[HN Gopher] Make product worse, get money
___________________________________________________________________
Make product worse, get money
Author : zdw
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-11-21 15:23 UTC (1 days ago)
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| chankstein38 wrote:
| This 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 there are plenty of people who
| are happy to do it still.
|
| So you end up left with a rock and a hard place. Do I not travel?
| Do I not go buy that thing? Do I not do these things that would
| possibly add happiness to my life to fight price gouging?
| Especially when you know that for every 1 of you there are 6
| other people happy to pay the price or buy the thing.
|
| It feels like a lot of these big companies are just too big to
| fail at this point and abuse us for it.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| Tesla is suffering not so much a boycott as a brand
| failure. The car is sold as a status symbol among a certain
| group, and they tanked that status. It wasn't a boycott so
| much as an own goal.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| People are explicitly not buying Tesla because of Musk
| and his politics. What do you call that if not a boycott?
| bigyabai wrote:
| There is no $25,000 Tesla - most of those the
| conscientious objectors weren't even in Tesla's target
| audience anyways. The "gotcha" of all luxury tech is that
| it's only a branding distinction.
|
| Which puts Tesla in a similar spot to the Apple
| situation, where the majority of customers are the least-
| likely to demand value, quality or moral consistency from
| their OEM. Your CEO can embarrass himself in interviews,
| ship nonsense thousand-dollar novelty products and kiss
| ass to authoritarians, but people who consistently buy a
| certain product won't abandon their brand loyalty. In
| fact, both Apple and Tesla seem to benefit from the
| influx of liberal and conservative customers who feel
| "represented" by superficial gestures like interviews,
| novelty products and asskissing.
|
| It feels safe to assume that both Apple and Tesla will
| persist long into the future, eager to amend their
| horrible misgivings coerced under authoritarianism.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| People in California were definitely Teslas target
| audience. The difference is there are plenty of cars that
| are just as good as Teslas. What are people in the US
| going to do that don't want iPhones? Buy crappy ad
| infested Android devices?
|
| Google is one of the companies that bribed Trump to leave
| him alone to "settle a lawsuits
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I would certainly love to see Tesla implode and I'm
| crossing my fingers that it happens, but I think it's too
| early to tell whether the outrage about Musk will amount to
| anything. Their sales were down in Q1 and Q2 this year but
| recovered in Q3. That could be a dead cat bounce because
| the EV tax credits were expiring, or it could be at the
| outrage did all the damage it was going to do and is over
| now. We won't know which for a little while.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| There is absolutely no reason to buy a Tesla over
| basically every other EV in 2025 unless full self driving
| ever becomes more reliable.
|
| I've driven 4-5 different EVs over the past couple of
| years [1] including Tesla's. They aren't any better and
| in fact the infotainment system is worse than even low
| end cars with CarPlay support.
|
| Sales are tanking worse overseas and being taken over by
| cheaper cars based on Chinese tech. It's very much a dead
| cat bounce.
| watwut wrote:
| It was not brief moment. It was him becoming increasingly
| open about his far right sympathies that existed for a long
| time.
| etchalon wrote:
| 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
| contribute to something.
|
| So boycott's aren't about me changing a company's policies,
| they're about me allocating my resources towards the things I
| want to see in the world.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Boycotts don't work unless they are organized and articulate
| a concrete demand. I respect boycotts that have an
| organization behind them and a clear end goal, even if that
| goal may be far off.
|
| When organizers ask for a boycott that may take years, their
| goal should be worthy to justify the consumer pain. BDS is a
| good example, it will take a while but stopping the apartheid
| Israeli regime is good.
|
| https://bdsmovement.net/
|
| A less intensive campaign is the Starbucks Union's no
| contract no coffee pledge, which presumably will last only
| weeks to months.
