DoubleList

DoubleList review — 5.4/10, 7 trackers detected

Here's the deal with DoubleList — when Craigslist killed its Personals section in 2018 because of FOSTA/SESTA, millions of people who used classifieds for hookups needed somewhere to go. DoubleList showed up and said "we're that." Eight years later, it's still the closest thing to what Craigslist Personals was. Same format: text-based ads, organized by city, categorized by what you're looking for — m4m, m4w, w4m, casual, kink, the full spectrum. Over 250 US cities covered.

The company is Interlaced Social, LLC, a Delaware entity operating as DoubleList. It was acquired in 2022 by Adly, a portfolio company focused on growth and monetization. Before the acquisition it was an independent project. After Adly took over, paid tiers appeared. The free baseline still works — you can browse, post up to 2 ads per day, and message without paying. Premium tiers run $10/month (Hookup) and $20/month (Hardcore) for boosted visibility and extra features. Not expensive by dating standards.

Now the Blacklight scan. 7 trackers, 2 cookies, and fingerprinting detected. On a site where people post personal ads describing their sexual preferences, their location, and sometimes their face. Canvas fingerprinting means your device gets a unique identifier that persists through incognito mode and cookie clearing. Seven trackers feeding ad networks on a hookup classifieds board. For context: Tinder scans at 0/0 with no fingerprinting. Even Bumble, with its 7 trackers and 11 cookies, doesn't fingerprint. DoubleList is the only dating site in our database with active fingerprinting.

The bot problem is real and well-documented. Trustpilot, Sitejabber, Reddit, PissedConsumer — every review platform tells the same story. Fake profiles, sextortion attempts, scammers asking for gift cards or "ID verification" payments. DoubleList requires phone verification for new accounts, which blocks automated bot registration, but human-operated fake accounts still get through in volume. The moderation is light. Posts get flagged by other users, not by a moderation team reviewing content. If you've used Craigslist Personals, you know the dynamic — real people exist on the platform, but you need to filter through noise to find them.

The interface is basic. Classifieds-style listing pages organized by city. No algorithm, no matching, no swiping. You read ads, you respond to ones that interest you, communication happens over email until someone decides to share a phone number. It works the way it's supposed to work — like a bulletin board, not an app. That simplicity is the appeal for people who found dating apps artificial. It's also why the scam rate is high — there's no profile verification beyond the phone number.

The gay and bi community is DoubleList's strongest user base. Multiple reviews specifically mention m4m being the most active category. For casual encounters in that space, DoubleList competes directly with Sniffies (more modern, map-based) and Grindr (app-based, real-time). DoubleList's advantage is anonymity — no app to download, no profile photo required, no GPS tracking.

No data breaches documented. No lawsuits. The platform itself isn't a scam — Interlaced Social is a real company, Adly is a real acquirer, the product works as described. The risk is user-level, not platform-level. But the combination of fingerprinting, 7 trackers, and an open classifieds format where people post intimate personal ads is a privacy mismatch that's hard to justify. You're posting about your kinks on a site that's fingerprinting your device and running 7 ad trackers. That math doesn't work.

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