Feeld Was a Dating App for the Freaks. Now Some People Call It ‘Normie Hell’

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.)