DATING AFTER the APPS

Was there such a thing as LOVE before Bumble, Tinder, and Hinge? How a generation of RELATIONSHIP SEEKERS that came of age SWIPING is now looking to MEET PEOPLE in NEW (and some very old) ways.

Story by SARAH THANKAM MATHEWS

Earlier this year, WhitneyWolfe Herd, founder of app giant Bumble and a cofounder of Tinder, offered a solution for the future of dating: AI. Speaking onstage at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco in May, Wolfe Herd envisioned a scenario where an app user’s AI “dating concierge” would “date” other people’s AI concierges, recommending the best matches among the lot. People reacted with a mix of malaise, amusement, and horror, many pointing out that this was a plot point in the dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror. How did we get here? Let’s rewind. In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 blanketed the U.S., dating-app usage surged. Bumble’s video-call feature saw a 70 percent increase in activity. The number of OkCupid users going on virtual dates shot up by a factor…

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Harper's Bazaar (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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