> But to get there we have to train ourselves to see all these "maladies," as you say.

I agree with this, but your initial comment is creating gendered maladies that don't exist. How is an IP lawsuit a gendered issue?

Basing it off not just the IP allegations but the history of these two companies, linked from the article, but also (mostly) from my own experience and that of pretty much everyone I've talked to about dating apps.

I don't know too much about the case. It could be, as others here suspect, that this is just a savvy PR move and there's a valid IP claim. I kind of doubt it, but either way I think the article touches on larger points about gender politics (esp. that of dating apps) that are worth talking about regardless of the merits or outcome of this case.

Even if the IP allegation is illegitimate, how is such a lawsuit an instance of masculine posturing?

If you view an IP lawsuit as masculine posturing, you should check your blind spots.

Maybe by market share, but Tinder predated Bumble, whereas Lyft predated Uber.

But Über predated Lyft (Zimride) by 4 years

Sidecar came up with drivers using their own car.

I'm failing to see how your comment is any less cynical than the comment above.

I'm a bumble user. They sent this post as an email to their user base. I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish by airing their dirty laundry publicly. Users don't care if you're in an IP battle.

Also, I could have done without the sexist implication that bullying is a masculine characteristic.

I thought the same thing. Why bring gender into this? Bullying should be discouraged in all walks of life, whether the victims and perpetrators are male or female.

Interestingly, all of my female friends who use Bumble are actually annoyed that they must act first to open the dialog with their matches. They don't seem to notice or care that the feature is placed there to empower women, nor do they know or care about Bumble's feminist origins. They use it because it has more attractive males than Tinder.

What's really funny to me is that I've had to explain to more than one female friend that there's a reason no guys start conversations with them on Bumble.

100% consistent with my anecdata as well. My girl friends who use it are all annoyed they have to say something first and mostly default to "hi", which is essentially passing the ball to the guy, who's expected to get creative (assuming similar dating market values).

Interesting. I suppose that's not too surprising, though. As a man, my biggest gripe with tinder is how much work it is.

A lot of their marketing decisions seem to be personal branding/vanity spending for the founders. (Paying money to be in music videos, sponsoring the Clippers ...) This statement probably falls into that category also, but maybe appeals to some of their users at the margin. Or they might be delusional enough to think these things matter, it’s easy to drink your own koolaid.

Popular curation is awful, you're right. But it remains unfortunate that old media still bundles their curation and authoring services. I'd like to see expert curation applied to the entirety of news articles.

Or you could just pay literally less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month --- with the first months free --- and use your Amazon Prime subscription to get WaPo. NYT all-access is a little pricier; it'll cost you two cups of coffee a month.

I'd understand the resistance if you were constantly having to authorize and approve these charges, but really you just sign up and forget about it. I use the subscriptions at least as much as I use Netflix. I am sort of kicking myself for not having set this up earlier.

Very interesting, I wasn't aware of this option. Here's the WaPo link: https://www.amazon.com/The-Washington-Post-Digital-Access/dp... Only $3.99/mo.

I can't find the New York Times on Amazon, though. I pay $7.50/mo for a digital subscription directly to the Times. A pretty great deal, if you ask me. They run a sale every week or two.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? You didn't address what I said.

WaPo bundles authorship and curation, which is exactly the problem I'm describing. The problem isn't cost, it's incompleteness.

What do you mean "useful"? Every viable product is useful for something. That doesn't narrow it down.

What it meant to me was that Yahoo couldn't help itself from taking every successful product or acquisition and screwing it up, deprecating it or otherwise wholly missing why its users valued it.

These have been listed in greater detail elsewhere, but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.

Flickr is the other commonly sited example where Yahoo just didn't seem to understand why the users valued it so much. Every year they'd nerf some core aspect of the product trying to turn it into something less useful but more "trendy".

Finally, for me, the "my.yahoo.com" customizable landing page / rss feed had enormous utility and huge potential but was just left to rot.

> but Y! Games is one of the most glaring examples where they had a massive, loyal audience and just destroyed the community bit by bit.

I'm sorry, but at least we tried when I was there, and if it hadn't been one of Filo's babies, it would have been killed long before we got to take a stab at it.

Used to use my.y.com daily as my home page until they fixed it to be unusable and then abandoned it.

I think useful in this case is pretty clear with the WD-40/duct tape example; hardly the best-in-class solution, but when you just need a simple, short-term solution, then Yahoo! should be the place to go.

In the same fashion that excel is the default go-to tool for any kind of basic data management (and now to a certain degree superceded by google spreadsheets), Yahoo! would have been the default place to go basic image hosting, basic blogging, basic chatting, basic news; A good enough solution to meet the 80% of common problems

Ah, then "low end" is the more appropriate descriptor.

Well, low end but expansive in its utility. Useful like a swiss army knife

For how many of your daily searches would you prefer to use voice? Voice has much higher latency and lower bandwidth than text/vision.

Ideally you'll work with early users who are just one or two degrees removed from yourself, so they'll feel social pressure not to ghost you.