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Make product worse, get money

dynomight.net

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Re: Make product worse, get money

#121

Post by formerly_proven »

pil0u wrote: post #88
vkou wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets. > 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 acce…

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…

> What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.

And you know this "for sure" exactly how?

Re: Make product worse, get money

#122

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

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…

Also, the pizza examples miss out the competition aspect. Pizza restaurants are competing against other pizza places, but also competing against other foods. If someone starts increasing the price and reducing quality of pizzas, then at some point people will start saying "I don't like pizza, let's go for a burger" and eventually a whole generation will grow up thinking that they don't like pizzas as they've only eaten crappy ones.

Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#123

Post by Madmallard »

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…

luckily for the opportunists that make products that capitalize on human psychology for profit, strict monogamy for life with one individual is not natural!

Re: Make product worse, get money

#124

Post by formerly_proven »

p1dda wrote: post #96
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.

I'm certainly not in the 98th percentile yet I dislike buying "durable goods" because it's almost always a disappointment.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#125

Post by ricardobeat »

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

It takes money to do that. And the money is already in the incumbent, and generating more money. The “free market” is an illusion, spherical cows. Capitalism collapses onto it’s own contradictions if left unchecked.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#126

Post by Flimm »

fragmede wrote: post #85
wredcoll wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something people rarely think about in these discussions is that google acquires all of its actual value, its search indexes, by spidering third party sites. Lots of these sites only allow google to scrape them. (This was a thing well before LLMs existed). Also they have a near monopoly on web advertising.

> Also they have a near monopoly on web advertising. Meta/Facebook made only $47 billion in revenue in 2024 vs Google/Alphabet's's $72 billion in advertising revenue for 2024.

Amazon made $56 billion just in advertising revenue in 2024.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#127

Post by [deleted] »

yen223 wrote: post #120
SeanAnderson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

This is a restating of an older idea that fancy restaurants aren't competing against other restaurants, they are competing against movie theatres. Because they are in the date entertainment market

[deleted]

Re: Make product worse, get money

#128

Post by charlieyu1 »

vkou wrote: post #39
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 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.

Overtaxation, less disposable income.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#129

Post by highfrequency »

Sure, every business owner has incentives that point to delivering a worse product (eg cheaper pizza ingredients increase margins). For most businesses there is a strong counteracting incentive to do a great job so the customer returns next week.

The key variable is how long that gap of time is. In the online dating example, if the dating app does a sufficiently great job you will never return. A milder version: if the used car salesman gives you great value, you might be back in 10 years. This creates very weak incentives for good service, so more predatory tactics dominate.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#130

Post by watwut »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #13
Analemma_ wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation, boycotts never work. The concept exists as an opiate and sop make you think you have power as a consumer and that regulations are unnecessary, but it's a mirage.

Tesla sales tell a different story. The people who were all for Tesla are fleeing and when he had his brief moment of MAGA alignment, it didn’t help because most of them didn’t have the money and/or desire to buy an EV. Tesla is having sells issues world wide due to a large part because of Musk. Another recent example how fast Disney turned around and bought Kimmel back after people started cancelling Disney+ subscri…

It was not brief moment. It was him becoming increasingly open about his far right sympathies that existed for a long time.
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