Sick of Tinder? Try some pickier alternatives

Swipe left, swipe right. We're all familiar with the Tinder-style selection for potential mates, but that's also led to dating apps gaining a bit of a reputation for hook-ups, rather than providing a chance at a long-term relationship.

But don't write online dating off just yet. If dipping a toe in the huge pool of lonely hearts out there sounds intimidating, there are a crop of apps offering to do the tough curation for you.

Here are two apps that are geared toward straight people.

Coffee Meets Bagel, from Korean-American sisters Dawoon, Arum and Soo Kang, used to only send a match a day, based on the concept of just skimming the best from the top.

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But now it has a new model, where women are shown profiles of men who "liked" them first.

Dawoon Kang tells Mashable that the concept is based on feedback showing that men and women have different approaches to dating.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"Studies done with our users have shown that men prefer a higher quantity of matches, and wanted to view an average of 17 profiles a day. Women, on the other hand, are more selective, prioritising quality over quantity. They want more relevant matches, and don't like wasting time on men who are not serious about taking the relationship to the next level," she says.

So every day at noon, Coffee Meets Bagel sends men 21 matches, based on previously selected criteria such as preferred ethnicity, height, religion, interests, and so on.

Women on the app get the best six potential matches, out of the men who have already expressed interest in them.

If a connection is made, a chat line will open up between the two, allowing them to get to know each other better. This chat line is open only for seven days however -- the priority is always to get people offline and arranging real-life dates, says Kang.

The idea seems to be working for the app. Since its new model was started in April this year, the app saw an 87 percent increase in the number of mutual likes made, and the hashtag #cmbcouple on Instagram shows hundreds of pictures of couples who met through the app.

Coffee Meets Bagel's founders claim that it's responsible for about 7,000 dates a week. Since it was launched in New York in 2012, it's made 2.5 billion introductions, they say.

Chatting won't bring you love

Often, chatting in a dating app just doesn't work, says Violet Lim, CEO of year-old dating app LunchClick.

LunchClick is an app from Singaporean dating network Lunch Actually, which has been setting people up on offline dates for the past 12 years.

Lim says the company's found over the course of Lunch Actually's history that online chatting often doesn't translate to real-life meet-ups. "Not all chats are interesting and engaging, and people lose interest once the conversation falls flat. But they might actually have hit it off if they had met up in person."

So LunchClick just doesn't have that option. Instead, when a match is made, users get a bunch of multiple choice questions to answer, and can decide after answers are swapped, if they want to make a date in person.

The app also only matches people to one person per day. The idea is for people to consider their matches more seriously, as opposed to if they were presented with unlimited matches, Lim explains.

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In the past year that LunchClick has been active in Southeast Asia, it’s seen 214,000 successful connections, the company says.

So if what you’re looking for is happily ever after, perhaps there is something to be said for careful curation.