Tinder vs. Bumble
To all the women out there: Here's when you decide where to find your soulmate.
the quick answer:
bumble.com
In 2012, Sean Rad, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Mateen, Jose Munoz, Dinesh Moorjani, and Whitney Wolfe (who later left and started Bumble, but more on that later) launched Tinder, a dating app that uses location to match members with other members of their preferred sex. A key part of Tinder’s increased popularity throughout the years is the fact that they popularized swiping, which allows users to swipe right on someone they like and left on someone they dislike. If two users swipe right on each others’ profiles, a match his made and they can start messaging one another. By 2014, Tinder became the new ‘big thing’ for college students, and users were swiping 1 billion times a day, and the number keeps increasing. Today, Tinder is the world’s most downloaded dating app.
Tinder has done quite a lot in the name of diversity, such as an updated profile orientation during Pride Month, where members can select up to three terms that they feel best describes their sexual orientation and adding a travel alert for members in the LGBT community, telling them if an area they are traveling to is generally unsafe for the community. Despite that, we believe that Tinder can do more, even if just to compensate for the fact that it was partly founded by a guy who both thinks women devalue his company and sex devalues women.
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Wolfe, one of Tinder’s co-founders, was allegedly being sexually harassed by her colleague Manteen, who sent her a two-year long series of “horrendously sexist, racist, and otherwise inappropriate comments, emails, and text messages” after they ended their romantic relationship. Manteen allegedly called her a ‘whore’ and ‘gold digger’ at a work event, and Rad, another one of Tinder’s co-founders, said that having a female co-founder made Tinder “seem like a joke” and that being the female co-founder of Tinder was ‘slutty’ because it is an app people use to hook up. This was followed by the press coverage and internet comments, sending Wolfe to a spiral of depression.
Stories of online harassment on Tinder aren’t rare. After the series of incidents, Wolfe decided to leave the inherently sexist company and file a sexual harassment lawsuit against them. "I had experienced a lot of strangers on the internet, calling me a lot of names. It affected me so deeply and made me so sad. It made my confidence go to zero. I really felt completely lost and scared, and I felt like I had lost a piece of my identity. I didn't know who I was anymore and I was letting these strangers on the internet define that,” Wolfe, now Bumble's CEO, told CNNMoney.
This sparked Wolfe’s idea to empower women and create a women-centric dating app that now rivals Tinder, where women have the power to initiate a connection by making the first move. "The idea was to give women the control to guide the conversation in the direction they wanted," Wolfe said. "To take the pressure off of the man from maybe thinking he needs to start with something aggressive or something really out there, and allowing the woman to say, 'You know what, I'm going to be in the driver's seat.'"
"I want to reconfigure the way that we treat each other. End abusive relationships. That’s it. That's the core of Bumble."
Besides the dating part of Bumble, the app also has a component for people looking for friends as well as a networking section for professionals. "It is our hope and our wish, that as women join the app, they will find the confidence to go after what they want. If that's making the first move on the app, or if that's making the first move in business or friendship, go after the life you want."
As America’s fastest-growing dating app, second on the list of revenue earned on Google Play for all dating brands, 55 million resisted users worldwide as of 2019, 2 billion matches generated in a year, and 50,000 new users signing up every day, Bumble has definitely proved that there is a need and hunger for female-led and feminist platforms out there in every industry, leveling the playing field between men and women and ultimately create a more gender-equal world.
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Sources:
https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/staticpages/index.php?page=Tinder-Statistics-Facts-History
https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/staticpages/index.php?page=Bumble-Statistics-Facts-History
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/bumble-whitney-wolfe-sexism-tinder-app
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/need-know-bumble-feminist-dating-app/
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/bumble-app-whitney-wolfe
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/style/tinder-bumble-lawsuit-explainer.html
https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/14/technology/business/bumble-whitney-wolfe-fresh-money/index.html