From the article:
In February, Match Group agreed to buy Azar’s parent company for $1.7 billion.
In February, Match Group agreed to buy Azar’s parent company for $1.7 billion.
Lastly, which "we" are you referring to?
Bumble founder disagreed.
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/17141308/bumble-match-group-ne...
From the article above:
"Match, which owns another popular dating app and Bumble competitor, Tinder, is suing Bumble for violating two patents and for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
It was a lawsuit made all the more intriguing considering Match wants to acquire Bumble;"
It’s companies buying competitors for market dominance with no regulatory pushback that’s the issue.
Accountability is kind of old fashioned in the modern world if I had to opine.
But far and away the bulk of dating app traffic goes through a Match property.
I was banned from Tinder about a year into the pandemic. I would sometimes idly swipe over that year to pass time but wasn't having conversations. I can only conclude that something in my profile was misunderstood.
They will not explain why, but I am now banned from all Match owned properties. That more or less leaves Bumble. At least until Match owns them.
Or take it one step further and sell turn-key dating-site startups. "Optimised for a quick Match Group acquisition".
This entire space is really hard to make work well for users, though, because users interests are so at odds with the service providers, in that anything that helps you meet someone quickly reduces the amount of chances they have to upsell you. It's in their interest that you remain frustrated.
So the real innovation that's needed is a new incentive structure.
I'm sure some site has tried to implement a system where you pay only if you end up in a long term relationship, but that seems hard to enforce once two people have each other's contact details.
Another approach that's been tried is for the government to run the site, on the basis that families are beneficial for society, while profit-seeking monopolies and incompatible silos of users are not efficient.
What I don't think has been tried yet is some sort of federated system, perhaps based on ActivityPub, where different providers all share the same distributed pool of users, and therefore can't lock you into their unreasonable pricing scheme.
The success of Mastodon shows that this service could be offered at scale for people to enjoy at zero cost. Possibly there would be an expectation that if you did find someone you really liked, you would make a donation to the one or two sites that you and your partner's profiles were hosted on, and perhaps give a testimonial at the same time.
I assume the difficulty of implementing this is that people don't want bots spamming them with private messages, nor do they want their profiles to be part of some bulk download which a rogue node tries to get away with.
People are understandably quite sensitive about what they write on dating sites, and who gets to see it, and although the safety of traditional dating sites is probably somewhat illusory, a system for moderating interactions is likely to be harder to implement well in a distributed system, and harder than moderating a microblogging service.
That sounds like a minefield. I have an additional idea: what about a dual-purpose site, one that has value for couples too? Saying this makes me realize Facebook, although their thing is new, might be able to cormer this actually...