I'm embarrassed it took me so long to realize this. Somebody explained that to me recently, within the context of a conversation about layoffs. That CEO had no prior CEO experience, was only there for less than a year, and was part of the board of directors. In hindsight it seems so obvious.

The ol' Ellen Pao

So like a corporate sin eater?

You bring in a female CEO to take the fall. The narrative gets to be about her weak leadership.

Ellen Pao wasn’t even CEO for a full year. Reddit clearly put her in charge to take the heat - which they knew would be ample based on her sex alone.

Exactly this, they are usually young too and they know their only job is to fire ppl and/or do decisions that will make most if not all unhappy. I have only seen it once my self but a lot of friends went through that at their company.

It's what boeing does everytime a plane goes down.

It was.

Yeah. I used the BFF version for a bit to try and find folks in my area to hang out with. It's a really horrible app. When someone messages you, you have 24 hours to respond. If you don't then the two of you get unmatched. I can understand something like unlatching after some time period without responding, but just 24 hours? Ick.

Did that ever...work?

Also regarding cost: I have yet to hear how a dating app solves the paradox that success means losing a customer. The incentives of the company and customer are not aligned and actually quite the opposite.

The company wants you to stay and spend as much as possible on the platform (optimizing to keep you just engaged enough to stick with it), whereas the ideal outcome for the customer means not needing the app in as little time as possible.

Bumble used to be different back in the day. I tried it when it was going down the tubes.

I think part of the problem is that the matching is fairly superficial, so while you know a little about the person, most of the details amount to their face, 1-3 hobbies, and their ass.

The women I matched with that I went out with were awkward and felt forced. In the end, I ended up falling in love with a close guy friend that I had known for years.

If bumble wants success, they should allow for much deeper Q&A, longer response times, a tweaked algorithm that matches people based off hobbies and passions, and an AD section that allows people to privately put in stuff that they like after dark. Info that isn't shared with their matches, but helps make people match better with people like them.

As for straight dating though, idk. I feel like people should probably be avoiding apps and meeting organically through stuff like biking groups, climbing groups, skiing events, big dance venues, etc. it fosters much more organic connections.

I don't participate in bar culture that much, but the difference between the gay bars I've gone to and the straighter college-y bars feels immense. The former is much more social with a pinch of kink, the latter is where people are getting absolutely blitzed without much dialogue over loud music. It's an extremely small sample size, but I can't help but wonder if it's part of a larger trend when it comes to meeting people and how portions of society meet and date. Perhaps there are bars where single straight men and women meet over 1-2 drinks and talk, but I haven't seen any so far.

Overall, I think the Internet and cars (decreasing population density and increasing the space between third places) has had a dramatically negative impact on love and friendships in places like the US.