Having been on several dating apps for about a decade, Bumble has been far and away the best experience. I've met multiple girlfriends on it and there's a high chance I'll eventually marry someone I met off it. It elegantly solves the problem this article identifies in a way every other app and site cannot, because (in hetero pairings) women must initiate the conversation.
Bumble is more superficial than Tinder because instead of 2 filtering gates it has 3 and that 3rd gate also removes the opportunity to create attraction through performance or skill.
1. Are you shown to someone you like? Other than paid things like Boost your only lever may be how you swipe.
2. Did they like you back? Good photos and bio actually help here so you have some agency.
3. Are they interested enough to initiate within the time limit? No agency here purely on the basis of sex. "Hi."
The deafening silence of gate 3 removes any chance to move a match from indifferent to interested by being funny, skillful or otherwise interesting. And it dumps even more work on the already most overwhelmed party in dating apps: the woman.
On hetero Bumble, be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive.
That "deafening silence" is the entire point of Bumble. It seems really mentally gymnastic to see the women-initiate-conversation-first rule as "dumping even more work on the woman." What is more exhausting:
1. Choosing entirely on one's own terms whether to say "hey" to someone you swiped right on
2. Sifting through literally hundreds of "hey"s from men
Skip the "really mentally gymnastic" contortions and say what you mean.
There's no question that it takes more effort to think of something better than "hey" to say than it does to read that message. And let's not forget that the matched people have both explicitly opted into a conversation.
I thought the entire point of Bumble was to spare women from gross messages and dick pics.
In my experience this results in a "Hey" from the woman 90% of the time. I've quipped to friends that it's "men message first, with extra steps". But I suppose the act of messaging counts more than the message.
I'm not clear on what you're mean. On Bumble, women are specifically supposed to type out the first message in a conversation, which is what makes it unique from other apps where either party may send the first message. If the woman does not send a message within some period, the match disappears. (This is how it was several years ago. I assume it is similar.)
Supposedly this makes it better, although I disagree. Many women adapt to that in the same way that men adapted to it in the OP, which is to say, they start sending out generic, shitty messages like, "Hi."
