Simple, they’re arbitraging the overhead of switching. The game is not to balance quality and dissatisfaction. It’s to balance quality against dissatisfaction + cost of doing something about it. If you just make the switching cost really really high, you can justify pretty much arbitrary levels of dissatisfaction.
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.