|
| https://www.nocontractnocoffee.org/
| projektfu wrote:
| The average "boycott" is not even organized, has no particular
| goal, and is just meant to make the boycotter feel morally
| superior. I bet Starbucks execs giggle every time they hear
| about the next boycott. The people calling for the boycott
| probably haven't been in a Starbucks in 15 years, and they
| don't have any intention of becoming regular customers if they
| do.
|
| Thinking of boycotts that have worked in the past, they
| generally had specific demands and a plan to resume normal
| consumption when those demands were met. The Gallo wine boycott
| in the 70s was successful. The workers had a clear case, simple
| demands, a desire to negotiate, and a call to boycott one
| specific winery until they came to the table. When they did,
| the boycott was lifted and the majority of boycotters went back
| to consuming the wine.
|
| On the other hand, if I decided to boycott Gallo wine, they
| wouldn't notice, because I don't think I've bought a bottle of
| Gallo in my life, and I haven't given a good reason to do it
| for other people to join me.
| projektfu wrote:
| Just a note that my "Starbucks boycott" thing refers to the
| people over the years who have boycotted Starbucks for random
| greivances, not the organized union boycott, that might have
| some success.
| catigula wrote:
| >Cars: "The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is
| expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars."
|
| It took a lot of wrangling to get them to be safe. They were
| coffins on wheels for decades.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I imagine someone could have leveraged that: 1. Build a safe
| car when no others are 2. Advertise like crazy "other cars will
| kill you - ours won't!" 3. Profit?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Wasn't that Volvo's whole thing? They invented the 3-point
| seatbelt and were always positioned as the safest car option
| when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
| catigula wrote:
| The perfect information consumer knows Tik Tok doom
| scrolling, while pleasurable in the short term, actually
| hurts them in the long term, so that is, of course, a very
| unpopular application.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I have no idea what you're talking about here.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think they are making a point about how very few, if
| any, consumers have "perfect information". I'm _guessing_
| they are trying to say that even if you have a better
| product it doesn't matter but I'm not 100% sure and I'm
| not completely sure on how that fits in with your
| original comment. Maybe saying that even if you optimize
| for safety that people won't take that into account?
|
| Their comment itself is making a sarcastic statement
| about how few consumers there are with "perfect
| information" given TikTok's user-base (the same could be
| said for Temu or even Amazon). To be fair, I agree with
| their statement by itself, I'm having more trouble
| fitting its message into this thread.
| catigula wrote:
| I constructed a direct falsification of the implicit
| premise, that capital allocation inherently produces good
| outcomes for individuals by competing well in the market.
| Whether or not you agree with my "perfect information"
| assertion is beside the point, it's more so the trivial
| observation that really bad things sell really well.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I guess what's happening here is that I'm too dumb to
| understand basically anything you write :( sorry.
| hamdingers wrote:
| And yet, car companies are still incentivized to make unsafe
| cars, at least in the US.
|
| Bigger vehicles are more profitable, easier to advertise (for
| features and/or as a status symbol), suffer less emissions
| regulation. They also are more likely to kill pedestrians or
| occupants of other cars, and do significantly more damage to
| anything else they hit.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They aren't even that safe for the occupants, they are much
| more likely to turn over in an accident.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| Also, in their argument "unsafe" could be replaced with
| "environment polluting", and it would be just as true
| Imnimo wrote:
| >Why doesn't someone else create a competing app that's better
| and thereby steal all their business?
|
| How do I know if the competing app is actually better? I mean,
| this was the advertising angle for eHarmony about a decade ago -
| that it was much better than competitors at actually turning
| matches into marriages. But this claim was found to be
| misleading, and they were advised to stop using it.
|
| Could a potential customer really get to the bottom of which site
| is the best at finding a real match? It's not like a pizza
| restaurant where I can easily just a bunch until I find my
| favorite and then keep buying it. Dating apps are like a multi-
| armed bandit problem, but you stop pulling arms once you get one
| success. So your only direct feedback is failed matches.
| 10000truths wrote:
| This is addressed in the "information asymmetry" section of the
| article.
