Just to say at the start of this, to put it into context, I’m going to have to roughly explain my preferences. I don’t mean any offence when I talk about what my preferences are not, it’s just what attracts me personally . (Also if you’re going to say it, I prefer hyper fixate to over think, it’s how my brain is, can’t help it)

The point is that Feeld has, as we all know, massively expanded its user base very suddenly and without having the infrastructure in place to cope. I think they demonstrate lazy thinking in lots of ways but here’s a big one:

If you divided people up into 3 groups identifying as cis men / cis women and / other (Please don’t be cross about “other”, I totally understand the nuances of the different identities I’m putting all together in that group, but just for the sake of my argument may I say it for a minute?). Then if you drew a circle around the people that have this thing I find attractive, (which I can’t really put my finger on, it’s not a level of “good looking” at all, it’s a characteristic that I can’t explain but when someone has it I immediately fall for them, it’s something like androgyny with a few other personality things). Anyway. My point is that it doesn’t bother me how someone identifies, as long as they’re happy. Also I don’t want to fetishise a particular group, I like everyone. So they might be any of those three groups but the chances are that they are most likely to be in “other”. It would make sense to tick everyone in the search settings except couples, because no not for me (…except male couples actually, but don’t let me hijack my own post, I’ll try and stay on track), but i’m likely be most interested in people in the other group.

Right so everyone is ticked ok let’s go! But no. The problem is that because they only show you this random number of people that match your age and distance search - for me, today, it happens to be 53 people - but they don’t take into account the different demographics in their user base, which is mostly cis men, the search results are therefore skewed and are obviously mostly cis men. If I toggle off men the I see loads of cool “other” people I don’t see when I include men so I’m losing out. If I toggle women off then I’m very pleased to avoid a huge cohort of unicorn hunting couples which are also costing me the people I want to see. If Feeld are not going not going to tailor results more intelligently then they need to take off the restriction on numbers of results.

So because of this there’s an opportunity cost in terms of who you can see if you include cis people in your search.

But I don’t want to exclude men, or women, because a) I like them and b) even worse … did you know who you look for affects who you are shown?? Sounds obvious right? I mean there’s no point showing straight people to gay people etc. but it’s worse than that, they’ve got it really wrong. I’m polysexual on there so I should see and be shown everyone you’d think - however if I tick women it affects some of the men that then appear, who then disappear if I untick women. I mean wtf ??? And anyway, as I say, I like some people identifying as men / women so if I take them off my search they won’t see me either. And I already think there’s a problem in who sees me, based on my likes and analysing who they’re from, but that’s another post…

It’s a shit show.

The least they need to do is ensure you’re shown an equitable cross section of people when you do a search instead of a disproportionate number of one group.

And edit, sorry forgot to say - I can’t filter the search results down to remove people that aren’t compatible with me, because it’s not intelligent enough and because there isn’t a bloody switch box. So I’ve given up on desires and just left it as all.