Make product worse, get money
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The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizza places are incentivized to make their pizza less healthy so that people come back more often"... which is exactly what happens!
So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market? It's partly because restaurants aren't just in the business of selling (healthy) food: it's also about convenience and satisfaction and experience. More importantly, that just doesn't fit with how people largely make day-to-day decisions.
The same thing happens with dating apps. People get drawn in for all sorts of reasons that don't necessarily map to getting married, even if finding a long-term relationship is explicitly their goal. Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps.
The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.
is a crazy remark, but I think you're right. We're living in weird time!
> The competition is therefore all the other activities that compete for the rapidly growing “discretionary time” of a population
His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.
People who uses dating apps are on a very specific mission (to get laid, a.k.a "to meet more interesting people"). They'll optimize their profile to specifically archive that goal.
TikTok accepts wider range of interest-based (instead of goal-based) contents, and have much wider demographic spread. On that platform, you show more aspect of you and your life to your viewers, and that creates a degree of trust and maybe even empathy, both are beneficial in creating a closer relationship.
And it's not just on TikTok, I first noticed the effect in online games. For example, people who act kindly often get a lot of friends, etc.
Meaning for example that if Tinder shows me profiles I find less attractive, I'm more likely to churn to Tiktok. So Tinder will show me profiles of people I have no hope of meeting, to keep me engaged nonetheless.
Really true. Most of dating seems to be dominated by that people want to be comfortable and dating is an inherently uncomfortable experience at times and many people seem to have a hard time with it.
I’m writing this as someone that made the conscious decision to face every form of uncomfortableness in dating if I noticed it was needed. Some people look at me bewildered with how I met my wife. They found what I did was way too much effort. But I am thinking to myself: you’re going to spend the most time with them! You better be damn sure that you’re long-term compatible.
Yet, enough people seem to act the whole process is more like buying something from your local Chipotle/<name your favorite establishment> where comfort is king.
Oh, and learning to be playful by unleashing my inner silly goose.
For relationships, what works for me:
* Similar personalities. I can now intuitively see people who have a similar HEXACO to me in 2 minutes. Note, not everyone that has a similar HEXACO to me I can see, but a subset of them. I've never been wrong (I only did this twice). I'm high in openness, and it's easy to see other people high in openness. Then seeing how the other dimensions fall out is quite predictable.
* Same coping style
* Secure attachment style
* Ability to be reasonable, pragmatic and emotionally intelligent in ways that I characterize those terms
Is that a good thing in a partner? I can see the case for similar openness, but with extraversion and emotionality, for eg., in my experience you probably want someone on the opposite side of the scale to balance things out and have complementary strengths and weaknesses that make life easier for the both of you.
I feel that people are different enough in ways that the HEXACO doesn’t capture. It’s just much easier to communicate with someone, because you think in a very similar way. So far, I have seen different strengths and weaknesses come about. We both are have a subclinical case of ADHD so being with each other is basically body doubling all the time which removes a lot of the annoyance that ADHD has. So oftentimes it’s not a 1 + 1 = 2 thing because there’s also an interaction effect as psychologist would say.
I am not saying this is a generalized theory by the way. I simply know it works for me. I have been in a few short relationships (of a few months) and 4 that were a year or longer. Women that think like me are way more suited as romantic partners and it’s not even close.
Bonus point: I don’t have to do the whole “men are like this and women are like that” dance that many people in my social circle explicitly seem to do. Because my dance is “she is like me and I am like her”. I would get much closer to predicting how she is when I ask myself “what would I do?” as opposed to “what would a general woman do?” Of course, in some cases sex and gender differences are there.
Or weird stuff like “women are more emotional and men are more logical”. It doesn’t apply. We can both hold each other to a standard that we both find reasonable and fully understandable. I expect my wife to be logical and emotional. She expects the same from me. I seem to have more of a bias towards logic and she does to emotions (well… more accurately, towards vibes and vibe-based living) but it’s often enough that I see she’s the more logical one or I am, at that moment, the more emotionally in tune.
