Bumble Tried to Change Dating, but the Dating Market Forced It to Change Instead
Bumble Tried to Change Dating, but the Dating Market Forced It to Change Instead
Bumble 试图改变约会模式，但约会市场却迫使其做出改变
Not even 24 hours after dating app Bumble announced it was getting rid of its trademark feature that requires women to make the first move, Robin H.’s inbox was already attracting unwanted attention. “This guy responded to my prompt, and he wasn’t a person I would have swiped on. I can’t believe some of these men think we’re a match,” the 53-year-old social worker in Orlando, Florida, tells WIRED. “Men will swipe on anybody and see what sticks. And with this change, they are just going to be reaching out to everybody.” (Citing privacy concerns, Robin asked that WIRED not publish her full last name.)
在约会应用 Bumble 宣布取消其标志性的“女性先行”功能不到 24 小时，Robin H. 的收件箱就已经收到了令人困扰的消息。“有个男人回复了我的个人资料提示，但他根本不是我会右滑（喜欢）的人。真不敢相信这些男人觉得我们匹配，”这位居住在佛罗里达州奥兰多市的 53 岁社会工作者告诉《连线》（WIRED）。“男人们会向任何人右滑，看看谁会上钩。随着这次改动，他们只会向所有人发起搭讪。”（出于隐私考虑，Robin 要求《连线》不要刊登她的全名。）
Bumble, which hit the market in December 2014, staked its brand on challenging traditional heterosexual dating dynamics. “Whitney Wolfe Is Bringing Feminism to Your Phone,” an Austin Woman headline exclaimed less than two years after launch. But the app’s sudden reversal last week suggests its women-first positioning has become a liability to the company’s sustainability.
Bumble 于 2014 年 12 月进入市场，其品牌核心在于挑战传统的异性恋约会模式。在应用上线不到两年时，《奥斯汀女性》（Austin Woman）杂志曾以“惠特尼·沃尔夫（Whitney Wolfe）将女权主义带入你的手机”为题进行报道。但该应用上周的突然反转表明，其“女性优先”的定位已成为公司可持续发展的负担。
Bumble’s policy update—which includes giving matches 72 hours to respond; previously it was 24—comes as Big Dating’s growth is lagging. Perhaps hinting at what was to come, in May, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe-Herd said in an interview with Axios that niche apps aren’t built for real longevity. The dilemma is emblematic of the volatility in the current dating market, where declining engagement and the introduction of AI are forcing companies to rethink how they should best appeal to singles.
Bumble 的政策更新（包括将匹配后的回复时间从 24 小时延长至 72 小时）正值大型约会平台增长放缓之际。或许是预示了未来的走向，Bumble 首席执行官惠特尼·沃尔夫-赫德（Whitney Wolfe-Herd）在 5 月接受 Axios 采访时表示，小众应用并不具备真正的长久生命力。这种困境是当前约会市场动荡的缩影：用户参与度下降和人工智能的引入，正迫使各大公司重新思考如何更好地吸引单身人士。
These problems aren’t unique to Bumble. Match Group’s August 2026 results showed Tinder’s number of daily active users is down 4 percent from the previous year, while Hinge’s global monthly active users rose 13 percent during the same period. But even apps with sustained engagement struggle with brand perception issues.
这些问题并非 Bumble 所独有。Match Group 2026 年 8 月的财报显示，Tinder 的日活跃用户数同比下降了 4%，而 Hinge 的全球月活跃用户数在同期增长了 13%。然而，即使是那些用户参与度持续增长的应用，也面临着品牌认知度的问题。
Feeld, a niche kink app that championed polyamory and BDSM in its early days, has shifted its focus to attracting more vanilla users, resulting in a 200 percent spike in users in 2025, though people have described the new vibe as “normie hell.”
Feeld 是一款早期主打多元恋爱（polyamory）和 BDSM 的小众应用，如今已将重心转向吸引更多普通用户，这使其 2025 年的用户量激增了 200%，尽管人们将这种新氛围形容为“普通人的地狱”。
Likewise, Grindr has positioned itself as more than an app for hookups, expanding into a “gayborhood” that offers luxury travel experiences, medical prescriptions for GLP-1s and erectile dysfunction pills, musical artist activations, and AI matchmaking. To turn a profit, Grindr has essentially transformed into a digital gated community that now charges members $500 to hook up through its newest membership tier, Edge, while users who opt out are forced to navigate a platform drowning in ads and bots.
同样，Grindr 也已将自身定位从单纯的约炮应用扩展为一个“同志社区”，提供豪华旅游体验、GLP-1 减肥药和勃起功能障碍药物的处方服务、音乐人活动以及 AI 匹配功能。为了盈利，Grindr 本质上已经转型为一个数字封闭社区，其最新的 Edge 会员等级收费高达 500 美元，而选择不付费的用户则被迫在充斥着广告和机器人的平台上艰难使用。
Bumble, which is publicly traded and reportedly exploring a sale, has taken a similar route: transforming a once-niche product into a for-everybody service that pay-gates basic features. The move has not settled well with users online, who have renamed it “Yellow Tinder”—a reference to the color of its logo—and complained that the changes will encourage harassment. “I’m not going to use an app that makes me feel like prey,” one user wrote on X.
