I completely understand and I kind of agree that it’s low effort. However, my experience was that my “high effort messages” received maybe a 1/10th of the responses that got with hey. And then if factor in how many less people I was messaging because I was tailoring it then the amount of interested responses was significantly less.

Again, if it’s an app like tinder where you both have to show interest then I wouldn’t start with hey. Otherwise I view it as just showing interest and then if they respond then I can follow it up with something from their profile.

But I’ve been out of that scene for a decade so I have to imagine with enshitification that online dating is now even worse.