It took a long time to find her and a lot of relationships and a lot of women to meet (and then to think how many women I secretly/silently rejected, at least 100K). The biggest hurdle to overcome is fear of rejection. I didn’t set out to be in a lot of relationships, but I do break up when I clearly see it’s not working.
That does sound appealing when put like that.
My experience has been with the counterbalancing kind of relationships I mentioned (maybe I subconsciously seek them out that way), with about 50% overlap in personality or interests and 50% divergence. And many of the memories I cherish from them have been from them introducing me to new little worlds, social environments, and experiences that I wouldn't have sought out or even given a thought to, on my own.
But there were also times when I wished we were more similar, when some experiences (that I was excited about) would have been great to share, and were diminished or even skipped out on because they weren't as into it. So seeking out more overlap seems at least worth trying out.
Thank you for giving a thoughtful and well-considered reply, by the way.
I wish I had the exact stats but I just got some crappy JS code from some Github website, edited it a bit and within 10 minutes the swiper was swiping. I'd then go meticulously go through every "match" (looking at photo's, reading the bio's, all of it) because if you only have around 250 "matches" each month (for each 50K women I swiped right on auto pilot), you can actually take the time. I unmatched a lot of them and was left with my real matches.
I met her in Valencia. She was on vacation and I was digital nomadding at the time. She asked me on a date and I was really tired and really didn't want to go because of it. But I remember thinking "you have to shoot all your shots and take all your chances." I'm so happy I did, she made me forget I was tired in a heartbeat and we were goofing around for the whole 3 hours, to the point where I realized I hadn't even asked one normal question and didn't know much about her haha (and vice versa). I love conversations like that, just fun vibes.
The lesson is in revealed preferences. One of my friends, live him to death, has been trying to lose weight since forever. When we try to eat together, hell judge the food. Either what's in my pantry/freezer or from the restaurant we go it. He keeps talking about keto as well. He's pretty knowledgeable about things by this point. But he keeps being unable to lose the weight! Yet no matter how much he tells me or how right it actually is, the lesson is on revealed preferences, aka he's got a ton of dominos pizza boxes hiding out in the trash that he's been eating.
Losing weight is pretty simple. Just stop eating such much food. It's not easy though, unfortunately. That food is pretty delicious. All dating apps have to do, which coffee meets bagel was doing at back when, is rate limit the matches given to women. Let woman rate as many men as they want, but only show women the to p 15/whatever matches so they aren't overwhelmed. it's so obvious and simple, but hard to put into in practice, for reasons that have zero to do with anybody's ability to write code.
Pointing out one incentive is not a complete argument without an understanding of the broader dynamics. Auto manufacturers are incentivised much more strongly and in the opposite direction to make safe(ish) cars. Pizza restaurants are incentivised not to make pizza from reconstituted sawdust and rancid milk fat, for multiple reasons.
Then, goes the argument, if we are willing to regulate cars and abandon truly bad pizza restaurants, how come we put up with dating apps instead of e.g. deleting them and offering a $10k bounty to matchmakers, payable on our one year wedding anniversary? Why don't we ditch them? There must be more than just one incentive at play.
Out of curiousity, what incentive did you think that sentence meant? Should I have explained exactly which incentives led to airbags and ABS?
They don't produce food; they produce shareholder wealth. That's their goal.
Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.
It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price.
Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.
All that is to say - I’m not sure I agree that supermarkets are the cheapest outcome for food. Locally grown food can be substantially cheaper. What we give up is the year long availability for any kind of produce we could dream of. Instead we eat seasonally and we eat what is available. It requires a shift in cooking practice from “I want to make X - I am going to go buy A,B,C ingredients” to “I have A,B,C - what can I make with this?”.
Maybe that lack of choice is an unacceptable trade off for some - for us we find it fun. It’s well worth cheaper, better tasting (really cannot understate this part), and substantially longer lasting produce. It’s actually crazy how long the produce we get from the farm lasts - we have basically zero spoilage now.
I just wish we could get food like this year round - and I am considering buying a second share next year entirely to can it. So maybe it will be possible!