| robrtsql wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's like any other "problem solver service". There's always an
| incentive to farm repeat business.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| More fundamentally--if a good product keeps a customer coming
| back for more there's an incentive to provide a good product.
| If a happy customer doesn't have any reason to come back
| there's no value in creating a happy customer.
|
| Note that "come back" needs to be interpreted broadly. For
| example, a Osprey backpack--lifetime warranty against most
| anything, doesn't look like there's any space for repeat
| customers. But--those of us who would buy something like that
| very well might want different sizes. And I would certainly
| recommend them to others who were in the market for a serious
| backpack. (And, yes, they do honor the warranty--had a buckle
| snap, I sent them pictures, they offered to repair it, or ship
| me the part and I do it myself. Took the latter option, a few
| days later I had a strap and buckle that I threaded through my
| pack, good as new other than the color didn't match.)
| pkaeding wrote:
| But similarly to you recommending the Osprey backpack to your
| friends because you are a happy customer, happy/successful
| customers of a dating site will spread the word.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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.
| Madmallard wrote:
| luckily for the opportunists that make products that capitalize
| on human psychology for profit, strict monogamy for life with
| one individual is not natural!
| ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote:
| I 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Then we need a better competitive environment that doesn't rely
| on VC money and growth hacking
| encroach wrote:
| Why 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.)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Probably the same reason they don't teach how rhetoric works.
| analog31 wrote:
| The high school that my kids attended did.
| fwip wrote:
| Mine did, because NY requires you to take an economics course.
| byronic wrote:
| What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are
| incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza
| thewebguyd wrote:
| And the "people actually want worse, cheaper products."
|
| iPhone sales numbers, as an example, say otherwise. If it was
| universally true that people just want cheap crap, everyone
| would rush to get whatever $200 budget motorola android the
| carrier is hawking for "free."
|
| I could seen an argument that people want cheaper products, but
| certainly not worse. Airlines aren't the best example because
| margins are pretty low, but food concessions? Insane markup,
| consumer should expect them to just eat the cost of making a
| better product for cheaper, they certainly have the margin to
| do so.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's a separate Veblen positioning, and Apple own it.
|
| Same with personal matchmakers for high net worth
| individuals. They charge tens, even hundreds of thousands of
| dollars.
|
| They're not necessarily any better at match making. But the
| users are paying a lot of money to reassure themselves of
| their superior status. And to filter out some of the more
| obvious riffraff.
|
| In fact, a huge driver of practical pricing is narcissism.
| You're either selling it as a service ("luxury branding") or
| using it as lever to cynically extract money from those you
| consider inferiors. (Most corporates.)
|
| Or both.
|
| "More for less" and enshittification are both driven by
| narcissistic greed and devaluation of customers.
|
| Some businesses start out like this. Some start out with good
| intentions. But generally once you get past a certain size
| many businesses become a competitive sociopath farm, with
| more and more sociopathy the higher you go.
|
| Most internal and external interactions becomes an expression
| of dysfunctional values where the object of the exercise is
| to assert superior status and power and to _deny_ quality
| service.
| tikhonj wrote:
| 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 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!
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| > 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!
| nirui wrote:
| 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.
| lolc wrote:
| I read the comment about Tinder and Tiktok being in
| competition differently: To me they said that both Tinder
| and Tiktok are in competition over eyeballs.
|
| Meaning for example that if Tinder shows me profiles I find
| less attractive, I'm more likely to churn to Tiktok. So
| Tinder will show me profiles of people I have no hope of
| meeting, to keep me engaged nonetheless.
| yen223 wrote:
| 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
| heymijo wrote:
| Yep, Peter Drucker wrote about this all the way back in 1964.
|
| > _The competition is therefore all the other activities that
| compete for the rapidly growing "discretionary time" of a
| population_
|
| His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with
| lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an
| abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
| pil0u wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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 accessible to every budget....
