I'm a bumble user. They sent this post as an email to their user base. I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish by airing their dirty laundry publicly. Users don't care if you're in an IP battle.<p>Also, I could have done without the sexist implication that bullying is a masculine characteristic.
Sigh. I guess I'm not surprised at the negativity here on HN about this, but I'm still disappointed. If you take offense to the effort to dismantle masculine posturing as it's practiced in corporate culture, or see a meaningful effort to rebalance gendered power structures as sexist, maybe you should check your blind spots.<p>Gender has everything to do with it, because gender is a cultural mode of expression (and it is most certainly not a tribe you have to defend, so just calm down, guys). On many many dating apps, that expression is <i>extremely</i> lopsided, <i>especially</i> in terms of abusive and otherwise unethical behavior toward other people - namely women. I'm personally much more likely to look into this platform now that I know that they take a principled stance.<p>(Edit: typo)
Undeniable that much of Bumble looks like Tinder.<p>The fact that the Bumble founders came from Tinder, of course they stole whatever IP and concepts they could. No question.<p>But there's still a long way to go here. And squabbles like this distract companies from making honest feature advances.<p>The core issue with Bumble or Tinder is that they aren't designed to help make matches, rather give people the perception of options.<p>This plays out in that men essentially swipe right on every woman they come across (we're forced to in order to have any chance of making a connection), and women end up bombarded with more choices than they can meaningful sort through.<p>I matched with 1-2 women a day, but my close friend who introduced me to Bumble matches on 70+ guys a day.<p>I have to craft witty, funny, and sexy messages... all under the pressure that I only have 2 choices that day.<p>She gets to disqualify guys if they take too long to write back, write too much, or for any reason she wants... knowing she has 70 more to choose from. (Worth noting that despite all the options, she's still single...)<p>Anyway, the whole thing could be a lot more efficient... lots of ways to go about this. Dating and finding love takes effort, compassion. These tools should, ideally, help make it less of a numbers game.<p># First feature request<p>Let anyone pre-approve in bulk. "Pre-match me with anyone who is between this age rage in this zip code who mentions hiking..." simple as that. If you really want to go all out, just learn my type from my swipes and pre-match on that -- plus gives me incentive not to just swipe on everyone as it's learning what I like.<p># Second feature request<p>Let users block based on rules. "I don't ever want to match with anyone who works for my company, Dynacorp, and I don't ever want anyone from Dynacorp to see my profile."<p># Third feature request<p>Only show people to me I have the potential to match with. "I liked her... but unknown to me, she only likes guys who are older than me... she'll never see my profile to match back... why did I see her in the first place then?"<p># Fourth feature request<p>Don't show people who have already swiped left. "I see her... but unknown to me, she's already swiped left on me... we'll never be a match, probably best to just not show her to me."