I haven't used dating apps in a few years but I stayed away from tinder and preferred Hinge and Bumble because I was looking for LTRs only. The most interesting and compatible people i've met (and in my friend groups, the longest relationships I've seen) have been from Hinge but I liked the idea of Bumble as it meant I could reach out to matches with my own timing and try to craft something interesting to say - there was no pressure to reply to simply whoever had messaged me first. I also think it's a bit of a filter for my own preferences which is for men who prefer a more progressive woman and/or don't fall into traditional gender roles, so in theory Bumble should've been perfect for me.

Bumble as a whole went downhill before this - I'm not sure why. I think (at least with hetero matching), men swiped right on everyone to try to turn it into a numbers game (since they otherwise couldn't reach out to anyone themselves) then women would get overwhelmed with the number of matches and the ticking time-window and then would send out generic 1-liners just to get the conversation started and remove countdown timer. I think the time-window was too short - you could swipe on ~10 people, decide that was enough and put the phone down for a few hours, and then later get flooded with notifications when those people in turn swiped on you and then that was when the count-down window started regardless of if you had the time to open up the app and start a conversation with 10 people. I usually gave up because I'd run out of time to message people and the matches would expire. I think extending the window is a good move but making it so anyone can message first basically takes away the point of bumble and what made it different from Tinder. This feels like a deathblow to Bumble.

I wonder why there was a time window at all! that sounds like a horrible user experience - at the least they could have told the other person that you didn't respond but left their profile sitting in your inbox somewhere so you could choose to message them later.

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