Part III of this series closed in December 2024, just after the New York Times ran its Vermont personal ads story. In the months that followed, the story kept moving.
Newspapers that hadn’t run personal ads in years started running them again. A print newspaper launched specifically as an antidote to apps. The data on swipe fatigue, already accumulating, became hard to dismiss. And the form that queer communities had been rebuilding since 2018 showed up in mainstream culture in ways that would have seemed unlikely two years earlier.
This epilogue documents what happened between December 2024 and the summer of 2025.
Cincinnati brings them back
In February 2025, CityBeat — Cincinnati’s alternative weekly — brought back a personal ads section for Valentine’s Day. Readers submitted their own ads and missed connections. The paper’s co-founder reflected on what had made the original work: the platform had “a real community in a geographical place,” and users were “very genuinely interested in using the platform for its intended purpose.”
A print newspaper for people tired of apps
Around the same time, a print newspaper launched in London called The Lonely Hearts Club — built specifically for people “tired of swipes, taps and algorithms.” Ads were short. Replies arrived as handwritten letters. The format was deliberately, pointedly analog.
It would have seemed like a curiosity in 2015. In early 2025, it was covered as a reasonable response to a real problem.
The numbers on fatigue
By the summer of 2025, the data on app fatigue had accumulated to a point where it was hard to frame as anecdotal. A Forbes Health survey published in July found that 78% of Gen Z users reported dating app fatigue. A Pew Research report from 2023 had already found that nearly half of online daters described their overall experience as negative.
Missed connections find new platforms
In July 2025, The Guardian documented the revival of missed connections on Reddit and TikTok. Not as a trend story, but as a reported piece with specific people and specific platforms.
The Guardian piece introduced Karly Laliberte, 30, who spotted a tall man outside a Boston Trader Joe’s, didn’t say anything, went home, and filmed a TikTok. Within hours it had 50,000 views. “There’s this desire to connect in-person,” she told the reporter. “I’m craving a connection that’s organic and less forced.”
That sentence describes the same thing every piece in this series has circled: the swipe model produces matches, but not the feeling that a match means something. Personal ads — in whatever medium they appear — start differently. The reader knows what the poster wants before they respond. The intent is in the writing.
What this series adds up to
This series began with the 2018 Craigslist shutdown and the specific things coverage at the time understood to be lost: a text-first, semi-anonymous way of meeting people that had no obvious successor. It then followed the same idea as it resurfaced across queer apps, newsletters, newspaper holdouts, and eventually Reddit megathreads. By late 2024, the mainstream press had started to notice what had already been happening for years.
By the summer of 2025, it had gone further. Newspapers were reviving their personals sections. A physical print publication launched to serve people who had given up on apps entirely. The fatigue data had become quantitative and undeniable.
Personal ads are not back just because people miss the past. They are back because they still do a few things unusually well. They let people be specific. They let readers respond to that specificity. And they start with words, which is still one of the best filters there is.
AseeksB: personal ads for the present
Text-first. Kink-friendly. Safety controls built in. All key features free on iOS and Android.
