In August comes a flock of hopeless and horny romantics on Reddit challenged the pros and cons of Bumble, the dating app that forces women to make the first move.
“Except for barren wastelands like [Plenty of Fish] This app is crawling with bots, scammers, whores and psychopaths and has to be the worst,” one user wrote.
Another said: “Lots of fun conversations, but ghost town when trying to get a number or plan a date.”
Other Redditors openly shared how they met their partners through the app, but the consensus was unequivocally clear: Bumble, like most dating apps on the market today, sucks. “If Bumble is the worst dating app, what’s the best alternative: Tinder, Hinge?” one user asked. “They’re all bad, so which one is the least bad?”
After a decade of swiping left and sliding into DMs, many people are now longing for a simplification of the dating pool. Like so much on the Internet, online dating made everything accessible at once and socializing became a kind of competitive sport. Waves, swipes, likes and roses embodied the desires of a generation of users hungry to connect in any way possible.
But the shine is goneand there is a growing feeling among young people that dating apps, once considered the future of romantic connections, are broken.
Facebook Dating is all old people. Raya is full of attitude. Hinge, which bills itself as the “dating app designed to be deleted,” hides its most attractive daters behind a $50 monthly subscription (at least that’s the theory according to a handful of TikTok users). As for Tinder, the app that revolutionized online dating when it launched in 2012, it has become “the dating air, or perhaps the pollution, that we all breathe,” writer Allison P. Davis observed last yearreflecting on the Olympic level of difficulty that modern dating presents for many people thirsting for connection.
The disillusionment with dating apps is felt most strongly among college students, according to a new study from Axios and research agency Generation Lab. Most forego regular app use (79%) in favor of personal connection, a fact that seems at odds with Gen Z’s innate gift for virtual expression on platforms like Snapchat and Twitch.