|
| You forgot the "For the brief period of time their
| produce is in season."
|
| Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a
| lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local
| grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to
| keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a
| _lot_.
|
| I am also pretty confident that those small, local,
| organic producers aren't the source of most of their
| customers' caloric demands.
| pil0u wrote:
| 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 a community of farmers that grow different things
| that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept
| eating exotic food only very occasionally.
|
| Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. 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.
|
| Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People
| already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too
| much sugar, too many calories.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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 calories than apples
| today
|
| I have a very hard time believing that the average apple
| from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
| pil0u wrote:
| That's the whole point: don't eat apples from January to
| December.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Apples are an exception to the rule as they can be stored
| for a long time (up to a year for some varieties) under
| the correct conditions.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > 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?
| floren wrote:
| The amazing 1000 calorie apple
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People
| already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too
| much sugar, too many calories.
|
| Carbohydrates are way cheaper, but the distribution of
| nutrients you can get for any price has not gotten
| cheaper proportionally. Then you factor in choices, like
| paying rent vs eating healthier, etc etc.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at
| least an order of magnitude more calories than apples
| today.
|
| At least an _order of magnitude_ more calories? Just to
| be on the same page, you 're saying that apples in the
| 50s had at least 10x as much calories as they do today?
| :DD
|
| You realize an apple is ~10-12% sugar by weight, right?
| The rest is just water and fibre. So an apple with an
| order of magnitude more calories would mean a solid block
| of sugar. (alternatively, an apple that's 10x the size,
| but we have photos of 50s apples, and they were roughly
| the same size as today)
| onion2k wrote:
| _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?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat
| healthy, but probably a small majority has.
|
| I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping
| trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes,
| biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared
| meals, etc.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| i'm always a little surprised by how low my cart total is
| when i just go into the store to refresh a few produce
| items. that said, eating healthy certainly hasn't gotten
| any cheaper. i've paid $1+ for a single onion which feels
| absurd
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There are very few areas where it's physically possible
| to live like that.
|
| And even in those areas many staples will be industrially
| farmed and imported from other countries, or at least
| shipped from far away within the same country.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Overtaxation, less disposable income.
| bikelang wrote:
| To push back on this idea a bit - my family buys a share
| from a CSA (community supported agriculture). Our CSA is a
| local organic farm operating on about 4 acres of land. They
| grow enough food for ~30 CSA shares and sell at farmers
| markets as well as to local restaurants. For $700 we get
| enough fresh produce to cover about 2/3rds of our groceries
| (for 2 adults) for a 20 week period. We spend a lot more
| than 35/week at Whole Foods typically! And this is in a
| relatively HCOL part of Colorado - which isn't known for
| its easy growing climate.
|
| All that is to say - I'm not sure I agree that supermarkets
| are the cheapest outcome for food. Locally grown food can
| be substantially cheaper. What we give up is the year long
| availability for any kind of produce we could dream of.
| Instead we eat seasonally and we eat what is available. It
| requires a shift in cooking practice from "I want to make X
| - I am going to go buy A,B,C ingredients" to "I have A,B,C
| - what can I make with this?".
|
| Maybe that lack of choice is an unacceptable trade off for
| some - for us we find it fun. It's well worth cheaper,
| better tasting (really cannot understate this part), and
| substantially longer lasting produce. It's actually crazy
| how long the produce we get from the farm lasts - we have
| basically zero spoilage now.
|
| I just wish we could get food like this year round - and I
| am considering buying a second share next year entirely to
| can it. So maybe it will be possible!
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Isn't yield relative? Take a bell pepper for instance,
| perhaps one grown in x soil another in y, the nutrient
| contents will vary even if one is clonal.
|
| There have been some rumblings about the nutrient
| qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about
| European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of
| qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated,
| indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0].
| There's a researcher that took historical records of
| micronutrient measures and compared them against modern
| cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents.
|
| I think it begs several questions about modern practices
| in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too
| often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which
| is associated with micronutrient deficiencies.