I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.
I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets.
> I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget....
You forgot the "For the brief period of time their produce is in season."
Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a lot.
I am also pretty confident that those small, local, organic producers aren't the source of most of their customers' caloric demands.
I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally.
Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.
Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
When I go to the grocery, food is available to me at any time of year.
Your friend's apples are only available for ~2 months/of the year. The supply chains that feed the world have to work year-round, and all the people that work them expect to get paid. Availability adds to the cost.
> What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today
I have a very hard time believing that the average apple from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.
Carbohydrates are way cheaper, but the distribution of nutrients you can get for any price has not gotten cheaper proportionally. Then you factor in choices, like paying rent vs eating healthier, etc etc.
And you know this "for sure" exactly how?
At least an order of magnitude more calories? Just to be on the same page, you're saying that apples in the 50s had at least 10x as much calories as they do today? :DD
You realize an apple is ~10-12% sugar by weight, right? The rest is just water and fibre. So an apple with an order of magnitude more calories would mean a solid block of sugar. (alternatively, an apple that's 10x the size, but we have photos of 50s apples, and they were roughly the same size as today)
I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.
Did people choose to do that, or why they forced to by increased costs in other areas?
And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.
It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible.
Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?
Even from an environmental perspective the arguments are dubious. The yields on organic food are much lower which means you need more land under production, land that could have been left to the wilderness.
There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents.
I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies.
Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.
If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.
But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.
Flights in my mind are already a very high quality product offered at a very reasonable price. I can pay $250 and get across the country faster and more safely than any other means of transportation. I don't necessarily think that extra legroom is part of a "baseline level of quality" we should expect everyone to know you feel is worth the money and automatically provide to you
It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.
Note that "come back" needs to be interpreted broadly. For example, a Osprey backpack--lifetime warranty against most anything, doesn't look like there's any space for repeat customers. But--those of us who would buy something like that very well might want different sizes. And I would certainly recommend them to others who were in the market for a serious backpack. (And, yes, they do honor the warranty--had a buckle snap, I sent them pictures, they offered to repair it, or ship me the part and I do it myself. Took the latter option, a few days later I had a strap and buckle that I threaded through my pack, good as new other than the color didn't match.)
I'm sure I've read that there's one where that is the advertising tagline, something like "The dating app you're going to delete!"
Pretty strong statement to be honest, I wish I'd thought of that.
So the author's list of 'Why Stuff is Bad' should * certainly * include 'lack of anti-trust laws and enforcement'. Rent-seeking, anti-trust, regulatory capture should all be mentioned in this under-thought blog product.
Seriously, not mentioning useful regulation and standards as a countermeasure to the negative trends the author describes seems like willful blindness.
[1] Phoebus Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
That's why that one bulb that's been burning for a 100 years in a firestation somewhere is only just glowing.
An electric heater at 100C is an incandescent light source with 0% luminous efficacy :)
With non-blackbody bulbs (e.g. florescent, LED, etc.) the light is produced directly. Any extra heat is still wasted, but we can (and do) engineer to reduce it, thus making the bulbs far more efficient.
Oh, they do. But Match Groups buys it and either:
a) they get to cover certain niche of the market they weren't monetizing (Indiamatch, Chispa, Ldsplanet...)
b) they leave it to die so people move to other apps (Like OKCupid, the only app I know that has less features with every update)
Just check their brands [0]: Match, Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, Plenty of fish, Our time, The League...
--
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ownedBecause there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.
Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.
Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).
> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."
Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.
Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.
1: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...
But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.
And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.
My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.
And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on.
What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.
But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.
A company's strategy, tactics, and individual decisions are always constrained by its competitors, customers, societal laws and norms, etc. For example, if a company faces a competitor that is grabbing market share by offering a cheaper product that is slightly worse, the company may have no choice but to lower the quality of its products so it can compete successfully.
Like I'm not willing to pay certain prices for things like I fly less because the experience is worse than it should be, by a lot and I can't handle paying 10x more for the business class option. So I'm just stuck doing it. And there are plenty of people who are happy to do it still.
