists in the future”, she says.
5. Substack
Your most pretentious friend’s favorite social-media app is a place for earnest essays, intriguing stats, and users typing “this 👇” while all sharing the same viral paragraph. So a lot of space for half-intellectual, half-horny conversation. The fact you can see what newsletters someone subscribes to also gives you a pretty good read on their cultural and political disposition. Inevitably, the question of Substack being a dating app has been written about at length on Substack; opinions are mixed. But if you get off on a good take, don’t rule it out.
4. Reddit and Discord
Pursuing real-life relationships (platonic or romantic) via forums has been a feature of online life since forever, and Reddit and Discord—a gaming-specific platform that has since grown to cover all kinds of interests—are very much the modern incarnations of that. The tradition of anonymous posting might be an initial speedbump, but if your heart has been stirred by long, niche discussions on r/guitarpedals or r/cheese, you might be so set on someone you don’t care about their looks. There are also a lot of “r4r” subreddits that are explicitly about dating (and often straightforwardly explicit too), which basically function as actual dating apps.
3. X and Bluesky
Search “Twitter is a dating app” on what is now X and you’ll see loads of evidence to that effect, including very heart-warming side-by-side photos of someone’s initial DM and the resulting marriage. Elon Musk’s stewardship of the company has seen an invasion of spam porn accounts, which somewhat spoils the vibe. Its main competitor, Bluesky, could be an alternative, though the political climate there is so painfully earnest it might dissuade you from a rogue, reckless message. Nevertheless, there’s potential in both.
2. Strava
Maybe it’s all that post-exercise dopamine, but Strava has had a reputation for horniness for a couple years now. Going on group runs—a park 5k, say—puts all users, even if they don’t know each other, into the same activity notification, so you can quite easily scroll through the profiles and DM anyone who caught your eye. There are other seduction methods too. Manny, a 27-year-old from Colorado, briefly met a similarly sporty Canadian girl in Paris and added her on Strava, given he didn’t have any other social media. “About three weeks after I got back to the US, I ended up DMing her,” he says. She invited him to Ottowa to stay with her and run a triathlon together. “The trip was organized around the race,” he says, “and then after, we ended up having a great time going out to dinner and doing some other things.” Organizing it on Strava definitely helped the vibe, he thinks: it allowed them “to branch off of that common interest.”
1. LinkedIn
Many, many people have a story about pursuing or being pursued romantically on this most corporate of platforms. Maybe that corporateness is a perverse turn-on, in the same way that office affairs can be so intense. Maybe it’s simply that, past the era of peak Facebook, LinkedIn is the most likely platform to find someone on—even if they don’t have Instagram, they’re probably here. This can obviously mean a lot of borderline harassment, given there isn’t even the most basic dating-app filter of having to match with someone before you message them.
But sometimes, the app’s universality can be an aid to romance. Mared, for example, got asked on a date on LinkedIn by someone a few weeks after having a lovely 4am chat with him at a festival. “I told myself if I could remember your name after the festival I’d find you,” went his message, she says. The date didn’t go anywhere, but she doesn’t regret pursuing the lead. Emily* got added as a connection by someone she briefly met, who then DMed her when she posted a short story on the platform. They started chatting, he asked her out, and they went on a few good dates before the reappearance of his ex halted things. “By the time he reached out again I was dating someone else,” she says, though that didn’t stop him sending her impassioned messages every couple months for a good while afterwards. As with repeated messaging on dating apps, the law of diminishing returns holds strong here.
*Names have been changed
This story originally appeared in British GQ.