‘Tinder for fighting’ was obviously fake but credulous journalists make for confused readers

Yesterday, it seems like virtually every tech outlet – and a few mainstream news titles too – wrote about a fighting app called Rumblr. A Tinder for fighting, if you will.

Of course, it was all bollocks – a fictional app made up for a fictional market to promote a very real business consulting service. Naming it would be achieving the ‘founders’ aims, so I won’t be doing that.

What strikes me most about this isn’t that an app with an awful premise was presumed to be true, but that the same trick still works after being pulled so many times by different companies.

It’s not ‘fun’, ‘innovative’ or any other word you’d care to choose to describe the marketing activity. It’s boring. It smacks of a ‘me too’ approach that I’d have thought most businesses wouldn’t want to be associated with.

Add in that the people behind ‘Rumblr’ told Mashable that it was an awful idea that would only bring negative things to the world if it really existed. Thanks for putting the idea in some investor’s head then.

From the reporters’ side, there’s little you can do if the people you interview lie to you, but a little common-sense and consideration of whether the idea even deserves to see the light of day would go a long way. As would some slightly deeper research.

For full disclosure and a note from the ‘no one is perfect’ file, it’s a lesson I learned myself the hard way with Livr, despite having reservations about the ‘product’.

It’s not a mistake I’ve made since, though.

Whatever the team behind the ‘Rumblr app’ set out to do, it’s antagonised readers and journalists, which probably isn’t the smartest way to make friends in media circles. Let’s hope no one needs to believe anything they say in future, eh.