Bumble: The Failed Experiment
Whitney Wolfe Herd founded Bumble in 2014 with noble ambitions. The app was designed to be the answer to her former employer, Tinder, whom she sued for sexual harassment before leaving the company. Bumble was to be a game changer in the dating app world. “This could change the way women and men treat each other, women and men date, and women feel about themselves,” Wolfe Herd said in an interview with TIME, presenting the app as thoroughly feminist in its focus.
It started with a simple idea: women make first contact. Women face approximately two to three times the amount of online harassment as men, according to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center. Younger women between the ages of 18 and 34 are especially likely to receive sexually explicit messages or images that were not requested (57%), to be called an offensive name (44%), or be threatened with physical harm (19%). By allowing women to initiate contact, Bumble would allegedly provide a safer alternative to apps like Tinder, where anyone can message first as long as they’re a paying member.
At first, Bumble gave users a 24 hour window to respond after matching with another user. Once that time was up, back into the ether they went. Predictably, this window seemed to be too brief for many people, so Bumble implemented an option to extend a match by another 24 hours. Eventually, though, in a drastic departure from its initial vision, the app would start allowing male users to send “compliments” before a match was made.
Bumble restricts this feature to a single compliment a day, but with its addition, one now has to wonder what really sets the app apart from Tinder. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the only similarity, as users have also reported issues with Bumble’s handling of harassment claims. The company says it investigates each claim carefully, blocks the harasser immediately, and will ban users who receive multiple reports, but some women have continued to see these users on the app and have reported them multiple times with no response from Bumble.
More than a few App Store reviews note issues with Bumble’s customer service. The app has generally declined to refund purchases, leading to one class action lawsuit in 2020 which the company settled to the tune of $22.5 million. Over the 2–3 year period I spent on Bumble, the increase in fake profiles became noticeable as well. Hailey Zureich told FOX 2 Detroit about stumbling upon such an account that had been posing as her, using her photos and information. The issue has led Bumble to create its own guide for spotting fake profiles.
According to another Pew Research Center study, men are the most frequent users of dating apps, and 41% of men report paying for subscriptions, as opposed to 29% of women. Despite the fact that Bumble promotes itself as a female-friendly dating service, its customer base is overwhelmingly male. That customer base is also expressing plenty of frustration at the lack of responses on the app. Across Reddit and Quora are countless stories of matches that expire without the initiation of any contact.
Some of this is just dating life in the social media era. We lead busy lives, we change our minds, we forget to check our notifications, we uninstall apps out of boredom, and so on and so forth. Dating app burnout is a real thing many of us are experiencing. It might sell itself as the dating app of choice for women, but the growing consensus seems to be that Bumble isn’t all that different from any other dating app.
The pharmaceutical company Merck conducted a study of more than 2,000 millennial women in 2015 and found that less than 1 in 10 women say they make the first move, regardless of whether it’s offline or online. Social norms may explain some of the picture here. For a long time, men have been socialized to be the “pursuers,” while women have been socialized to be the “pursued.” These norms remain influential in our culture, even in spite of some of the advancements made for gender equality. But another noteworthy factor could be that for women, making the first move tends to open the floodgates to all the unwelcome and inappropriate conduct mentioned above.
At the same time, it’s hard not to notice the strategic shifts in Bumble’s business plan. First, extensions had to be granted. Then the introduction of the compliments feature, a surprising break with previous policy. It may be a necessary one, however, given the experiences many users report having with the app. Instead of changing the way that we date, Bumble itself seems to be changing, adapting to its environment and evolving to meet the needs of its customer base.
It’s a wise decision from a business perspective, but it more or less marks the failure of a far more interesting experiment. Many media outlets have celebrated Bumble’s success, and it has indeed proven to be financially successful. An often overlooked part of this story are the compromises that are being made in order to compete in the wild world of dating apps.