So you end up left with a rock and a hard place. Do I not travel? Do I not go buy that thing? Do I not do these things that would possibly add happiness to my life to fight price gouging? Especially when you know that for every 1 of you there are 6 other people happy to pay the price or buy the thing.
It feels like a lot of these big companies are just too big to fail at this point and abuse us for it.
Thinking of boycotts that have worked in the past, they generally had specific demands and a plan to resume normal consumption when those demands were met. The Gallo wine boycott in the 70s was successful. The workers had a clear case, simple demands, a desire to negotiate, and a call to boycott one specific winery until they came to the table. When they did, the boycott was lifted and the majority of boycotters went back to consuming the wine.
On the other hand, if I decided to boycott Gallo wine, they wouldn't notice, because I don't think I've bought a bottle of Gallo in my life, and I haven't given a good reason to do it for other people to join me.
I used to think, "I'll stop shopping here! They'll change their policies!", and yeah, nope, what happens is the company just leans into the customers that remained. So my "boycott" didn't do anything but deprive me of something I wanted.
However, I decided that, at least for a certain set of things, my desire for the thing can be outweighed by my desire not to contribute to something.
So boycott's aren't about me changing a company's policies, they're about me allocating my resources towards the things I want to see in the world.
When organizers ask for a boycott that may take years, their goal should be worthy to justify the consumer pain. BDS is a good example, it will take a while but stopping the apartheid Israeli regime is good.
A less intensive campaign is the Starbucks Union’s no contract no coffee pledge, which presumably will last only weeks to months.
Tesla is having sells issues world wide due to a large part because of Musk.
Another recent example how fast Disney turned around and bought Kimmel back after people started cancelling Disney+ subscriptions left and right.
Disney had to ignore pressure from Trump and the FCC. It definitely wasn’t a principled stand - they were one of the ones who bribed Trump personally.
I’ve driven 4-5 different EVs over the past couple of years [1] including Tesla’s. They aren’t any better and in fact the infotainment system is worse than even low end cars with CarPlay support.
Sales are tanking worse overseas and being taken over by cheaper cars based on Chinese tech. It’s very much a dead cat bounce.
Which puts Tesla in a similar spot to the Apple situation, where the majority of customers are the least-likely to demand value, quality or moral consistency from their OEM. Your CEO can embarrass himself in interviews, ship nonsense thousand-dollar novelty products and kiss ass to authoritarians, but people who consistently buy a certain product won't abandon their brand loyalty. In fact, both Apple and Tesla seem to benefit from the influx of liberal and conservative customers who feel "represented" by superficial gestures like interviews, novelty products and asskissing.
It feels safe to assume that both Apple and Tesla will persist long into the future, eager to amend their horrible misgivings coerced under authoritarianism.
Google is one of the companies that bribed Trump to leave him alone to “settle a lawsuits
Isn't this just your "information asymmetry" point over again?
The average user has no way to actually compare outcomes between dating apps - at best, they can run a limited A/B test on short term outcomes (do I go on a lot of dates? Do I click with my dates?), or they might have anecdotal evidence from the success/failures of their friends dating on the same apps.
Dating apps make this dreadful process much faster IMO.
I met my wife through one of these popular apps, but I had a process where I serially dated dozens of women over the course of years, optimizing for volume not for matching score.
Many girls I dated were great but it took years until I finally met the one I could actually marry.
In comparison my parents grew up in a small town and were pretty much set for marriage by their parents when they were very young. They spent almost 60 years together.
The key variable is how long that gap of time is. In the online dating example, if the dating app does a sufficiently great job you will never return. A milder version: if the used car salesman gives you great value, you might be back in 10 years. This creates very weak incentives for good service, so more predatory tactics dominate.
It took a lot of wrangling to get them to be safe. They were coffins on wheels for decades.
Their comment itself is making a sarcastic statement about how few consumers there are with "perfect information" given TikTok's user-base (the same could be said for Temu or even Amazon). To be fair, I agree with their statement by itself, I'm having more trouble fitting its message into this thread.
