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“Beware - no value for money”

written by AlannahMeadows on 10/05/2016

First of all, context. I'm a late twenty something and have moved country to settle in London one year ago. As most people I know are colleagues from work and I was sick of talking work all the time whenever on a night out with them, I decided to give this a try. I forked out the 38 pounds or so for 3 months of premium membership and boy, what didn't I do.
As someone said below, there were warning signs I should have paid attention to. Here are the problems I noticed :

1- Apparently if you're not a paying member you can't send messages at all - or even answered the one you received. This is a huge mistake in the business model has this prevent people not paying to be active at all. You can't force people to pay for a service they don't know if it will be valuable yet. Some will fall into the trap and pay as I did. But because of this "let's force member to pay to use the site at all" no community is built as most people chose not to pay for an unknown service - and wisely so. You can afford to make your service a paying one once you proved yourself, built up a community and scaled it up.
2- There is no added value to the service. By that I mean that there is no matching algorithm to match similar people together - not even by location. The simplistic design shows there are no qualified engineers being a poorly designed website (yes obviously, if the site is so poorly designed - crashing all the time and not easy to navigate - don't even hope for a m mobile decent app, there is none).
It's almost laughable but here is the way the site works : you choose a few basic activities - "sport" - "drinks" (...) "restaurant" and then an automatically generated "about me" section will be created. This section is barely modifiable as you are limited to 100 characters or so. You end up with a generic, unpersonnalized profile with a very very vague location. Result : when you look for like minded people, you can only search by age (and location but this does not actually works, presenting people living sometimes in Manchester or Leeds or even Scotland when looking in my immediate neighbourhood...).
You'll end up "matching" people you actually have very few in common with. I suspect it is because the founder did not have the budget to hire a real engineer to create a proper algorithm, hence the poorly designed website, absence of algorithm and amateur overall design.

3- it forces you to pay to be able to contact anyone at all....sure enough I got rid if almost 40 pounds and texted a lot of people, most of which appearing to be premium. Very very few answered. I suspect strongly there a lot of fake profiles, just as in dating websites.
I received tons of automatically generated messages also.

All in all not worth it. It has been designed by an unskilled person, with absolutely no added value as it only matches you on the basis of your age (yes, in citysocializer world, a "similar person" is just someone who is the same age as you. They could be a criminally convicted assaulter and you a young professional and this site would match the both of you because you're both 29. Soul mates! Yay!).
The level of amateurism is laughable and the exec of this company seriously needs to get a grip on reality. Soon enough lawsuits will be filed.
No wonder they try and force people to pay as the site has absolutely no value (no matching algorithm, poor database and amateurish website design).