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Notes -
Bumble has an alternate mode for finding friends, but it is infamously rife with people who are either gay and cruising for sex with some veneer of plausible deniability (on the male side) or incredibly flaky (on the female side). It only matches you with potential friends of the same sex because, in practice, opposite sex pairing only happened between people who were into each other's physical looks anyway, and the man would typically end the "friendship" date by trying to convert it into a date-date where he could get laid sometime soon. As a result, male-female friendship was officially declared unrealistic and removed from the app.
The real Tinder equivalent for finding friends is probably Meetup; look for some hobby or activity group that meets in your area, go there every single team the meetup occurs, and make small talk while participating. Regular attendance will eventually net you friends in the same way regular gym attendance will make you jacked: i.e., not the first time, nor as fast as you might hope, but after 2-3 years everyone will see the difference.
You make bumble sound worse than I had initially thought to be honest. Is that universal or just in particular areas?
The meetup suggestion sounds like solid advice. I guess it makes some amount of sense that friendships aren't usually created one on one but rather in a group context. I'll take a look at it and see what's around my local area.
You should have known that this is the obvious failure mode. Effective Altruism events can't even get people to stop using the Swapcard app to get dates. Bumble had no chance.
You're right in that I shouldn't be surprised. I guess I am just a little disappointed. Thankfully some of the other advice is already working well for me, so I won't necessarily miss that this doesn't work!
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