Bigger vehicles are more profitable, easier to advertise (for features and/or as a status symbol), suffer less emissions regulation. They also are more likely to kill pedestrians or occupants of other cars, and do significantly more damage to anything else they hit.
1. The miracle of markets (supply and demand, "the invisible hand," etc.)
2. The weakness of markets (incomplete information, monopoly, etc.)
How do I know if the competing app is actually better? I mean, this was the advertising angle for eHarmony about a decade ago - that it was much better than competitors at actually turning matches into marriages. But this claim was found to be misleading, and they were advised to stop using it.
Could a potential customer really get to the bottom of which site is the best at finding a real match? It's not like a pizza restaurant where I can easily just a bunch until I find my favorite and then keep buying it. Dating apps are like a multi-armed bandit problem, but you stop pulling arms once you get one success. So your only direct feedback is failed matches.
Because this someone will start doing the same thing.
The article feels like a very naive perspective.
Psychologically, they also never admit they're at fault themselves.
People love swiping, but hate being swiped upon. Renters love complaining about prices they are willing to pay – and so on. How many consumers factor in customer support when choosing a carrier? None. They choose on price and then complain when the support sucks.
Even between the EU and America there are differences in regulation with the EU often getting the stronger regulation first.
This video is my source for all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI-vFq39-I
I've done my best to remember most of it.
"Your traffic laws or lack thereof are so insane that riding a motorcycle is basically a death sentence."
"Ok, we'll get people off motorcycles then!"
To abuse a meme, men will do literally anything to avoid obeying stop lights
I don't think there is a clear answer. Safer car means owners of the car survive more and more often: which is unequivocally great. Making it cheaper means there are more people in a safer vehicle than before which can reduce their likelihood of getting hurt/dying, but they're not as protected as they could be. This is, on the whole, also really good.
It just so happens car makers pick to make it cheaper. It's good for business and good for those who couldn't afford it before. It is bad for those who encounter the situations where additional protection would have saved them.
You need OEM parts, or you can't simply buy a piece that broke, but you need a whole module.
The trend seems to be locking crap with software.
So in a way, while they improved greatly in terms of safety, maintenance and parts it's completely absurd.
I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for example, makes pianos and motorcycles. I believe that American companies hyper-focus on particular markets and try to squeeze every penny that they can out of them. Combined with the short-sightedness of quarterly targets and a lack of competition through things like regulatory capture, there's less incentive to create great products.
It's interesting that this article uses the restaurant industry as an example, because it is rife with examples of restaurants that debut to acclaim, enshittify their offerings, and then go out of business as their clientele evaporates. How many software products have gone the same route? How many were initially good, bolted on too many unwanted features, ignored their core audience, and ultimately lost their users to the next big thing?
It seems like something is missing in this fellows theory, and the answer is fair competition. Pizzaria's don't sell cardboard discs for $300 precisely because they become the worst pizza in town long before reaching that point. Restaurants that stay in business long-term are forced to limit their impulse to seek greater profits. They must maintain a level of quality that lets them remain competitive. That's a hard limit imposed by the market. Many choose to dance around on the boundaries of this limit. It's profitable, but risky. If you go too far and consumers abandon you, you can't just improve your product a little and expect them to flock back.
This is why big tech companies love to buy out, lobby against, and otherwise disrupt or obliterate their competitors. Competition is what places limits on profit-seeking enshitification. If you can establish a monopoly then you can enshittify to your heart's content. e.g. Google.
I would say it has a good moat in the minds of consumers, but not a good moat in reality.
Also they have a near monopoly on web advertising.
Meta/Facebook made only $47 billion in revenue in 2024 vs Google/Alphabet's's $72 billion in advertising revenue for 2024.
The great thing about the dating app biz is that the competition is universally awful at providing good matches that lead to long term relationships. The same goes for pro match-makers, speed-dating events, etc.. It's a hard problem to predict what makes two people click together, even if you get them to meet face to face.
