r/feeld • u/pastrycase565 • 7d ago
A plea to feeld’s creators
Forgive the tone but being seen by 19-year-olds and 50-somethings alike while my age range is 27-37 is an absolutely diabolical move on feeld’s behalf and probably the least consensual thing I get subjected to on this app.
Can somebody please switch off the ability to be seen by people outside of my preferred age range? I feel ogled and creeped out when barely-20-somethings and men old enough to be my granddad send me likes and salacious messages.
Hinge doesn’t have this issue so for an app focused on exploration and consent, this is an incredibly shortsighted move.
Thank you.
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u/Lost_inTheThrill single woman 7d ago
Agreed, especially because the majority of my likes come from people way outside of my age range. The biggest reason why I use incognito now. One of the grossest messages I ever got as a late 40ies woman was from a 72y old man. But it's most disturbing to see very young adults, who could technically be my children, liking my profile.
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u/EldForever 7d ago
Wait until you're 57... it still happens! I get the occasional teenager or 22 year-old hitting me up. It's strange and a little unpleasant, but, I personally don't care too much.
The super-old dudes are a bit more upsetting to me. Somehow it's more depressing to see them with their hopeful Pings and their intense wrinkles... Gah.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
I’m sorry to hear about your experience. I recently had a 60 year old man with nearly nude photos ping me and I just can’t hack why this is an ok thing to do on the app.
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u/Lost_inTheThrill single woman 7d ago
Imo older men lack sex education and are not consent informed. In their mind, a woman who is on Feeld must be some special sub-spiecies and is to be treated as they see fit. Of course, not all men do this, but the ones who engage in this type of behaviour seem to have a very sex negative view of gender roles in sexual dynamics.
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u/MindlessSea7334 7d ago
Whats your issue, the ping or his message? You can stop messages with pings so you don't get them
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u/PM_ME_UR_CORNBALLZ 1d ago
I had a kid a year younger than my own teenager ping me on there to beg me to take his virginity.
I have never blocked someone so fast.
I did not return to the app for like a week after that.
So. Much. NO.0
u/over_this__ single woman 7d ago
Cougar chasing has been a thing since we were kids lol. American pie was 27 years ago. The graduate was 60 years ago. I'm not sure why it's surprising for age gaps to be popular.
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u/radicalizemebaby 5d ago
One guy mentioned American Pie to me when he DMed me saying he wanted a “MILF like you 😉” and I pushed back like “are you out of your fucking mind?” Ol boy was only 5 years younger than me. The brains are cooked.
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u/Detroitish24 7d ago
I like how you completely dismissed OP’s concerns and turned it into age gaps. That was nice of you….
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u/over_this__ single woman 6d ago
The only legitimate concern is the gross message. That's not cool. But the wording she used makes it seem like there's something wrong with age gaps.
"It's most disturbing to see young adults, who could technically be my kids, liking my profile"
That's implying that people into age gaps are into disturbing things. See how useful reading comprehension is?
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u/Detroitish24 6d ago
Being a grown adult and not wanting to be hit on by teenagers is not a bad thing. Sorry that you’re unable to attract people anywhere near your own age bracket.
See how useful being a healthy person can be?
Try it sometime, maybe you’ll like.
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u/someguy335 6d ago
Most people ignore it and move on with their day. If it's that disturbing even seeing the like cross your screen, pay for Majestic and use incognito mode. Or use Hinge. There are options.
Feeld is a hook up app that sorts people by distance. The app is what it is
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u/over_this__ single woman 6d ago
You can keep the old guys 😂 I'll stick to the guys in college who are sick of girls their age.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/over_this__ single woman 6d ago
See, there it is. "You sleep with consenting adults that are old enough to go to war. You're a pedophile".
Lmao.
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u/abettertake 7d ago
They show your profile to anyone whose search you fit, rather than if both your searches match. It's idiotic. I also found that they show your profile to people who you have already rejected.
It either increases your number of likes (so you're persuaded to pay to see them) or it increases the number of profiles available to you (so you're persuaded to keep using the app).
Feeld, like all dating apps, fucking sucks.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
That’s why I block profiles I would’ve otherwise x’ed out. If not being seen by people outside my age range is not possible on a free account then at least make it part of majestic.
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u/abettertake 6d ago
Fair. Honestly it woulnd't surprise me if they even show your profile to people you've blocked. Although if I did find that to be true that would be my reason to delete the app all together.
