A Brooklyn woman using the Feeld dating app encountered a profile of a man who identified himself as an ICE agent, which she found shocking given the app's sex-positive and progressive reputation. This experience reflects a broader sentiment among long-time users that Feeld, once a niche platform for non-traditional and kink-friendly dating, is being overrun by mainstream "vanilla" daters, changing its core community.
The app has experienced massive growth, with membership up 368% from 2021 to 2025, leading to user complaints that it has become a "normie hell" akin to Tinder. In response to its evolving user base, Feeld is launching a "self-discovery" tool called Reflections, a guided survey designed to help users understand their desires and boundaries.
The main topics covered are a user's anecdotal experience on the app, the platform's significant growth and perceived shift away from its niche audience, and the introduction of a new feature aimed at user self-discovery.
Alise Morales just happened to be on the dating app Feeld the night a man was detained by ICE agents a mile from her Brooklyn, New York, apartment.
Fresh off of a divorce, Morales, a 35-year-old comedian, was in the market for something strictly casual. That’s when she came across Paul’s profile. “I was a couple swipes in, and it took me a second to even get what I was seeing,” she says. He was 32, straight, and, like Morales, looking for “casual fun.” He was also one mile away. Then she noticed his bio: “Hey I’m Paul! ICE agent in from out of town looking for fun :)”
Initially, Morales thought it was a bad joke, “but there was nothing else on the profile to indicate that it was, or what the joke would even be,” she says. News alerts across her socials had mentioned an active ICE operation in the area. “I’m like, is this guy actively kidnapping one of my neighbors right now?”
Of all the dating and hookup apps, Morales felt the least overwhelmed by Feeld when she joined in the summer of 2025. She “liked the radical honesty” of the people on the platform. But this was a first. “Obviously, I don't expect everyone on there to have the same, like, progressive political beliefs as me, but Feeld does feel like the type of place—because of the sex-positive nature of it, and what it embraces—where it is shocking to see someone like that on there.”
Though her experience is unique, it represents a larger shift being felt by some Feeld power users that the app, once primarily a space for nontraditional and kink-friendly daters, now caters to everyone.
Launched in 2014 as 3nder, Feeld made a name for itself by embracing people who didn’t fit into the boxes of every other dating app. (Its original pitch: Tinder but for people into threesomes.) Looking for a play partner who is two-spirit but not nonbinary? Interested in finding a brat that is into bondage and ethical non-monogamy? Feeld was for the freaks.
That’s changing. According to the company, from 2021 to 2025 membership grew 368 percent, with a nearly 200 percent spike in new users over the same period. In data shared with WIRED, “finding community” has become the platform’s fastest-growing relationship modal, which surged 257 percent among new users from December 2025 to mid-January 2026.
“We’re capable of doing something really big and important for people,” Feeld CEO Ana Kirova says. “And that a lot of what we stand for can resonate with more people, not because we enforced it, but because we find a way to mirror what people want and then deliver it.”
But many longtime users describe Feeld as a place that has gone from a bespoke platform to “hopeless” “normie hell” overrun with vanilla daters who are “using the app as the new Tinder.” That’s on top of the “scammers,” “matches peddling their OnlyFans,” and bots. The biggest complaint, said one user on Reddit last year, “is the amount of people now on the app who are not sexually open minded.” Added another: Feeld “took the biggest and what feels like the fastest nosedive in a dating app I’ve ever seen.”
At the heart of the app’s evolution, a question lingers and swells: Who exactly is the platform for these days?
On Tuesday, Feeld will launch a new “self-discovery experience” called Reflections. Developed by University of Michigan associate professor Apryl Williams, Reflections is a guided 30-minute survey—available within the app or online for nonmembers, free of charge—that measures your capacity in three areas: desires, boundaries, and relationship preferences. Across 165 total prompts—questions range from “What would stop a connection from moving forward?” to “Would you use large toys or objects on someone?”—Reflections tests users on things like their kink affinity, awareness of red flags, sex drive, potential for exploration, and self expression. (Users are given a percentage score in each area along with a summary of personalized results.)
