Bumble was supposed to be different. When it launched in 2014, it offered women a simple proposition: if you matched with a man, you had to make the first move. The rule was meant to make online dating safer and less intimidating, while giving women control over who got to speak first.<\/p>\n
This week, Bumble abandoned it.<\/p>\n
The change follows the introduction of Opening Moves, which had already softened the original rule, and comes as Bumble prepares to abandon another defining feature: the swipe.<\/p>\n
The company says it is responding to changing user behaviour and wants to encourage more meaningful connections.<\/p>\n
But there is another way of reading the changes.<\/p>\n
Bumble was created to fix what many saw as Tinder\u2019s chaotic and aggressive hookup culture by shifting the power dynamic entirely to women. Now it is dismantling those features. And it is not alone. Across the dating-app industry, the swipe-and-match model that transformed how people met is being quietly reworked while companies race to put artificial intelligence at the centre of whatever comes next.<\/p>\n
\u201cBumble is in salvage mode,\u201d says Luke Brunning, a philosopher who studies the ethics of technology and relationships. \u201cThey\u2019ve already reorganised, restructured and cut jobs in response to declining revenue. This risky, standout pivot suggests they\u2019re wondering how, despite all that, to keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n
The number of Bumble\u2019s paying users fell sharply over the past year and its share price has been under sustained pressure. The company cut about 30% of its workforce this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be fascinating to see whether they can weather it,\u201d Brunning says. \u201cBut they\u2019re not alone: a lot of the major players are also in salvage mode, trying to figure out how to position themselves in a market that is increasingly fed up with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brunning\u2019s research shows dating apps are now often used grudgingly, because people feel that they are necessary, rather than with the excitement that accompanied their rise.<\/p>\n
The online dating industry, estimated to be worth almost \u00a310bn globally, is keenly aware of this. Its solution? To go full AI.<\/p>\n
Grindr \u2013 seen as a testbed for the wider industry \u2013 is transitioning into an \u201cAI-first\u201d platform. Tinder is testing Chemistry, an AI-powered system intended to reduce \u201cswipe fatigue\u201d. Bumble has been developing an AI matchmaking assistant called Bee.<\/p>\n
Other startups are dispensing with swiping altogether. London-based Fate describes itself as an \u201cagentic AI dating app\u201d: instead of browsing profiles, users are interviewed by an AI about what they want from relationships to find similarities with potential partners.<\/p>\n
So why aren\u2019t we talking about being on the brink of a brave new world of dating apps, where AI will successfully sift the candidates to find our one true love? Why, instead, is the debate about whether the apps will even survive?<\/p>\n
Adam Peacock, a researcher of technology and intimacy, thinks the issue is that the industry is misreading what people are objecting to.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a kind of emerging cultural backlash against allowing AI into our intimate lives as well as the additional concern that someone you\u2019re talking to on these apps, is actually filtering the whole conversation through an AI concierge,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Peacock says gen Z in particular are concerned as to whether dating apps are even being designed to make good connections between users but are, instead, opaquely tweaked to monetise the time users spend on the site. That, in a cynical twist, the apps are deliberately profiting from keeping people lonely.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dating industry has turned intimacy into an enormous source of data,\u201d Peacock says. \u201cDating apps can know where people live, what they look like, who they are attracted to, what they say to potential partners and, increasingly, how they behave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsa Kugelberg, a philosopher who researches gender and relationships, says online dating has become too embedded in modern life to fail. But the first generation of dating apps \u2013 the era of the profile, the swipe, the match and the message \u2013 may be reaching its end.<\/p>\n
Peacock thinks the apps may evolve into something broader: \u201cMore of a social media, lifestyle product than a dedicated dating app.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the question is whether any iteration of dating app will make the experience better, or whether the extra layers of AI will simply function as a temporary facade on an exhausted model.<\/p>\n
Brunning believes AI on dating apps doesn\u2019t have to be like this. \u201cThere can be ways of trying to do digital better, that doesn\u2019t involve giving people AI tools to talk to each other with,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Better moderation, clearer policies, better ways of presenting yourself and more control over how the environment works could all improve online dating without handing more of it to machines, he says.<\/p>\n
The critical point is this, he says: \u201cYou can\u2019t just take a product that\u2019s out of favour, put AI on top of it and say: \u2018OK, now we have a product that works.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bumble was supposed to be different. When it launched in 2014, it offered women a simple proposition: if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-593317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}