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Dating Apps Ditch The Swipe
BumbleBot // Illustration by Kate Walker
Bumble, one of the biggest dating apps in the US, announced it will do away with the classic swipe functionality for matching.
The Big Picture: The vibe around dating apps has seriously shifted in recent years, with many daters now finding them more exhausting than inspiring. That’s led to significant financial issues for dating-app companies — Bumble’s overall revenue dropped 14% year over year — and pushed young daters to go analog in search of love. Maybe getting rid of the swipe can bring a bit more humanity back to the apps.
Between The Matches: Bumble no longer wants your snap judgments.
The company announced that it will sunset swiping and move toward matching people through AI.
That shift will be facilitated by a new AI assistant called “Bee,” which is “aimed at understanding things like users’ values and relationship goals, then suggesting matches and explaining the rationale behind those matches,” per The NYT.
Last Look: Breaking up with the swipe is a big bet for Bumble that users won’t buzz away in droves to rivals still doing things the old-fashioned way. While users have soured on dating apps, they’ve been more successful than many might think — a Pew Research study found that 1 in 10 committed relationships now start from an online connection.
Still, there’s little argument that the swipe function has created a more superficial dating culture. People want deeper connections and don’t want to feel like they’re spinning their wheels because someone had a flattering profile picture. Whether AI is the answer to fixing that problem remains to be seen.
Prediction: No one likes spending hours swiping, so maybe AI will lead people to simply run dating apps in the background at all times — offloading the search for a partner. That could crater engagement on these platforms, forcing them to shift to a subscription-only model.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.