We Rejoined Seeking Yesterday — It's a Ghost Town

Master and I opened a Seeking profile yesterday for the first time in two years. We were looking for collaborators, friends, maybe someone to help with content creation for my book promotion. Seeking used to be where we found creative, open-minded people who understood unconventional arrangements.

The site is completely dead. Like, nobody-home, tumbleweeds-blowing, lights-are-on-but-nobody's-there dead.

Where did everyone go?

Let me back up. Master and I met on a sugar baby website eleven years ago — not Seeking, but sugardaddy.ca. I write about this in Chapter 3 of Why Submissive Women Are Happier, called "Sweet Arrangement." It wasn't pretty at first. I tried the sugar baby thing for about two minutes, felt like a prostitute, and realized it wasn't for me.

But then I met Master, and everything clicked. He wasn't looking for a transaction — he was looking for the mentorship-driven, adventure-focused dynamic that the sites advertised but rarely delivered. Older man, younger woman. He brings you on adventures, makes you discover things. That's what I really wanted.

Over the years, we kept going back to these platforms — not for sugar arrangements, but for friends, collaborators, creative partners. When you're eccentric like us, most people don't believe what we're actually about. These sites had women who were already open-minded, entrepreneurial, comfortable with unconventional relationships.

Yesterday's experience was jarring. We clicked "active now" — nobody. We checked "last active" — months ago. The newest registrations were two weeks old.

One of our podcast callers, Sock Daddy from Montreal, confirmed our suspicions. He said Seeking still works for him, but they raised the price from $75 to almost $200 a month. "I can browse and anything, but I won't be back on there."

Even in Montreal — which Master and I know is basically the escort capital of Canada — the traffic was minimal compared to what it used to be.

So what happened?

The obvious answer is that Seeking got caught up in their own contradictions. They were selling prostitution, legitimately. Not everyone on there was doing sex work, but enough were that it created a thriving ecosystem. The women were engaged because they wanted something — money. They'd text you, send DMs, like your profile. They were entrepreneurs.

Compare that to regular dating websites where women get overwhelmed with messages and barely participate. On Seeking, the women were the active ones because they had skin in the game.

But then Seeking tried to clean up their act. They banned "sugar dating" language, started policing conversations about money. Master and I remember having to be careful what we said because the site was monitoring everything. Even when we wanted to find women to collaborate with on YouTube or photography, the platform treated us like potential pimps.

They killed their own golden goose.

So where did everyone go? I have theories:

OnlyFans took some of them. The women who wanted to move their entrepreneurship online — safer, no in-person meetings, less chance of dangerous situations. Why meet random men when you can build a subscriber base from home?

They moved to mainstream apps. I heard from a friend that you can basically do sugar babying on Tinder now. Go on dates, get free meals, make it clear you expect the man to pay. You don't need sites that are explicitly labeled "sugar baby" anymore.

They aged out or moved on. Maybe it's like Facebook — once their parents found it, the younger generation left for other platforms.

But where? That's what I'm dying to know.

The generational shift is fascinating. Master had desktop dancers in Windows 95 — third-party software with animated girls on his taskbar. When he switched to Mac, he lost them. Apple doesn't allow that kind of content.

Now we have dating apps instead of dating websites. Everything's mobile, everything's swipe-based, everything has notifications and instant gratification. Maybe Seeking failed because it never became an app. It remained a website — formal, desktop-based, requiring actual thought and conversation.

The women who used to be on Seeking are probably on Feeld now, or Bumble, or even Instagram. Places where the interaction is faster, more visual, less explicitly transactional.

There's something else happening here that's bigger than just one platform dying. The whole landscape of alternative dating has shifted underground. The communities that used to gather in obvious places — Seeking, Adult Friend Finder, even Craigslist personals — have scattered.

Master and I are looking for friends and collaborators, people who understand power dynamics and unconventional relationships. We used to know where to find them. Now? It's like trying to find a speakeasy without knowing the password.

Maybe that's not entirely bad. Maybe the community is becoming more discerning, more careful, more intentional about where they gather and who they trust.

But it does make me wonder: in our rush to clean up the internet, sanitize the platforms, and eliminate the "problematic" spaces, are we also eliminating the places where people like us could find each other?

If you know where everyone went, don't be shy. Leave a comment. I'm genuinely curious.

Because right now, it feels like we're all looking for the same thing — real connection, honest conversation, relationships that don't fit the traditional mold — but we're all looking in different places, unable to find each other.

Maybe that's the real problem with dating apps today. Not that they don't work, but that they've scattered us so widely that we can't build the communities we need to thrive.

Sources:

Seeking Arrangement Trustpilot Reviews — Trustpilot

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