Are Plenty of Fish Bots ruining the platform? – POF Alternatives

Plenty of Fish, often referred to as POF, has been one of the top dating apps for many years now. It’s one of the main competitors of Ok Cupid, and has been a serious rival to newer dating apps like Tinder and Bumble.

The app has a core user base. However, many of those users have reported dissatisfaction with the platform gradually getting worse over time, with the main problem being more and more spammers using it.

Is Plenty of Fish really full of bots?

The unfortunate truth is that yes, just like some other dating platforms, POF has been overrun with bots in the last few years. Many of the supposed users of the platform are now bots, and it’s practically ruined the platform for those looking to meet a new match.

Plenty of Fish has actually been one of the better apps when it comes to features, and it was worth the upgrade to a paid plan as you’ll get access to hidden features and be able to contact anyone via the platform, including those in a close proximity to you.

However, it’s pretty difficult to recommend POF in its current form. Hopefully, over the next few years they can evict all of the spammers and get the platform back to what it once was.

How to Identify Fake Profiles

Typically, bots will send you a message that is easily identified as spam. However, sometimes they can actually be pretty good at passing for a real person.

Most bots or scammers will write in jumbled language that doesn’t quite make sense, and most of them will have two photos on their profile.

They’ll then have a brief bio that doesn’t make sense – you can usually link their profile pictures, biography and messages together and tell that it’s not a real person.

Eventually, if they’re a fake profile they’ve eventually ask you to send money. If you come across a bot on the platform, you can easily report them by using the reporting form.

Before you submit the form to report the false profiles, Plenty Of Fish wants to make sure that you’re not wasting their time and the user is actually a bot – not that they’re just being reported because they didn’t reply to your DMs.

Best Alternatives to Plenty of Fish

The good news is that there are some great alternatives to using POF, and they all tend to meet the needs of the user pretty well – they all have their own qualities.

  • Tinder – The most used platform with many real people. A great dating app if you’re looking for hookups and relationships without strings.
  • Bumble – For when you get tired of matches going absolutely nowhere on Tinder. The vast majority of users on Bumble are genuine, so you don’t need to worry about bots and scammers like on POF.
  • eHarmony – Probably the best genuine alternative to Plenty of Fish. Though it used to be a heavily religious platform, new owners have turned eHarmony into a general dating site. Worth checking out if you’re actually looking for love.
  • OKCupid – One of the older dating apps that has plenty of attractive women and men, little to no fake accounts and good for finding the right person. Lots of genuine female profiles and a good place to start your online dating experience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Plenty of Fish definitely has a bot problem, and for most people it’s not worth using the platform unless you already have a history there. It’s usually pretty easy to tell whether someone is a bot or not, though it’s not always that easy to determine if they’re real.

Fortunately, there are a ton of other dating apps that you can opt to use instead, so you don’t need to rely on the Plenty of Fish platform.

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Edward

Edward brings years of experience in a variety of different fields including online marketing & No-code app development, and he's been investing in stocks and cryptocurrency since 2016. Outside of work you'll usually find him watching movies at the local cinema or playing games in the Apple Arcade.

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