Not surprisingly these articles never talk about men’s experiences. Only women or “people”
Men's experience is relevant to them, but not the owners of the app.
The ratios are skewed so badly that women get at least an order of magnitude more likes that men on average, so having the woman at least indicating that they are marginally interested lets you know it's worth spending the effort on making the next move.
If you're an incredibly good looking guy, women will put some effort in, but for ordinary looking guys, the vast majority of women don't even bother to respond with an autoreply "sorry, not interested". They just ignore your message entirely, and there's only so many interesting and well-thought out first moves you can send based on something in someone's profile that you resonated with, only be be completely ignored, before you realise that it's all just an utter waste of time if you're not in that top 10% of guys.
To me, it seems that Bumble doesn't really know what it's lost by changing that behaviour, as it's now become just another Tinder.
It would be nice but women are literally flooded with options. You should know they're interested if they match with you and have a conversation with you. At least, you get the same information as a "hey" from that. Bumble is just trying to promote actual dates with their paying customers who don't get a "hey" and scarcely get a match in the first place, because women aren't very interested in dating normal guys.
Sort of understandable because the stereotype goes that most men will right swipe on all and then filter upon match whereas women will filter before swipe.
The real reason women are on bumble at all isn't because they like the gimmick. Instead they just hope that men there are better than the ones on tinder.
Nailed it... Maybe they are predisposed to think the guys are better because they would only feel like messaging exceptional guys anyway. But in general, they would really prefer guys to take all the risks.
Men are typically the vast majority of paying customers. If guys have a terrible experience they will stop paying eventually. But there's a sucker born every day, as the saying goes...
Are they suckers? Probably. Do the platform owner care? Nope.