作为一家上市公司，据报道 Bumble 正在寻求出售，它也采取了类似的路线：将曾经的小众产品转变为面向大众的服务，并对基础功能进行付费限制。这一举动在网上引起了用户的不满，他们将其戏称为“黄色 Tinder”（指其标志的颜色），并抱怨这些改动会助长骚扰行为。“我不会使用一个让我感觉自己像猎物的应用，”一位用户在 X 上写道。
“The change obviously goes against their whole thing,” says Emily Spence, a 28-year-old events producer in New York City who has used Bumble since 2015. “But the requirement for women to message first didn’t really prevent creeps from messaging you. Just because you say ‘hey’ first doesn’t mean a man isn’t gonna send you something crazy after. It was kind of like a false sense of protection.”
“这次改动显然违背了他们的初衷，”自 2015 年起就开始使用 Bumble 的 28 岁纽约活动制作人艾米丽·斯宾塞（Emily Spence）说。“但要求女性先发消息并不能真正阻止变态骚扰。仅仅因为你先说了句‘嘿’，并不代表男人之后就不会发一些疯狂的内容。这在某种程度上只是一种虚假的安全感。”
The new update may also reflect a desire for a return to more traditional courtship roles. In the announcement, the company noted that 66 percent of women surveyed on Bumble said they prefer men to send the first message, adding that it alleviates unnecessary pressure from the experience.
这次更新也可能反映了人们希望回归更传统求爱角色的愿望。在公告中，该公司指出，在 Bumble 上接受调查的女性中，有 66% 表示更喜欢由男性发送第一条消息，并补充说这减轻了约会体验中不必要的压力。
The company said that its testing of the new feature showed increased chat initiation, but it’s unclear if that will actually translate to more dates and higher user retention or just more unwanted messages. Bumble did not respond to a request for comment.
该公司表示，对新功能的测试显示聊天发起率有所提高，但尚不清楚这是否真的能转化为更多的约会和更高的用户留存率，还是仅仅带来了更多垃圾信息。Bumble 未回应置评请求。
Stefanie Feldman, 41, appreciates the new direction of the app. “I like that it takes off the pressure. Sometimes I just want the men to do the work,” says the business manager in Los Angeles. “I’ve never considered myself a feminist. I want to be pursued. And just because someone reaches out to you doesn’t mean you have to say anything. So that is a feminine power in itself, learning to say no.”
41 岁的斯蒂芬妮·费尔德曼（Stefanie Feldman）对该应用的新方向表示赞赏。“我喜欢它减轻了压力。有时我就是想让男人主动去做，”这位洛杉矶的业务经理说。“我从不认为自己是女权主义者。我希望被追求。而且，有人联系你并不意味着你必须回复。所以，学会说‘不’本身就是一种女性力量。”
Even before last week’s news, Bumble’s brand dilution seems to have been in the works for a while. In 2024, Bumble began tweaking its founding principle when it debuted the feature Opening Moves, which let men reply to a prompt on a user’s page. According to data the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with WIRED, the app has also not featured its women-first social mission as part of its marketing in the US since 2023, with only a few limited branding spots reinforcing that women make the first move in 2022. As an alternative, Bumble “created more generic messaging on how the app has been successful for previous users and encouraged potential users to ‘get to know new people today,’” says Kara Lee, a senior analyst with the firm.
甚至在上周的消息传出之前，Bumble 的品牌稀释似乎就已经在进行了。2024 年，Bumble 在推出“开场白”（Opening Moves）功能时就开始调整其创始原则，该功能允许男性回复用户页面上的提示。根据市场情报公司 Sensor Tower 与《连线》分享的数据，自 2023 年以来，该应用在美国的营销中已不再强调其“女性优先”的社会使命，2022 年仅有少数几个品牌宣传点强调女性先行。该公司的资深分析师卡拉·李（Kara Lee）表示，作为替代，Bumble “创造了更多通用的宣传信息，强调该应用如何帮助过往用户取得成功，并鼓励潜在用户‘今天就去认识新朋友’。”
The reversal ultimately highlights the difficulty of building a dating app around a social mission and how the cost of doing business sometimes requires you to abandon your original ideals.
这次反转最终凸显了围绕社会使命构建约会应用的难度，以及商业成本有时会迫使你放弃最初的理想。
Riki Thompson, an associate professor of digital rhetoric at the University of Washington Tacoma who published a study on the app last year, adds that the shift away from mandatory first moves was the only way, in the interim, for Bumble to keep pace with its rivals.
华盛顿大学塔科马分校数字修辞学副教授里基·汤普森（Riki Thompson）去年曾发表过关于该应用的研究，她补充说，取消强制性的“女性先行”是 Bumble 在现阶段跟上竞争对手步伐的唯一途径。
“An app is only one small part of a much larger system, how people actually behave, what they expect from dating, and the norms they bring with them. You can design an app with great intentions, but you can’t fully control how people use it,” Thompson says in an email. “Bumble is still a business. It has to stay competitive and profitable in a marketplace where plenty of competitors aren’t built around any social mission at all.”
“应用只是一个更大系统中的一小部分，它涉及人们的实际行为、对约会的期望以及他们带来的社会规范。你可以带着良好的初衷设计一款应用，但你无法完全控制人们如何使用它，”汤普森在电子邮件中写道。“Bumble 终究是一家企业。在一个许多竞争对手根本没有任何社会使命的市场中，它必须保持竞争力和盈利能力。”