Wow, as a gay dude reading the comments here, straight dating sucks, why is it even like that?
Bumble used to be different back in the day. I tried it when it was going down the tubes.
I think part of the problem is that the matching is fairly superficial, so while you know a little about the person, most of the details amount to their face, 1-3 hobbies, and their ass.
The women I matched with that I went out with were awkward and felt forced. In the end, I ended up falling in love with a close guy friend that I had known for years.
If bumble wants success, they should allow for much deeper Q&A, longer response times, a tweaked algorithm that matches people based off hobbies and passions, and an AD section that allows people to privately put in stuff that they like after dark. Info that isn’t shared with their matches, but helps make people match better with people like them.
As for straight dating though, idk. I feel like people should probably be avoiding apps and meeting organically through stuff like biking groups, climbing groups, skiing events, big dance venues, etc. it fosters much more organic connections.
I don’t participate in bar culture that much, but the difference between the gay bars I’ve gone to and the straighter college-y bars feels immense. The former is much more social with a pinch of kink, the latter is where people are getting absolutely blitzed without much dialogue over loud music. It’s an extremely small sample size, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s part of a larger trend when it comes to meeting people and how portions of society meet and date. Perhaps there are bars where single straight men and women meet over 1-2 drinks and talk, but I haven’t seen any so far.
Overall, I think the Internet and cars (decreasing population density and increasing the space between third places) has had a dramatically negative impact on love and friendships in places like the US.
sometimes you bring on a ceo just to get some controversial thing done. they can eat the blame and then leave
You bring in a female CEO to take the fall. The narrative gets to be about her weak leadership.
Ellen Pao wasn’t even CEO for a full year. Reddit clearly put her in charge to take the heat - which they knew would be ample based on her sex alone.
So replacing a woman with a woman, and then bringing back the original woman is what made you think the fall person had to be a woman? Reddit may have done so… but I find it hard to believe this was sex/gender related. Otherwise it would have made more sense to replace the woman with a man, have him take the fall and go back to Whitney so it made her / the company look better long term.
This is moronic and sexist.
History is full of males that were suckered into taking the fall.
Saying that women alone are incompetent to the point of always being suckered into a CEO position to be the fall gal is peak misogynism.
Think things through a little before posting.
What is “the glass cliff”, Alex.
Sorry that stating the existence of this systemic sexism is apparently sexist. Guess I’m sexist?
Yes, you are sexist….against women for sure (your comment proves that) and probably men, also.
The ol’ Ellen Pao
Ellen Pao was a shit executive and a failure. Has nothing to do with the imaginary “LeTs bRinG iN a wHOmAn tO tAkE dA faLL!!!”
And it should be noted, it was shit like “you can’t have a subreddit entirely devoted to encouraging groups you dislike to kill themselves”
Tacit racism. She is a US citizen of Chinese background. Why have her face on the flag of the Empire of Japan if the subliminal message wasn’t yellow peril?
But that was the idea
Good point, although I agree with the sentiment of online communities becoming hugboxes with no room for actual dissent.
Exactly this, they are usually young too and they know their only job is to fire ppl and/or do decisions that will make most if not all unhappy. I have only seen it once my self but a lot of friends went through that at their company.
the sad part is the act they put on coming in. many at the company will think this is a real hire that will bring about good cultural change
They called it an Axe Man, in my time. I’ve been at two companies hit with them, and I follow them AND the CEO who stepped down (once a reverted permanent one and the other a long-term leave) to see which companies are fucked next.
More specifically here it’s called a glass cliff
I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize this. Somebody explained that to me recently, within the context of a conversation about layoffs. That CEO had no prior CEO experience, was only there for less than a year, and was part of the board of directors. In hindsight it seems so obvious.
So like a corporate sin eater?
It’s what boeing does everytime a plane goes down.
That must be quite a list of ceo’s
everytime
Not a word, my dude.
you’re wrong, corsicanguppy
Sureitis
Insofar as everyone likes the wherewithal offered by pronominal and hitherto conjunctive adverbs
Is the signature feature that women initiate or was that some other app?
Yeah. I used the BFF version for a bit to try and find folks in my area to hang out with. It’s a really horrible app. When someone messages you, you have 24 hours to respond. If you don’t then the two of you get unmatched. I can understand something like unlatching after some time period without responding, but just 24 hours? Ick.
We have shareholders to consider! Now get on with your relationship before we unnecessarily cut you off.
Brought to you by Match, "You’re next Bumble, you think they fucked up Bumble already!? Just you wait!’
This just gave me the (shit post) idea of an app where VC funders can swipe on projects they want to invest in or not
That would make a great parody sketch.
Did that ever…work?
Probably, considering that it was enough to get the company to the point that it could go public. And for the company to lose 54% of its “value” after changing it.
So it got enough eyes on the platform to serve them ads or subscriptions or whatever their monetization strategy was…did the product ever once function as advertised?
Not really because a lot of women just used to begin the conversation with “hi” which gave you nothing to work with. Especially when they had a basically empty bio.
So basically suffered from exactly the same problem that every other dating app suffered from which is that nobody really puts the effort in.
Never really got the problem with opening with “hey.”
In person, she’ll look like a defecating sphincter if she completely ignores you, so you’ll at least get a “hey” back, and you can play it from the energy she responds with, go earnest, go smooth, go funny, go away, etc. What do you want me to do, compose a fucking sonnet out of the profile you didn’t even fill out? “Soft, she who likes dogs and is very laid back, I know which one of the four girls in her profile photo I hope she is?”
It was.
There’s a big problem with the “women message first” gimmick, and it’s that they just don’t.
If they don’t simply let the match expire, you either get a shitty Gif, or something along the lines of “hey.”
Maybe one in ten will actually send a message that genuinely starts a conversation.
That ratio was much higher for me. I’d say about 70% sent a message. Probably work on the profile, make it more interesting? If that is now really gone I’m not sure whether I ever install that App anymore, it was nice not having to come up with first messages with questionable outcome…
Maybe it’s you guys, but I never really had this issue.
it would work better if it was "women swipe first’. men can look at and swipe the women who swiped them already. this solves two problems:
- women are not seen by anyone they don’t want to be
- men don’t need to spend hours swiping hundreds of women
please give me 1 million dollars
That’s the premium feature in pretty much every dating app. You get to see who likes you but you have to pay the money to find out if anyone swiped on you at all.
They imply that lots of people swiped on you but you don’t actually know until after you’ve given the money.
So basically your plan is to just remove the con part which I’m all in favor of.
thanks
This means men will see many fewer women on the platform in many cases.
it means men would not spend hours on the app, which means nobody would ever do this
Exactly, Im 50 and Im not rich or particularly good looking. If I was straight I might only see 5 or 6 women on the app that would match with me to begin with and if those didn’t become anything I’d be done with that app. It can’t work
Would you rather see 5 or 6 women that all expressed interest in you or a thousand women who have never and probably will never even see you? Open the app, swipe 5 or 6 times, move on with your life.
As someone who has spent a stupid amount of time browsing Tinder for shits & giggles, I’m not sure I wouldn’t want that. But then again I’m gay and things work way differently for us. If I swipe right, it’s very likely we match and then have a boring convo that goes nowhere. Maybe I suck at it but I never have any luck despite everything.
You’re gonna have a boring convo on a chat app with a random stranger. You’re both interested in each other, just ask to meet up. Do something interesting together and the conversation will flow naturally.
This is very well put.
Exceptthe company that makes the app needs you to keep dating to make money. If ypu have 5 options and they don’t pan out you are done with that app.
Who wants men spending hours on the app and why? Most of these are subscription-based, not ad-supported.
Sure, but you’ve got to build that habit of checking the app. Gotta lure people back for more little hits of dopamine. The men aren’t going to subscribe (or at least stay subscribed) if they aren’t getting that illusion of lots of options for people to date.
Yes, that’s the idea. They wouldn’t see anyone who hasn’t already liked them.
Which means after the exhaust those few options they won’t use that app again. No app developer will do this.
They’re not “exhausting options”. They’re just only seeing the options that are actually available, rather than an endless stream of those that aren’t.
You get that not seeing more people is the problem for the developer, right?
What?
I loved bumble when I was on it 🤷♂️ much, much higher hit rate than any other app
I have by far more luck getting matches on tinder
I literally saw so many profiles being like “I don’t message first”, like do you even understand what the app you’ve signed up for is?
I always wondered if they realised we actually can’t send the first message.
Well, men CAN message first, as of like 8 months ago.
Great, so I can just use any other dating app now, and don’t need Bumble anymore? What kind of genius move it is to kill the signature feature. But oh well the person responsible already left…
you either get a shitty Gif, or something along the lines of “hey.”
So same result as when men message first.
Might just be my experience, but men put in more effort. Probably because women are more desirable so they don’t really need to.
*superficially desirable
*men are hornier
*some men are hornier.