These companies aren't enshittifying their products to make money. They were just never good to begin with. Dating success still boils down to the shotgun approach. So, it becomes a question about who can fool the most users with false claims and reach the critical mass required to load buckshot in everybody's blunderbusses.
This also creates a perverse incentive to use the media to condition your customers to have bad taste.
iPhone sales numbers, as an example, say otherwise. If it was universally true that people just want cheap crap, everyone would rush to get whatever $200 budget motorola android the carrier is hawking for "free."
I could seen an argument that people want cheaper products, but certainly not worse. Airlines aren't the best example because margins are pretty low, but food concessions? Insane markup, consumer should expect them to just eat the cost of making a better product for cheaper, they certainly have the margin to do so.
Same with personal matchmakers for high net worth individuals. They charge tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They're not necessarily any better at match making. But the users are paying a lot of money to reassure themselves of their superior status. And to filter out some of the more obvious riffraff.
In fact, a huge driver of practical pricing is narcissism. You're either selling it as a service ("luxury branding") or using it as lever to cynically extract money from those you consider inferiors. (Most corporates.)
Or both.
"More for less" and enshittification are both driven by narcissistic greed and devaluation of customers.
Some businesses start out like this. Some start out with good intentions. But generally once you get past a certain size many businesses become a competitive sociopath farm, with more and more sociopathy the higher you go.
Most internal and external interactions becomes an expression of dysfunctional values where the object of the exercise is to assert superior status and power and to deny quality service.
There are still mid size company that try to make a good product for a fair price, but I have the gut feeling that any company that have a board of shareholders will always default to this behaviour.
But...Pizza?
More specifically to dating apps: There is a huge market imbalance on it, there are only a few women to pair off to whomever they prefer... So they can serve that market just fine, then the rest of the men are the ones to jerk around a bit: trick them with bots, tell them if they pay they will move up the ranks and have a better chance, come up with "studies" that show all they have to do is make better pictures and keep paying and trying.
How immoral is it really to satisfy a percentage of users... and then abuse the rest? Its not like you can properly give them what they are looking for anyway. I think its quite immoral but thats why I am not a successful businessman.
The pizza and other comparisons are quite dumb and not the same thing: A market that requires many participants to benefit a few, only some can be helped so do your best with those, then figure out how to abuse some/many for profits. If they don't figure out how it really works, well, thats a shame that they keep participating.
I have NEVER had any such problem. Subway puts what you want on the sandwich. You tell them directly. You watch them make it. If you ask for soggy things on your sandwich, it will be soggy.
I do not ask for soggy things on my sandwich. That is why I have never eaten a soggy subway sandwich, EVER.
I did have a fairly loud argument with one - only one - of their sandwich artists ONCE, who refused to microwave the bacon (add bacon to any sandwich for $0.50) before putting it on sandwich, per STANDARD SUBWAY PRACTICE. I finally walked out on the dirty bastard, but I did not file a formal complaint with Subway mgmt. I am a busy person. Maybe next time. Perhaps the sandwich would've also been soggy, had I agreed to uncooked bacon, which I will NEVER do, but I don't know why that would make it soggier.
But I digress: Soggy sandwiches have specific reasons. Wanting a cheaper sandwich is not one of them. Bacon will make your sandwich slightly crispier, if that helps. It also tastes EXCELLENT.
EDIT: To be clear, it is important to be SPECIFIC about how much of something you want. The average sandwich artist has a tendency to dump the contents of an entire bottle of a given condiment on your sandwich, which I admit, could cause sogginess. This is because they think they are doing you a favor. I often use bold & dramatic hand gestures while bent over slightly, face pressed against the glass enclosure of the sandwich-making zone. "STOP! RIGHT THERE!" I will yell, several times, if necessary. Then again, I assume everyone knows this. Or else now you do.
This is mediated by culture and/or region and/or personal taste. I generally find that they default to fairly reasonable amounts and that their notion of "a little" or "a lot" of a sauce etc. matches mine well enough that I can make it work. The much bigger communication problem is getting them to stop assuming you want lettuce and tomato without being asked.
