In October 2019, The Guardian ran a piece with a specific, declarative headline: personal dating ads were “making a comeback.” This was eighteen months after FOSTA. The format the article described as returning was the same one Craigslist had just removed: text-first, writer-controlled, photo-optional.
The comeback was real. It just wasn’t happening in one place.
How Lex was built
The earliest post-2018 revival had actually started before 2018. Kelly Rakowski had been running @Personals — an Instagram personal ads account for LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people — since 2017. Inspired by the personal ads sections of queer magazines like On Our Backs, Rakowski invited followers to post their own ads. By the time FOSTA was signed, the account had over 60,000 followers.
In November 2019, Rakowski’s team launched Lex as a standalone app.
Lex went on to reach over a million downloads. Its core idea stayed the same: posts in the style of classifieds, no photos, no swipe.
The Cut’s newsletter
While Lex was building its queer audience, New York Magazine’s The Cut launched its own personal ads section — not an app, but a newsletter. Called Personals and edited by senior editor Amy Rose Spiegel, it ran semi-anonymous personal ads alongside Spiegel’s writing on sex and relationships.
The format was the same as a newspaper personals section: a curated selection of short ads, organized by week, readable by anyone. The difference was that the newsletter reached millions of New York Magazine readers, giving the personal ad a mainstream distribution it hadn’t had since the peak alt-weekly era.
Spiegel described opening her inbox every morning as letting “people’s romantic hopes wash all over me.” That she was editing a personals section for a major American magazine in 2022 — unremarkably, as a standing product — says something about how thoroughly the appetite had survived the platform’s closure.
Seven Days and the newspaper holdouts
Not every publication had killed its personals section in the early 2000s. Seven Days, a free alternative weekly in Burlington, Vermont, had been running personals since it was founded in 1995 and never stopped.
Jeff Baron, the paper’s personals editor, vets each submission by hand. His editorial standard is simple: he looks for people who actually live in Vermont. His advice for ads that work: write something “really genuine and kind.” The couple Brian and Brandi Littlefield met through Seven Days personals in 2010 and married the following year.
Other alt-weeklies were experimenting with revivals. By March 2024, the Washington Post was writing about singles abandoning apps for in-person alternatives — including speed dating, which had largely disappeared during the Tinder era.
Why it kept coming back
Personal ads found new homes independently, in at least four distinct channels — queer app, newsletter, newspaper holdout, mainstream press — with no coordination between them. This pattern is hard to explain as nostalgia alone. Nostalgia would produce imitation. This produced innovation.
The common thread was simple: you wrote what you wanted before anyone responded. People encountered your intent before your face. That creates a different kind of first contact than photo-first mutual matching. It also filters for people willing to read, and willing to write back.
“Personal ads have always been successful. Not just for the people writing them but also for the people reading them because they’re just so entertaining.”
By early 2024, this was no longer a niche observation. The mainstream press was starting to document the same fatigue that had driven the post-2018 revival. What that documentation looked like — and what it produced — is the subject of Part III.
AseeksB: built in the personals tradition
Text-first personal ads on iOS and Android. Post what you’re looking for. Control who responds. All key features free.
