It was always a long shot. As I wrote last week, the dating app Feeld recently released a bot for the work-chat platform Slack, which alerts users who mutually expressed romantic interest that they liked each other. Despite Feeld’s grandiose claims that using this bot would “make your organization more human” by encouraging people not to hide their crushes at work, it seemed unlikely that workplaces would really want to install this.
Slack, apparently, didn’t think so either. The company has decided not to list Feeld’s bot in its app directory. In its developer policy, Slack says it “will remove Apps that we consider to be inappropriate for use in the workplace or that negatively impact the user experience on Slack.” Dimo Trifonov, the founder of Feeld, told me in an email that this is the feedback he received from Slack as to why the app was rejected. Slack declined to comment further.
While Slack is oriented toward workplaces, people use the platform for other things—for groups of long-distance friends or as meeting places for people with similar interests. Feeld’s bot might be awkward in those contexts, but not inappropriate. “Negatively impacting the user experience” is a nebulous catch-all reason. And it seems like the only other directive in the policy Feeld might be in violation of is “Be a good fit for Slack teams,” which is also very vague.