Pizza 1 and 2 are true for when you become a chain and public company. Pizza 3 makes no sense on its face.
Make product worse, get money
21–30 of 176 posts
Re: Make product worse, get money
#22Why don't highschools teach every student these two things? 1. The miracle of markets (supply and demand, "the invisible hand," etc.) 2. The weakness of markets (incomplete information, monopoly, etc.)
Probably the same reason they don't teach how rhetoric works.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#23Cars it's not about safety, they have been made worse in terms of maintenance costs, and that's where a lot of the money is made.
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.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#24> Why is food so expensive at sporting events? ... why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people. Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up t…
>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose.
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.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#25What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza
And the "people actually want worse, cheaper products."
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.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#26This is why I fail to see the value in boycotts at this point. Anything that I boycott will be cancelled out probably 10 fold by people happy to buy from that place still or just required. 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 the…
I changed my own internal concept of a boycott. 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 contribut…
Boycotts don’t work unless they are organized and articulate a concrete demand. I respect boycotts that have an organization behind them and a clear end goal, even if that goal may be far off.
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.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#27Make product worse, get money, go out of business. 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 the…
As for dating apps...
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.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine someone could have leveraged that: 1. Build a safe car when no others are 2. Advertise like crazy “other cars will kill you - ours won’t!” 3. Profit?
The perfect information consumer knows Tik Tok doom scrolling, while pleasurable in the short term, actually hurts them in the long term, so that is, of course, a very unpopular application.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#29The ultimate dating app/service would fill everyone's needs for a short period of time and make them feel good about it, to have them back the next weekend for another go. This means that people traditionally left in the cold would get something out of it, and people who feel like dating lacks meaning would find meaning, etc., but they would get their fill in a date or two, and be back looking again.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#30I think the main problem is getting a market leading position and then enshittification. It takes time for the competition to eat the lunch, and while that is happening users are getting screwed over. And the competition is going to do the exact same since they are burning VC money to grow with undercutting, so any legitimate business with no intention to rugpull cannot compete since they have neither the users nor t…
Then we need a better competitive environment that doesn't rely on VC money and growth hacking