I mean.. most people are kind of boring. It's not surprising that most profiles will thus be kind of boring.

The biggest factors I think are

• You live someplace shitty.
• Your photos are bad. This is different from you are bad.
• Your profile has red flags.
• You're writing unimpressive messages.

The apps suck and are a capitalist nightmare, but there's stuff you can do to improve the odds as a free user.

I just remembered some guy on lemmy that was like "i can't get any dates on these things!" and when pressed, he revealed that he'd talk to women on there for a couple weeks, and then was surprised when nothing happened. No shit. You gotta ask people out.