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Make product worse, get money

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Re: Make product worse, get money

#91

Post by camillomiller »

tikhonj wrote: post #16

All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost . The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention . The dynamics are qualitatively different. 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 alo…

I honestly felt like “wtf” reading those examples. Everything listed there as positives would lead exactly to user(patrons) retention. For dating apps it’s the exact opposite.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#92

Post by pil0u »

vkou wrote: post #89
pil0u wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe. 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…

> I don't understand your second point. 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 calor…

That's the whole point: don't eat apples from January to December.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#93

Post by rckt »

> Why doesn’t someone else create a competing app that’s better and thereby steal all their business?

Because this someone will start doing the same thing.

The article feels like a very naive perspective.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#95

Post by Retric »

decimalenough wrote: post #87
andriamanitra wrote: post #67

The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no…

> Customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. 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.

Not everyone needs extra space and for those who do the hourly rate for being in mild discomfort on an airline is huge.

It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#96

Post by p1dda »

andriamanitra wrote: post #67

The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no…

The 'zombie customer base'explains much of everything wrong in today's society packed to the brim by stupid people. If you find yourself in the 98th percentile, prepare to be disappointed by just about everything available in today's society.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#97

Post by gwd »

camillomiller wrote: post #91
tikhonj wrote: post #16

All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost . The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention . The dynamics are qualitatively different. 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 alo…

I honestly felt like “wtf” reading those examples. Everything listed there as positives would lead exactly to user(patrons) retention. For dating apps it’s the exact opposite.

Read the pizza example, and was like "this guy is really clueless". Read the car example (car makers are incentivized to make cars unsafe!), and thought, "This ignorant fool needs to shut up." Car makers are incentivized to make unsafe cars, and before there was such heavy regulation, did so.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#98

Post by yapyap »

> 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.

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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#99

Post by tedggh »

People forget how incredibly difficult is to find someone that meets your expectations while you meet the expectations of that person as well, hit it off and made it through the stream of disappointments that follow to finally settle on a minimum set of values that are non negotiable and accept the fact that the perfect relationship you imagined existed only in your imagination.

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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#100

Post by hrimfaxi »

tedggh wrote: post #99

People forget how incredibly difficult is to find someone that meets your expectations while you meet the expectations of that person as well, hit it off and made it through the stream of disappointments that follow to finally settle on a minimum set of values that are non negotiable and accept the fact that the perfect relationship you imagined existed only in your imagination. Dating apps make this dreadful process…

Did you grow up in a big city as opposed to a small town? Why do you think your experience has been so different from that of your parents?
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