They've gotten worse by the year. If you're married and have 2 kids, you probably were on them long enough ago that it was quite different. You might also be conventionally attractive.

I've been single a couple of times in my life and some of those times I created a Tinder (and/or Bumble, OKCupid) account.

First time must've been about 8-9 years ago now after I got broken up with. Got an okay amount of matches, tons of interesting conversations. Met a few people IRL. Found a girlfriend after about half a year, ended up not being very compatible, broke up, made another Tinder account. 3-4 years on Tinder, getting fewer matches by the year. Increasingly few interesting conversations, met maybe 4-5 people IRL over that time (some of whom I'm still friends with). Ended up meeting the person who would become my baby mama and ex-wife. After I divorced her, created a new Tinder account and... near-zero matches. I saw TONS of bots. Like super obvious bots, all the same-ish profile archetypes (my favourite one being random letters for name with a weird blurry photo of a red building, saw hundreds of those). Half a year and two dates with one woman later, I just... deleted it and embraced being single. An average looking woman makes an account and in a few hours they have 99+ likes (where it stops showing the exact amount). Not quite happening for me or any men I know.

I'm not super attractive, kinda average looking face and a bit overweight, but I'm quite strongly built and masculine which some women seem to find, I dare say, irresistible, but many do not. But I've never (in my adult life - middle school was different) had problems holding a conversation with a woman, I've always had creative bios and decent photos compared to many I've been shown from other guys' profiles. My ability to get matches on Tinder, Bumble, whatever, has gone down over the years, whereas I feel off those apps I'm better than ever? I've joked that I have the exact same thing with jobs and women: Once I get to the interview, I'm in, but getting there rarely happens.

And like... it's not just the quantity of matches that went down. Quality too. By match quality I don't mean "I matched shit people", that would be quite arrogant of me to say. I mean I used to match more people with whom I felt I had things in general. People with whom a conversation would just flow until 5 AM. That just stopped happening over time.

Oh and you get fewer swipes than ever, no longer get any free superlikes on a free plan (you get 5 a week on gold I think, used to get few on free...), etc. The gold plan is like 20€ a month which I got as a bonus through my Revolut plan and... they still keep upselling you on both a more expensive sub, and consumable boosts.

Most other apps belong to the same company and seem to have degraded similarly - but none of them are used much here anyway, there's 100x fewer people on Bumble and OKCupid would just show me people from other countries only.

TL;DR: Used to get more matches. Used to match people who I'd actually enjoy talking to (and vice versa). App itself is trying to upsell you more and more while you get about as much on paid plans now as you did on free plans back in the day.