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 deletes the app and never uses it again.
Make product worse, get money
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Re: Make product worse, get money
#12I 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 the cheapest prices.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#13This 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…
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+ subscriptions left and right.
Disney had to ignore pressure from Trump and the FCC. It definitely wasn’t a principled stand - they were one of the ones who bribed Trump personally.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#14Why 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.)
Re: Make product worse, get money
#15What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza
Re: Make product worse, get money
#16All 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 along and take the whole market? It's partly because restaurants aren't just in the business of selling (healthy) food: it's also about convenience and satisfaction and experience. More importantly, that just doesn't fit with how people largely make day-to-day decisions.
The same thing happens with dating apps. People get drawn in for all sorts of reasons that don't necessarily map to getting married, even if finding a long-term relationship is explicitly their goal. Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps.
The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
Re: Make product worse, get money
#17> 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 to 50% of the revenue, and concessionaires, who employ the servers and supply the actual food.
Venue operators and sports teams don't like the liability and cost exposures of serving food, so they farm it to a third party. And rather than carve that up into multiple competing vendors, most modern large venues hand it to a single hospitality company, who uses scale to lower costs and offer a lower share of revenue in exchange for exclusivity over all venue food service. Without competition, they can jack the price up.
Worth noting two things on the "why not raise ticket prices" angle: ticketing is moving in the same outsourced direction as concessions, and ticket prices are going up anyway (up >100% since 1999[1]).
> Across pro sports, Matheson says, teams are making the determination that "they can make more money selling fewer, more expensive tickets rather than lots of cheap seats."
Most venues have given up having their own box offices and farm that out to StubHub, TicketMaster, etc. Same motivations, same result: the venue spends less by contracting out ticketing, the team gets a bigger cut of the revenue, and the ticket vendors get exclusive control not only over selling the tickets but reselling them, with dark patterns like dynamic pricing and fees piled onto the buyer at every part of every transaction.
Both wipe out all competition on both quality and price. Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. Apply that pattern to existing fanbases grown over generations during eras of better prices or quality and you get a captive audience who complains constantly but never quits spending, so there's no pressure to lower prices or improve quality.
1: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...
Re: Make product worse, get money
#18Make 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 their core audience, and ultimately lost their users to the next big thing?
It seems like something is missing in this fellows theory, and the answer is fair competition. Pizzaria's don't sell cardboard discs for $300 precisely because they become the worst pizza in town long before reaching that point. Restaurants that stay in business long-term are forced to limit their impulse to seek greater profits. They must maintain a level of quality that lets them remain competitive. That's a hard limit imposed by the market. Many choose to dance around on the boundaries of this limit. It's profitable, but risky. If you go too far and consumers abandon you, you can't just improve your product a little and expect them to flock back.
This is why big tech companies love to buy out, lobby against, and otherwise disrupt or obliterate their competitors. Competition is what places limits on profit-seeking enshitification. If you can establish a monopoly then you can enshittify to your heart's content. e.g. Google.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#19This 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…
Yep. Me not buying from Amazon isn't going to make a dent in their bottom line, but it'll make a significant dent in my happiness.
Re: Make product worse, get money
#20I 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…
It's like any other "problem solver service". There's always an incentive to farm repeat business.