Finding love has never been more simple than using the thumb and does not involve the Russian roulette intrigue and of harnessing the rawness of the lonely road in hitchhiking for a date.
The platform of Bumble interfaces with the social network of choice and allows users to zip through a series of user profiles featuring abbreviated biographical information and images. It is not complicated and frighteningly powerful in the vast selection of candidates which appear on the screen of a phone or device.
Interested- use the thumb to swipe right.
Not interested- swipe left.
The eloquent brilliance of the experience is that it is a pure mystery as to who swiped left or right, as the app does not indicate whether someone is intrigued or not. The only positive indication a user receives is if they swiped right on a profile and the other person swiped right as well. Once the official connection is made, contact is allowed between the two and the courting process officially begins, or ends in three or four highly charged messages.
While it seems vain and juvenile to sort through hundreds of profiles in a single session and with everything based on instinctive attraction, the apolitical environment of the app was a viable escape from interacting via social networking. However, Bumble recently joined the indelible of ranks of corporations castigating the NRA and are literally and inexplicably throwing themselves into the thick of the gun debate, by officially banning users from posting pictures featuring firearms. The Verge clarifies that the updated company policy also includes a stipulation calling for a removal of all existing gun photos and the active moderation of other instruments of self-defense, including knives and nunchucks. In the resin addled brains of the company staff, apparently the selected images of guns and other mechanisms of self-defense, are somehow cause for a pending and bombastic revolution of epic proportions. Or maybe they are simple pawns in parroting the anti-firearm sentiment from the venture capitalists who originally funded the site. What do guns have to do with dating anyway? It only makes sense to the gun control lobby.
While Bumble is intent on becoming a digital gun-free zone, the alarming amount of fake profiles with influences from the Cartel, and Nigerian and Russian criminal syndicates, continue to compromise the integrity and order of the dating community with an influx of images featuring beautiful people on exotic beaches, who are simply too good to be true. During the onset of online dating a rule was established that is still applicable today, “A bikini shot and a series of pleasant messages, is not a confirmation of identity.” Armed with sensual and beautiful bots, the bad guys have infiltrated the instant gratification dating realm, and are busy committing ceaseless acts of fraud, while Bumble has chosen to negatively politicize the domain. The metaphor is tragically ironic and extends into the vortex of the real world and the unproductive hypocrisy that many terrestrial corporations have recently fallen into.
Editor’s Note-
I used this platform over the Summer months and there were not a lot of photos of people with guns. Come on, only a dimwit would post images devoted exclusively to selfies taken in an arsenal. If a gal or guy displays a photo at the range or hunting, which is the usual case if at all, then what is the issue? I cannot fathom the amount of time and money that Bumble is going to waste as well as alienating a considerable amount of their user base in enforcing this horrendous policy. While I actually went on dates with a total seven woman (five were Amazon corporate employees… only in Seattle), who were all fairly reasonable, charming, and attractive, the issue is not with meeting people, rather the ever present criminal element that canvasses users with grandeur dreams of false hope. I personally experienced this twice, in an online interaction and more disturbingly and bizarrely, a good old fashioned meeting at a local establishment and teeming with notions of entrapment. In both cases, I utilized common sense to avert disaster, but in the latter mentioned example, there was actually a tangible intellectual and physical attraction, and the fact that it was all based on an illusion kind of hurt in the end. Bumble should be focused less on politics and more in tune to offering end users resources of protection against an ominous force that is becoming increasingly sophisticated in using weapons of fraud, and not punishing users for simply exercising their rights.
Read the Verge article here.