
Bumble Swipes Left on Match Group/Tinder Allegations - Sonnol53
http://thebeehive.bumble.com/bumbleblog/match-group-response
======
brucephillips
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.

Also, I could have done without the sexist implication that bullying is a
masculine characteristic.

~~~
jamilbk
I thought the same thing. Why bring gender into this? Bullying should be
discouraged in all walks of life, whether the victims and perpetrators are
male or female.

Interestingly, all of my female friends who use Bumble are actually annoyed
that they must act first to open the dialog with their matches. They don't
seem to notice or care that the feature is placed there to empower women, nor
do they know or care about Bumble's feminist origins. They use it because it
has more attractive males than Tinder.

~~~
BadassFractal
100% consistent with my anecdata as well. My girl friends who use it are all
annoyed they have to say something first and mostly default to "hi", which is
essentially passing the ball to the guy, who's expected to get creative
(assuming similar dating market values).

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acobster
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.

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 _extremely_
lopsided, _especially_ 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.

(Edit: typo)

~~~
CryptoPunk
Your comment contains a bunch of suppositions that are by no means widely
accepted or indisputable truths.

For example you characterize Tinder's mode of conduct as "masculine
posturing". Inherent in that comment is the supposition that there is
something toxic about masculinity itself.

Imagine if someone called Bumble's letter "feminine posturing". Irrespective
of the content of the letter, could you ever perceive the use of that term as
anything but ignorant and misogynistic?

You also claim there is a "gendered power structure", and imply that Tinder is
part of it, which is a very serious and broad allegation, that's made without
supporting evidence, which is irresponsible.

You claim that "gender is a cultural mode of expression (and it is most
certainly not a tribe you have to defend, so just calm down, guys)", but the
letter says Bumble is proud to be women-run.

It's not necessarily bad to embrace femininity and celebrate a company being
run by women, but be upfront about it, and don't gas light anyone who
recognizes it as a form of tribalism.

Instead of trying to cast women as victims, and men as victimizers, I think we
should step back from identarianism and recognize that members of both genders
are disproportionately afflicted with their own set of maladies (e.g. 92% of
workplace fatalities afflict men) and that it would be more constructive to
put aside this 'which gender is a greater victim' competition and focus on
empowering all individuals irrespective of gender.

~~~
BadassFractal
This is a generalization, but I wonder if what we're seeing, with the job
world becoming more evenly split between the genders, is men and women playing
to their traditional strengths to advance in their professional goals.
Historically women don't pick up the club and physically assault their
opponent. They instead often indirectly attack a challenger's reputation (see
shaming, guilt inducing etc), which is still very powerful.

Men, when facing a challenge, will avoid complaining, buckle down and try to
power through the obstacle. Women, on the other hand, will play the victim
card instead of using brute force, and will rely on their cunning to
accomplish the same business goal. Both strategies are likely very effective.

I wonder if, as we have more majority-women and women-led organizations, we
will see more of these indirect tactics deployed by those organizations. More
covert corporate warfare than what we're traditionally used to. Nothing wrong
with it per se, but just a shift in tactics people might have not foreseen.

~~~
CryptoPunk
I don't foresee the corporate world becoming more evenly split between men and
women. The primary differentiator between men and women is testosterone and
estrogen levels, and this has a profound impact on life strategy.

With respect to testosterone, the much higher levels found in men drive them
to be far more likely to make sacrifices and take risks to achieve more
ambitious goals, which manifests in everything from higher numbers of Nobel
prize winners, to a life expectancy that is on average 5 years lower than that
of women, to a much a higher proportion of murderers, and criminals in
general, being men.

This difference in outcomes is not based on gender, even if it correlates with
gender, so it won't go away as a result of eliminating any supposed social
constructs that promote gender stereotypes. It's based on different
behavioural traits associated with sex hormones, that establish a person's
priorities, and that just happen to be found at higher concentration levels in
a higher proportion of men, or women, depending on the hormone.

~~~
BadassFractal
I buy all of that, but does that preclude us from ever seeing more women-only
or majority-women companies out there that behave as a unit differently from
the traditionally predominantly-male companies?

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ythn
> We — a woman-founded, women-led company

I don't know why, but this made me want to stop reading the article
immediately.

~~~
jazoom
Probably because it was completely out of place and was only inserted to play
the victim female card. I'd be surprised if Tinder's attempts at buying them
out or sueing them would not have occurred if the founders were male.

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BadassFractal
Notice the narrative: to attack Bumble is to attack women's empowerment.

~~~
drharby
Ding ding ding

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dbg31415
Undeniable that much of Bumble looks like Tinder.

The fact that the Bumble founders came from Tinder, of course they stole
whatever IP and concepts they could. No question.

But there's still a long way to go here. And squabbles like this distract
companies from making honest feature advances.

The core issue with Bumble or Tinder is that they aren't designed to help make
matches, rather give people the perception of options.

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.

I matched with 1-2 women a day, but my close friend who introduced me to
Bumble matches on 70+ guys a day.

I have to craft witty, funny, and sexy messages... all under the pressure that
I only have 2 choices that day.

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...)

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.

# First feature request

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.

# Second feature request

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."

# Third feature request

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?"

# Fourth feature request

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."

~~~
the_watcher
> 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.

This is not at all true for all men (I have never heard of this being
necessary from an IRL friend).

------
QML
To people who use Tinder or Bumble, would you prefer matching yourself or have
an algorithm do the matching for you?

~~~
samirillian
Well OkCupid already kinda does the algorithm thing. I prefer tinder/bumble
because it at least leaves the possibility for some sort of "je ne sais quoi"
in the process, or for something you didn't know you liked until you saw it.
But that's just me.

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laretluval
Tinder : Bumble :: Uber : Lyft

~~~
brucephillips
Maybe by market share, but Tinder predated Bumble, whereas Lyft predated Uber.

~~~
mvid
But Über predated Lyft (Zimride) by 4 years

~~~
deepakhj
Sidecar came up with drivers using their own car.

