Bumbling Around

Harry on the sad state of bumble + we're almost at 2k subs!

and

May 17, 2024

RS: guess what, good hangers! we’re at 1,987 subscribers. well that’s nice and all but we want it to be 2000. and we want it NOW. please help us get there by telling your friends, lovers, and hinge matches to subscribe! (s/o to me and harrys hinge matches who subscribe… we couldn’t do this without u guys <3)

Here’s an essay from Harry on Bumbles new failed marketing campaign.

HK: For those who don’t know bumble is in a hilariously stupid PR situation right now where they rolled out a new marketing campaign centered around anti-celibacy for women and tons of people on line got really mad at them and then they issued an apology on Instagram.

Here are some of the pics from the campaign.

The whole thing is awesome.

Getting Brain (Drain)

I want to talk for a second about the advertising industry at large because it helps provide some context. Advertising over the last 30 years has experienced extreme brain drain. In 1990, a young creative, and ambitious person would strongly consider trying to get a job on Madison Ave, writing copy for HP, or designing billboards for McDonald's. Of the handshakes with capitalism one could make as someone trying to Make Stuff, at least in advertising there were colored pencils and a culture of week day binge drinking.

Today, ad agencies have been subsumed by bloated ‘digital marketing’ agencies, who claim to understand how to place thrillingly efficient Google search ads. In 30 years, the job moved from vaguely shiek to incredibly boring. So the smart creative-driven people are elsewhere, becoming influencers or reselling sneakers or making literary magazines funded by Peter Theil.

The sum total of all this is advertisements (perhaps especially ads targeted at millennials, the generation that kicked off this brain drain) are dogshit.

Trouble in Bumbledise

Much of the press around Bumble’s marketing gaff seems to center around people being mad on line that the ads are anti-feminist. I’m hesitant to take these critics of Bumble campaign at face value because the majority of them appear to be voicing their criticism in front-facing videos on TikTok, which is frankly something that only stupid or cynical or evil people do (sorry!)

Bumble’s issue is not that it is anti-feminist, it is that its totally stupid and incoherent.

Many have written about the decline in dating app quality.

Magdalene J. Taylor

had a great essay on this recently. This recent Bumble snafu reveals another issue with these apps being giant venture-backed companies with bottom lines to hit– the tightening of aesthetic diversity among them.

Bumble has always felt to me like a dating app for babies. I’m somewhat sympathetic though because how else can they differentiate? Match.com, which owns Hinge and Tinder has very smartly positioned itself as having the two poles of dating locked down. Criminally horny (tinder) and totally sterile and sexless (hinge). It is no accident that Tinder’s color is red and hinge is black and white.

Dating apps are, of course, only as good as the amount of hot and cool people they can get on there, so what is Bumble to do if they want to lure people away from Hinge and Tinder? They can’t be hornier than tinder and they can’t be more sterile than Hinge. So they’ve elected, it seems, to be the dating app for hecking doggo puppers.

Other apps like Muzz and Coffee Meets Bagels are hoping to differentiate by being dating apps for an explicit group of people. These too seem flawed and hopeless and boring but at least they are aesthetically legible. Bumble is in total no man’s land, attempting to wrap its arms around the contours of a digital vibe created by aging millennials who only sort of understand the internet. It's not too dissimilar to the losers of the great streaming wars. Someone's gotta end up as paramount +.

Plus…once you sift through Bumble chaotic aesthetic, it ends up being what its always wanted to be….hinge. I’ve basically never used it except once I went on a bumble date in Boston, ghosted her, then ran into her at a bar called “Phoenix Landing” at 1 am. Appologized for ghosting her. We started texting again and then I ghosted her again. So clearly bubbles “women message first” does not inoculate you from idiots like 23 year old me.

Anyway…bumble is right about one thing…please baby don’t be celibate your sooooo sexy…..

MMF MAy check-in

RS: Before we get into it… I wanna start off by saying we LOVE when you guys email us and DM us and stuff. We want more. Sorry sometimes it goes to spam because we keep saying stuff like MMF and “sex”

Here’s a recent one that got relegated to the spam folder:

Thank you Owen!

HK: We got a lot of folks sending in 3 sum requests. Oddly enough, none of them were specifically about being 2 girls and having sex with me (harry). Here are a few: