Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Make product worse, get money

dynomight.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 176 posts

Re: Make product worse, get money

#101

Post by fragmede »

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…

> So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market?

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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#102

Post by theobreuerweil »

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.

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#103

Post by ErroneousBosh »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #37
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…

It isn't just restaurants, but also supermarkets. 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.

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.

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?

Re: Make product worse, get money

#104

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> Instead of selling water for $17, why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead?

¿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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#105

Post by ErroneousBosh »

robrtsql wrote: post #11

I don't think comparing the dating app to a pizza restaurant makes the dating app argument fall apart. The difference is that even a satisfied customer will get hungry again, so it's possible to provide a really good experience and still have that customer come back. A dating app is unique (or, at least in a different category) in that the best possible outcome for the user (assuming monogamy) is that the user delete…

> A dating app is unique (or, at least in a different category) in that the best possible outcome for the user (assuming monogamy) is that the user deletes the app and never uses it again.

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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#106

Post by onion2k »

pil0u wrote: post #79
vkou wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. 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.

In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved.

Did people choose to do that, or why they forced to by increased costs in other areas?

Re: Make product worse, get money

#107

Post by vkou »

pil0u wrote: post #92
vkou wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is the whole problem. Your friend's apple orchard is not a replacement for the modern grocery. It's a seasonal supplement that replaces the cheapest and easiest part of a diet - in-season produce.

And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#108

Post by cenamus »

LMSolar wrote: post #80

The article mentions light bulb durability. There was a cartel, the awesomely-named Phoebus Cartel [1] that encouraged its members to reduce the typical operating life of bulbs from 2500 hours to 1000 hours to increase bulb sales. 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 th…

Bulbs with a shorter lifetime are also a lot more efficient, because they run hotter.

That's why that one bulb that's been burning for a 100 years in a firestation somewhere is only just glowing.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#109

Post by nirui »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #32
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…

> Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps. is a crazy remark, but I think you're right. We're living in weird time!

It's not really that weird.

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.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#110

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #103
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just restaurants, but also supermarkets. 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.

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. 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 w…

Not only that but there is no real evidence that organic food is better for you.

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.

Post reply on HN