THE GUARDIAN – Nov 1 – Bumble and Badoo have announced plans to crack down on ghosting. Bumble has recruited an in-house 'ghosting' expert, Kate Leaver, and Badoo has introduced a series of suggested responses, such as: "Hey, I think you're great, but I don't see us as a match. Take care!" Leaver's role, building on the expertise she developed writing her book The Friendship Cure, is focused on pushing for "a revival of kindness and respect," she says. "People are ghosting everyone all over the place. I think they are too lazy, or too cowardly to have the difficult conversations," Leaver adds. "There has been some extreme psychological damage for people who are living without any explanation as to why they've been ghosted." Google, for instance, recently updated Gmail to introduce a feature called "nudges". The service prompts users to reply to emails that they "might have forgotten to respond to" and to "follow up" on emails they sent that never received a reply. While it can occasionally be useful, the feature is attempting to fight a symptom of information overload by adding more information to the pile. It's not enough to ignore an email. We now have to ignore it twice. Could nudging ghosters in the dating world simply add to the overload of the modern era? After all, as the psychologist Maya Borgueta has written in HuffPost, "ghosting is avoidance and often stems from fear of conflict. Which means that ghosting is about wanting to avoid confrontation, difficult conversations and avoid hurting someone's feelings." If that is the case, Badoo's pushy attempts to restart conversations could have the opposite effect: if you ghost because of a fear of confrontation, then it's not much help when your dating app begins confronting you.
by Alex Hern
See full article at The Guardian
See all posts on Badoo
See all posts on Bumble
Summarized by the IDEA team
THE VERGE – Nov 2 – Bumble is looking to drop its $400M countersuit against Match Group. Yesterday, Match filed a notice of non-opposition, essentially saying that it's okay with Bumble dropping its claims so long as the court issues declaratory judgments absolving Match from allegedly stealing Bumble's trade secrets. Match is also hoping the court will issue declaratory judgments validating its patents and Bumble's alleged infringement of them, which are involved in its original lawsuit from March. Both companies seem okay backing away from this case for now, but Match seems to want to get some absolution out of it, especially if it'll benefit the company's lawsuit against Bumble. Match sees Bumble's countersuit as serving only as a publicity stunt to bolster its reputation.