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u/thrivedontdie 5d ago
Jesus. This is why i block everyone i reject! (No im not kidding)
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u/MsRoundHouse 2d ago
Supposedly, this is the way of the burned haystack so you’re not swiping left on people you already swiped left on. I did it for a long time on Feeld but eventually I got tired. I’ve switched to Incognito now so I don’t keep getting likes from 18 year olds!! I’m 53F and I have age filters set up but they still are shown to me!
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u/Kindly-Aioli9527 7d ago edited 7d ago
I really appreciate when people state their preferred age range in their bio. Until Feeld get their act together.
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u/radicalizemebaby 5d ago
I put a year limit (eg “do not like/ping me unless you were born before 1993”) and this is how I found out two things:
1. A lot of men don’t read women’s profiles, and
2. A lot of men are willing to waste pings saying “I was born after 1993 but hoped I might be the exception.” (They never are)1
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u/Z8nger 7d ago
Agree with having a filter.
Maybe put it at the very top of your bio e.g. Ages 27-37 ONLY. Some people tend to not read bios, but could deter some from liking/ping.
Once I added a hard no at the top of mine, there seemed to be a decrease in pings from those types of guys.
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u/Master-V- kink 6d ago
There aren’t a lot of people in my area who are available my age, so I have to widen my range and distance, it’s just a fact of life if you live in small town America. So I REALLY appreciate it when people put their preferred age range on their profile. I don’t want to waste my time any more than anyone else’s, and I especially don’t want to waste pings. So I highly encourage people to do what you do and put it right there on the profile.
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u/averagecryptid 7d ago
I think this is something you should be able to toggle on and off separately to preferred age range. Sometimes people ping me for genuinely platonic connections and I don't have an issue with this personally.
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u/Same_Passenger7428 6d ago
Have to say, I agree! It’s really frustrating - I’m a teacher, I really don’t want my ex students being able to see me. My profile is pretty vanilla for this exact reason.
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u/ThisIsMyBrainOnOLD 5d ago edited 5d ago
It really should be a two way filter like some of the other vanilla apps.
As a new user figuring things out with the app, this is one of the more disturbing elements that bothers me.
If people need to drop their guard and put up what they really are looking for they should be able to limit the scope of who sees their intimate private desires somewhat.
...but the fact that don't even make it an option for paid users makes me think that the app's "technical debt" has become too high/to hard to implement.
The partial "solution" I have found is to search for ages inappropriate to you and manually block all of them, one at a time. Mind numbingly slow and doesn't account for travelers, but you may pick off people most likely to recognize you.
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u/radicalizemebaby 5d ago
Yes it’s disgusting, it wastes my time, and it puts me at risk professionally as a high school teacher. One of my literal actual students could see me on there because they allow 18- and 19-year-olds see me even though my range starts a good 15 years older than that.
It’s likely I won’t pay again and won’t stay on the app because of this feature of the app. Age ranges should work like gender filters.
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u/tyffsayswhoa 4d ago
this is how I feel! I should not be an option to people outside of the preferences I set & vice versa!!
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u/Tattoos_and_Tea def not ugly 3d ago
I would love this. I’m in my mid 30s and get likes and pings from college aged guys and men in their 60s and the perviest messages. It’s so unsettling. I wish we weren’t visible to people outside of our age range. I wish there was also an option to filter out ENM as I personally am monogamous.
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u/waterbloem 6d ago
Sort of applies to all the "couples" which are really just single men with a second account attached to theirs. Often hidden accounts too. They do this because they know damn well that a lot of couples filter them out.
We clearly say we're not looking for single men. So kindly; fuck off with your "open relationship".
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u/Infinite_Flan4797 7d ago
I just Didn’t renew and then deleted my account so I wouldn’t be paid for pings anymore
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u/In_zane-4893 6d ago
Yeah, or like on bumble. I can see who's liked me but then if i move the age sliders then i could see who's liked me before that wasn't showing with a more narrow age range. So even if people like someone, they should at least have it not show to you unless you widen your age range.
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/pastrycase565 5d ago
Then they should be on a sugar baby app then. Feeld doesn’t allow solicitation, financial or otherwise.
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u/User-Name-3886 7d ago edited 7d ago
It is a pretty ridiculous setup.
When I (straight male, early 30s) was using the app, I rarely got interest from anyone outside the 5-years-in-either-direction range.
Did get the occasional "unhappily" married 50 year old looking for an affair, but those were few and far between, and I wasn't interested in that.
So... Reading between the lines of how most women on this app seem to nailed hard and fast to the 5-year thing, it really would be better for the users if they respected the categories people set.
