Bumble red flag advertisement

A while ago a friend of mine said I should check out the online dating app called Bumble. I did have a look on there for a while in 2021 and basically wasted a whole lot of time and energy on there for minimal returns. I did connect with some people but they were all to varying degrees mentally unwell, many of them needed therapy much more than a date and I wish all of these people the best in getting the help they need to be happy within themselves as this is what will ultimately allow them to be happy with others.

It took me a while to fully understand why Bumble is such a bad app for finding quality relationships. On the surface a few things seemed like they'd be good about the platform but empirically it was a huge waste of time for anyone who was looking for something long term. It might be good for hookups but I wasn't looking for those.

In the software world we tend to say that software ends up strongly resembling the companies that make the software. In companies the leadership at the top will greatly influence a company. In software companies we see the organizational structure and ethos represented in an app. The very existence of Bumble as a company is rooted in a harassment case at Tinder, more about this in another post though.

In modern larger companies the marketing campaign direction will come from the top. Social media marketing is big money and typically choices here, even if the look completely insane from the outside, will follow some sort of internal logic. This corporate logic might be twisted, unethical or outright illegal, but it's very rarely random. What you see in those marketing campaigns will be represented in the experience you get on those apps to some degree. If not entirely. There's a recent sponsored content post from Bumble that I saw on Instagram that I think is one of the best examples of a company stating the culture it is attempting to create that I've ever seen:

Mentally healthy people will immediately be viscerally repulsed and disgusted by this advertisement, as they should be, if they are looking for a healthy committed relationship. If you have any level of self respect you would never entertain this sort of behavior.

I'll do a detailed breakdown of the various aspects of these dynamics and how they impact the dating landscape in a future post. That post will be a long one though and in the interim I just want to put out the warning signal to anyone who's looking for a healthy relationship so they can avoid this app and the normalized cheating that the app company is pushing.