“One of the challenges we have with people who are not maybe well-versed in different communities and languages is that it's just so obvious on the platform,” Kirova says. “Feeld has always been a melting pot of people who are very active in a certain lifestyle or way of living and people who aren’t. That’s been the case since day one. I think the scale of it now is just different.”
As Feeld has marketed to a wider audience under Kirova’s tenure—she became CEO in 2021 after serving as chief product officer—it has had to juggle its priorities. Veteran users say the problems started after the relaunch in 2024. According to a press release from that January, Feeld wanted to “reimagine the app from the ground up and evolve [its] design system and technology in a way that allowed for greater scale and flexibility.” With Kirova at the helm, the app was growing faster than ever. But the update came with hiccups. There were chronic glitches: a looping redirect during the sign up process, slow loading speeds for photos, videos, and messages, a flickering effect when in dark mode for Android users, a bug that would cause the app to randomly crash, the inability to upload profile photos, to name a few. In under four months, the app had undergone seven significant updates.
“It was awful,” says Marcus, a 55-year-old schoolteacher in upstate New York who joined Feeld in 2014 to find women “to engage in power exchange with, or couples to engage in threesomes.” (Citing professional concerns, he asked to be identified by his first name only.) He says the update changed the DNA of the company—and its priorities. “The number of vanilla people flooding in continues. I don't know where they are marketing this app, but they aren't targeting just alternative lifestyle folk. Recently someone from work found me there, which was awkward.”
Feeld’s rebound has been its biggest mystery. The numbers tell one story—revenue increased by 26 percent in 2024 to $65 million, according to a Companies House filing, with Japan, France, and Mexico emerging as the app’s fastest-growing regions—but some users tell another.
Phoenix-based makeup artist Yaz Roque joined in 2023 after her five-year relationship ended. A self-proclaimed “man-hating lesbian for a decade,” she was finally ready to explore her sexuality with men. At first, everyone was “genuine, open, and had a similar wavelength of kink and queerness” compared to Hinge, she says. On Feeld she found a consistent play partner and was able to explore her submissive side in ways she hadn’t before, getting into role-play and BDSM. But she has noticed a drastic change in recent years. “It instantly bums me out that they’re appealing toward a broader audience of people.”
In February, fed up with the direction the app was going, Roque disabled her paid account, feeling like she kept meeting “low-effort” guys who weren’t being intentional about the kind of relationship they wanted to create with her. Feeld offers a free tier, with limited features, and a “Majestic” membership—which can range from $30 per month or $125 per year, but varies depending on location—that allows you to see who likes your profile, send daily pings, and more. “I have hope that it can still be a space where people can be queer, be in open relationships, and be very intentionally poly. I just don’t know if that’s where it’s going. It has not felt that way.”
As the company works to rehabilitate its image, Kirova hopes Reflections can be a real step in the right direction, for the needs of seasoned users, what she calls “torchbearers,” and new converts. “I want to find a way to hold both truths at the same time,” she says. “It’s a constant balancing act.”
Marcus has seen this story play out before—how scaling so quickly over a short period never benefits the user in the end. “I worry Feeld’s going to get sold to some large conglomerate and all the user data will be sold off and data-mined. I mean, isn’t that practically inevitable?”
According to the company, insights from Reflections are used internally to improve the tool and the user experience on Feeld. The company’s privacy policy maintains that it does not sell user data, which Kirova says she takes seriously. “I feel too responsible with that kind of information people share—their sexuality, their expression. It’s so private and sacred.”
For now, Feeld remains one of the most progressive apps on the market. Heteroflexible—straight people who sometimes participate in same-sex sexual experiences—is its fastest-growing sexuality, with pegging on the rise among cis men (up 200 percent among users in 2025). Women over 40 are the second fastest growing demographic. Per Feeld’s 2026 State of Reflections report, 71 percent of members also view alternative relationship styles as normal, and 68 percent of members actively practice kink.
But Feeld’s meteoric growth is what continues to trouble Marcus.
“If you just want a hookup—don’t join. If you want a traditional monogamous marriage, white picket fence, 2.5 kids—don’t join. Honestly, if you’ve never been to a local swingers event or a munch, you’re probably not ready to be on Feeld. Come back once you've been involved in your local scene first.”
Meridiano