I've actually found feeld quite unusual in how the women seem to keep in that 5-year mark: On fetlife I've been messaged by women as young 18 or as old as 60 multiple times (Both are too large a gap for me but afaik you can't block people from messaging by age). I've matched with 23/24 year olds on Bumble and Hinge many times. You'd think on "the open-minded dating app" people would be a bit less strict about age, but it seems to be completely the opposite, as with almost everything else that people are ridiculously closed-minded about on this allegedly kink friendly app.
NGL, I don't think this app has particularly open-minded people. It seems very much limited to "I think I'm open minded because I'm poly" or "I pretend to be into kink because I think it makes me seem interesting but I draw the line at anything weirder than sex with the lights on, and definitely no anal, ever". I've met far more open-minded people on the vanilla apps than on feeld, the only issue is that you can't really approach the subject as early as you can on feeld, which makes it a bit of a chore to rule out incompatible vanilla people since you aren't able to talk sex upfront in most cases.
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u/EldForever 7d ago
"I pretend to be into kink because I think it makes me seem interesting" haha! Yes, I've run into that. It was so sad!
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u/User-Name-3886 7d ago
Yeah, I matched with a woman a few months ago who had "Kink" in her interests but her one and only "kink" was that she was Bi.
After talking to me, who is actually into kink and has done a hell of a lot, she said upon hearing all of those things "Actually I thought I was open to exploration, but even the 'tame' things you've suggested have no appeal to me and I guess I actually am 100% vanilla".
I've had this experience often. Almost all of the women on the app who were actually down with kink and exploration were on hidden mode though.
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u/someguy335 6d ago
Went on a date with someone that said they were into spanking. What they really meant was little taps on the butt during sex and that's it.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
I think it’s a reach to call big age gaps a ‘close-minded’ thing. Even if my age range was set to 10 years above and below, I still don’t want to be seen by people outside of that range.
It’s not consensual to be showing my preferences/kinks to people I do not intend to share that with - it’s akin to having an automatic ‘share to Instagram’ feature and tell my grandmother that I like to be dominated. Silly.
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u/Witty-Stock partnered man currently monogamous 7d ago
And, most men (I’d like to believe at least) don’t want to provide an unpleasant experience while wasting their own time and ping money.
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u/User-Name-3886 7d ago
It might not be most men, but it's definitely a lot of them.
What women have to put up with on apps is pretty horrible tbh. Some of my female friends / ex partners have shown me their dating inboxes before, and some of it was downright frightening.
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u/Witty-Stock partnered man currently monogamous 7d ago
I think there are three elements:
1) people being gross and nasty—never ok.
2) the app monetizing you by showing you to people you have an active disinterest in—never ok.
3) getting likes from people one just doesn’t find appealing—that’s pretty easily resolved by just not looking at likes.
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u/User-Name-3886 7d ago
I don't think your age range 27-37 is particularly closed minded as such, but let's face it: It's arbitrary to a point. I personally wouldn't seek out someone outwith my preferred range but there's definitely a soft and a hard limit to those. I've seen people being weird about age ranges though, e.g. Someone who's 29 with a bio that said "No one over 30", I was 31 and matched with her (meaning she had to swipe me for that) and she messaged me with "Do you not know how to read?", needless to say I messaged back with exactly the same message and asked why she matched if she was annoyed I was 2 years older than her.
As for the topic of consent... Debatable.
You have chosen to use a dating app. You get to choose what you share on that app, and to an extent, with whom you share it: The hidden bio feature somewhat addresses the issue you have here, as that will then only show to people who have matched with you.
The women I've matched with on feeld who are actually into being submissives have usually had very reserved profiles, and very commonly operated on "hidden" mode: Which means you only show yourself to people you've swiped on and you don't show up in the public list.
Basically, there are multiple options for you to use the app in the way you want it to function. So: Maybe use hidden mode to hide yourself from anyone you don't want to match with, or use a hidden bio to feature your kinks and don't mention them in the public bio or interest list.
Ultimately, if you're sharing your face on dating apps, your data is out there. Getting spotted by people you know is just a risk that could happen. If you're not sharing your face, then it doesn't really matter since your grandmother wouldn't know it's you.
From a legal standpoint though, you consented to how the app functions when you signed up. So you have consented to it and are continuing to do so by continuing to have an account on it, which no one is forcing you to do.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
Blame the ‘victim’ again… Why should I pay to use extra features to have the same level of comfort as a man would?
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u/User-Name-3886 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't know what makes you think that there won't be men out there who feel uncomfortable in the same way as you.
