471–480 of 840 posts
The question I have is why is Match Group allowed to have a monopoly on online dating? > Match Group is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. I can't even name another dating site.
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A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the thoughtful internet. Ouch.
Mobile onboarded a different demographic of user. Pre-mobile, not many people really used computers or the internet outside of work or gaming. I grew up in a poor part of the US and lots of people did not have desktop computers at home; most kids begged their parents for access to computers for gaming. Parents in our area could never figure me out. I liked using computers (I would dumpster dive for parts since as a p…
The article doesn’t mention a number of contributing problems such as monopoly power. I want to highlight growth as such a problem. Perhaps Ycombinator is the wrong place to bring up such a point, but the idea of constant growth in user base as the source of value in a company almost certainly contributes significantly to the problems discussed in the article. What happened to community? The businesses I like to deal…
As I said, my anti-growth example is the local family restaurant, that's hugely successful and profitable, popular, provides steady employment to new family members, and is not trying to take over the world. If it throws off profits, those can be invested in other businesses, not in growing the restaurant.
The question I have is why is Match Group allowed to have a monopoly on online dating? > Match Group is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. I can't even name another dating site.
> We’ve all been Marl at one time or another This, to me, is the key line in this quite good article. It's not that software companies are catering to those other people who are infinitely stupid and deserving of our scorn. It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.
In my experience, making stuff that provides no intrinsic value like video games, only value of meaning, my games have only gotten better by catering to those impulses, which are really not that negative or stupid.
Really, who needs tutorials? Why make stuff that needs a tutorial? You can have complex games without tutorials and FTUEs. You don't need so much UI. It's not about scrolling so much as it is that so many apps obscure, rather than transmit, anything meaningful, through really obnoxious UI.
This argument is the Malcolm Gladwell 140 character tweet complaint not being enough to have a deep conversation. Easy for him to say, he's got his!
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And note that the incentives for the user and the company are at cross purposes with dating apps. Users use dating apps with the intent of not needing dating apps. A dating app that works well destroys it's user base. Their desired user base is people looking for hookups. Is it any wonder the apps have degraded into stuff pretty much only useful for hookups?
If you can't find a long-term relationship on a hookup app that's an attractiveness issue on your part. How's the app going to stop you from going on a second date?
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A somewhat natural conclusion is that mobile killed the thoughtful internet. Ouch.
I find I comment and write much less on mobile than on a computer, because the writing experience on mobile is still very sub-par.
Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is sticky", but I really doubt this is the main reason.
No, the truth is far more scary. The average user doesn't want deep and meaningful content. The average user is Marl. That is why every product, no matter how noble it starts off, eventually degenerate into Marl-fodder. Because that's where the money is. The only way to escape this is to take on a huge pay cut and work at a company that doesn't care about growing profits. Go ahead, you first.
Finally, let's be honest. Marl isn't some obnoxious bozo. You and I are both Marl. That's why we're here in the HN comments. You are Marl, I am Marl, the world is Marl, and it's getting Marlier every day.
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1 is one of the axioms because a binary cutoff is built into the premise.
I may have taken you a little too literally when you wrote that you didn't understand the problem. Perhaps what you're saying is that the conclusion is not repugnant to you and that the conclusion is neither counterintuitive nor ethically problematic. Consequently you believe that it is better for a large number of people to exist in a state barely better than misery than for a smaller number of people to experience…
But I just don't get why people see it as an ethical dilemma – the conclusion is a perfectly sensible outcome of the setup. The conclusion is just a restatement of the premise – a maximization of population over a maximization of happiness. Thats why it seems tautological to me, the math of it is perfunctory and reveals nothing. If you cared about maximizing happiness more than population you would have to modify the setup. The trade-off is built into the premise.