IMX, soggy sandwiches happen mainly because either the sauce wasn't applied neatly, or because (as you say) there are soggy things on it (the lettuce often has water on it, and condiment sauces add up, not to mention the marinara on pizza/meatball type subs).
God, Poe's law really gets me sometimes.
I like pizza, but the usual is that you are getting 2 meals with one pizza.
The moment someone does things better, he can be ahead of the competition.
This one doesn't even fit
¿Por qué no los dos?
I live in New York. Season tickets at our stadiums cost as much as fancy cars, and concessions at these venues are eye-watering.
The simple answer is that folks are willing to pay for shite. The reasons they are willing to do that, merit further examination, but the fact remains. This goes for both individuals and organizations.
As long as that is the case, creating high-Quality product, is damn near impossible.
Quality costs. It’s actually significantly more cost-intensive to even marginally improve Quality, which puts organizations that produce high-Quality stuff at a disadvantage.
It’s really hard to stay in business, in a land where people are willing to pay for junk, unless you produce junk.
Business, particularly under capitalism (where ownership is detached from operation) is about making a profit, not making great products or services
So price discrimination, corner-cutting, price gauging, vendor lock-in, planned-obsolescence, monopoly power, are all tools to increase profits.
That is a really eloquent way to phrase one of my main gripes with capitalist societies. Thanks, I will be stealing it.
It takes money to do that. And the money is already in the incumbent, and generating more money. The “free market” is an illusion, spherical cows. Capitalism collapses onto it’s own contradictions if left unchecked.
userbase and brandname is everything in dating apps, making it near impossible to start one without VC funding for a massive ad campaign (which will be the seed of the enshittification cancer if your platform blows up)
AKA because the competing business will have to invest so much to break into the dating app game that it will be impossible to leave that start up phase uncorrpted by the current big money powers that be.
Who is "we"?
When was the public vote where a democratic majority of all airline customers rejected the idea? I must have missed the memo.
How much is that 3% in dollars?
Who came up with the initial seat number in the first place that the airline now "has to compensate" by raising prices?
The airline would reduce both revenue and costs, but somehow the raised prices only factor in the lost revenue and get to ignore the reduced costs. That's not even a question for the author?
People use to believe they would burn in hell for all eternity, now even their prayers are selfish.
LOL
The gap between noticing something is unsatisfactory and successfully doing something about it (capital, time, effort, risk, market share, …) is massive. It’s really only the second line they have to worry about. If the customer is unhappy but it’s too hard/expensive to switch, or there’s no other options, etc that’s really not a problem. It might even be good for “engagement” or whatever.
The gap is even wider when there’s extra barriers like network effect (dating apps) or legal rights (tv, movies, music). And the more things tilt in that direction - inherently cheap products with huge artificial moats - the more power they have. Every tick up of market capture fundamentally justifies another tick down in quality and/or an increase in price, when needed. This is just the ‘enshittification’ concept we’ve come to know.
Worst case, like another comment mentioned, when the market occasionally does produce something notable - let them do the legwork then buy it. And the bigger entities get the easier that becomes. They get harder to catch up to, while gaining more money and influence to purchase a competitor.
This isn’t 2005 where you can just make a social network or streaming platform with no consequences and take over the world. You’re not even allowed to make the app without permission.
AND as the article mentions, our only classical defense is ‘vote with your wallet’. Which presumes that a critical mass of people would be informed, willing, organized, and able to structurally boycott. Clearly we’re not equipped for that kind of economic warfare on every front from burritos on up.
And as the consumer continues to weaken economically, we actually get less power.
> But if they are actually doing that (which is unclear to me) or if they are bad in some other way, then how do they get away with it? Why doesn’t someone else create a competing app that’s better and thereby steal all their business? It seems like the answer has to be either “because that’s impossible” or “because people don’t really want that”. That’s where the mystery begins.
Pretty much all the article’s examples are known to be happening. As to why - it’s essentially because it’s impossible, just not because no one can code a dating app. Consumers have no real leverage. There is structurally no back-pressure on this in any way, by design.
The dating example is an example of the Shirky principle. The others are not.