*most
Edit: on the scale of all women versus all men, it’s not even close. Men are by far the hornier of the two biological sexes. There are specific women who can be hornier than a lot of men, and there are men who are not sexual at all…. This does not mean that it is incorrect to generalize and say that men are hornier.
Well cultural habits are slow to change. I suspect it would take some 20 years to change the dynamics such than women are always expected to make the first move.
Bumble was well positioned to push for that change, unfortunately earning revenue has a priority, they are are a business after all. Still their gimmick got the ball rolling, we’ll see who picks it up next.
Just like with anything, if you put something interesting in your bio, women will use that as conversation starter.
That is definitely not it. Looking at my bio which I wrote ages ago I’m actually kind of concerned I’m slightly doxing in myself the amount of information that’s in there.
The problem is that there is a social convention that men start the conversation, so a lot of women just aren’t very good at openings, so they say “hi” and then I’ve basically got to carry the conversation. So what’s the point in the app then? Even if they just opened with “sorry I’m not very good at this yet” it would be a start, but noooo.
No, they didn’t. I had plenty in my bio about hobbies, sports etc, very few mentioned it.
Yeah I can see how women message first will tank a dating app. That fucking stupid. I get it that women get bombarded with messages from guys on dating apps. But guess what all the time I used the apps 0% was I ever messaged by a woman.
Women don’t chase men because they don’t have too. I knew several women I help set up their dating profiles. They would get a 1000 hits, mostly guys says “hey” or the worse be :hey baby".
How I realize just how easy and why I never had problems with dating apps. You got to give a woman more then hey and calling them baby is just cringe. Then you get the guys straight up asking for sex or nudes. Anyways point is having the app where the men can’t make a move unless the women contact you? Will not work wtf was she thinking?
Hell most of them like to just scroll, none of them were interested in making the first move.
mostly guys says “hey” or the worse be :hey baby"
Can you perhaps understand why that might be as bad as getting no messages at all? How many dick pictures were mixed in? Many, many, many men use these apps to spam matching with everyone. Those “hi”’s rarely lead to actual connection.
having the app where the men can’t make a move unless the women contact you? Will not work wtf was she thinking?
I mean, it did work though. It was one of the top dating apps for a long time.
Huh the app lost 53% of stock price so no whatsoever she was doing didn’t work why they fired her ass.
whatsoever she was doing didn’t work why they fired her ass.
You’re contradicting yourself, because you didn’t understand (or didn’t read) the article.
Bumble was a platform where only women could message first. It was a leading platform for a while. This CEO changed that to be a more conventional system where men could message first. After that change, the user base dwindled and the stock tanked, as you noted.
In other words, they were much more successful as a woman-message-first platform.
I see never used Bumble, well are they changing it back? What other features does it hold? Is like all the rest now were you swipe left or right? I used OKCUPID back when you had to put thought into your profile. And the longer the better.
You literally listed a bunch of reasons why men shouldn’t be allowed to message first
Because the moment a woman makes a move, then the guy just falls the hell over on themselves thinking they’ve struck jackpot, then they’ll start pouring in their long-ass list of shitty pick up lines. Just admit it, guys cannot for the life of them, treat a woman as a woman and as a human being. There is always, always some underlying goal a guy has most of the time, when it comes to finally talking with a woman who bothers giving them even 5 minutes of their time.
And you highlighted them.
The best way to get laid is to not try to get laid and actually interact with each other like humans
Why are you telling me this? Go tell the dude above.
Because you need to hear it, either figure out how to have an intriguing personality (not thirsty) and do some self improvement instead of bitching that all the girls are impossible. Your incel is showing hard.
Ohh you mean the “pay for every little thing” -feature? Dang I really liked that
Also regarding cost: I have yet to hear how a dating app solves the paradox that success means losing a customer. The incentives of the company and customer are not aligned and actually quite the opposite.
The company wants you to stay and spend as much as possible on the platform (optimizing to keep you just engaged enough to stick with it), whereas the ideal outcome for the customer means not needing the app in as little time as possible.
Oh they solved it alright. They just make it harder to find matches. Could you imagine the fuckery that goes on with their algorithms. Some engineer dialing back the chance of falling in true love. The executive is like, “We need to turn down finding true love to .0007% because we are losing too many customers!”
I meant success in the context of what a dating app should achieve: Matching suitable partners.
But you are of course right that for the company success is profit and the rest are just variables to be optimized towards that goal.
Yeah that conflict runs deep.
There’s the open source Alovoa, but of course it’s still far away from mainstream.