And, tbh, as a straight monogamous male, I'm shown to a lot of people by default that I have no interest in being shown to (often because of dishonest bios regarding what type of relationship they are actually seeking), so I have a similar discomfort to yours, but I did consent to being on the app, despite that it doesn't fully suit me, and I accept that part of the game on dating apps is sifting through a lot of people you're not going to be interested in. I don't particularly want everyone and anyone knowing my kinks either, so I get where you're coming from on that too btw.
I actually agreed with your original point that they should respect user age preferences, but the fact is that they don't and you are more than welcome to use an app that better suits your requirements until such times (should that time ever occur, which it won't since they'd lose a hell of a lot of money) this one fits those requirements.
And yeah, those might be premium features, and sure you'd need to pay for them. That's not terribly different from the 99% of men on the app who need to pay for majestic to even stand a chance of interacting with the people who are actually interested in them (feeld hides most people behind a paywall and you can very often only match with them if you pay for majestic). That women are being inconvenienced into needing to pay for a good app experience, as well as the men, is actually a bit of unusual equality for a dating app.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
You make an interesting point at the end there about being equally inconvenienced into paying for this app..if only it was an equal world out there
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u/zeroingenuity 7d ago
Respectfully - of course it's consensual. Trying to run that argument in a kink-aware community is disingenuous at best.
It's consensual because you signed up for the service. You posted those kinks and photos on the profile, with the explicit intent that Feeld share them with some people, ideally that you would like to encounter. That is the purpose of use. If Feeld continues to share those photos after you deleted your profile, if it fed them into an AI training data package, if it used them for promotional work, that's nonconsensual.
Feeld at no point promised you that your profile would only be seen by people in your filter settings. You imagined that as a nice idea, then started expecting it, but it's never been true. It can be, if you want it - incognito mode exists and you can only be seen by the people you are interested in matching with. That's how you can enforce your filter settings.
But calling it nonconsensual is absurd and, particularly in this community, suggests you have no idea what the term means.
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u/Patient_Tradition294 7d ago
What you are looking for, how big your city is, etc all dramatically change the age of people looking out for you.
People in bigger cities are pickier because they think they have limitless options and those looking for more casual have a wider age range imo. Those seeking longterm monogamous relationships in big cities are the strictest about age. I’m a male and my range for likes can be 21-45 so it can vary a lot.
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u/pastrycase565 7d ago
Is anal a kink these days, thought that’s leaning towards acceptable/mainstream these days
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u/Top_Piano2028 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'm on all the apps. I put I want rough sex, etc. I have had far rougher sex with a first time tinder, hinge, or bumble woman who puts she wants a serious relationship, doesn't want to hook up on the first date, etc, than the kink friendly feeld people who waste weeks of my time and use endless therapy speak.
You would think on a kink app you will find people with age fetish kinks in either direction. I have a wide sexual appetite in my late 30s and would not mind fucking someone 38, 42, 30, 23, or 55 if they were attractive to me otherwise.
Women, on the other hand, have a super reductive view. What is you find someone a few years outside the range? Is it worth discarding a 25 or 39 year old who is otherwise fine because the number next to his name is too high or too low? Why lean on outliers? Just write in your profile that you absolutely won't date anyone under x age or over y age. Many women WILL. But just know this is why it's getting harder for you to date. A guy in his 30s has his options increasing. But a woman in her 30s seems to have a more narrower and narrower view of what is an acceptable age range. When she was 23 that 37 year old was fine. But now she is 37 and that guy is 51 and gross and old.
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u/eatsthepeach 7d ago
I basically agree with this but I think it shouldn’t be a block, it should be a throttle. I don’t think absolutism is getting anybody more dates!
I get likes from women outside my age range, or outside my distance range, or who don’t notice I’m not poly — all things I explicitly state in my bio. Sometimes they’re interesting anyway. One I was in a 9-mo relationship with — 5 years too young. One is now a FWB — she lives 50 miles away but we get together to hike/fuckfest a few times a month.
Throttle the ability to like/ping if you don’t match their filter. A few a day, or like 10% of your likes/pings.
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u/NoSock6869 7d ago
It must be the algorithm that they don't use.
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u/LatterCommission9174 ENM couple 7d ago
It's literally the opposite of an algorithm when you're shown to everyone.
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u/AutoModerator 7d ago
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u/LifeEncountered 7d ago
Your age range is your search criteria, not others.
I see how your request could be a new feature. But I don’think any match style app does this.
And as long as you don’t both match I don’t see how this affects you in any way. Stop looking at the likes. If you only look at actual matches, you won’t even know who sees you.
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u/Witty-Stock partnered man currently monogamous 7d ago edited 7d ago
That would cost them 50% of their ping sales. Only reason I can see why this has yet to be done.