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| strken wrote:
| I think the point was that, yeah, auto manufacturers are
| incentivised to make unsafe cars...but in real life, they
| make safe(ish) ones. Pizza restaurants are incentivised to
| use the cheapest ingredients possible...but in real life,
| they have stopped somewhere above the absolute lowest
| quality. How can this be?
|
| Pointing out _one_ incentive is not a complete argument
| without an understanding of the broader dynamics. Auto
| manufacturers are incentivised much more strongly and in
| the opposite direction to make safe(ish) cars. Pizza
| restaurants are incentivised _not_ to make pizza from
| reconstituted sawdust and rancid milk fat, for multiple
| reasons.
|
| Then, goes the argument, if we are willing to regulate cars
| and abandon truly bad pizza restaurants, how come we put up
| with dating apps instead of e.g. deleting them and offering
| a $10k bounty to matchmakers, payable on our one year
| wedding anniversary? Why don't we ditch them? There must be
| more than just one incentive at play.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Auto makers make safe(ish) cars because they are legally
| required to.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Exactly... unsafe at any speed was written for a reason.
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| mettamage wrote:
| > 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!
|
| Really true. Most of dating seems to be dominated by that
| people want to be comfortable and dating is an inherently
| uncomfortable experience at times and many people seem to have
| a hard time with it.
|
| I'm writing this as someone that made the conscious decision to
| face every form of uncomfortableness in dating if I noticed it
| was needed. Some people look at me bewildered with how I met my
| wife. They found what I did was way too much effort. But I am
| thinking to myself: you're going to spend the most time with
| them! You better be damn sure that you're long-term compatible.
|
| Yet, enough people seem to act the whole process is more like
| buying something from your local Chipotle/<name your favorite
| establishment> where comfort is king.
| perfmode wrote:
| How did you meet your wife?
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Can you expand on what types of uncomfortableness you faced
| and what you mean by effort (to the point of bewildering
| people)? Curious what worked for you. Not sure if you just
| mean you forced yourself to go on a million dates and were
| super selective.
| nubg wrote:
| Super interesting, please share more details! :-)
| starkparker wrote:
| > 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...
| ianferrel wrote:
| >Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only
| party who can't choose.
|
| But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to
| those events and venues and do other things with their time.
|
| And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and
| realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for
| higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I
| might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because
| it _feels bad_ to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have
| to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than
| my parents took me to for similar reasons.
| immibis wrote:
| This is the same pro sports industry that already stops you
| watching matches on TV once a week, spreads them over several
| different streaming platforms so you pay several times, and
| is currently trying to make it so you can't watch matches on
| devices that can sideload apps. Apparently, their revenue has
| only been going up, even with all these shitty things already
| happening...
| ianferrel wrote:
| Sure, it is going up. For now.
|
| And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But
| not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might
| have watched the game some night will find it too much of a
| hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough
| times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as
| much about the team, or the sport, and so on.
|
| What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For
| some people and some things, the short-term demand is very
| inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the
| people making these decisions have better models of that
| than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue
| with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't
| care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or
| decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams
| approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I
| probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll
| probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're
| completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves,
| because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.
|
| My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern
| California team also completely abandoned an interest in
| sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he
| did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to
| put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My
| other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the
| rubbish.
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| I would add that there is psychology at play as well. Someone
| might scoff at a $200 ticket, thinking it's ridiculous to pay
| that much, even if you could then eat at the venue for $20.
|
| But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and
| then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The
| smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are
| compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Definitely. There's almost always a strong incentive to move
| charges as far back into the flow as possible. Knock $5 off
| your ISP package price, then hit them with a $5
| "infrastructure fee" at the credit card screen. For
| consumers, just because you picked a higher upfront price for
| a service doesn't mean you'll you won't be nickle-and-dimed
| later in addition, so it is not trivial to avoid. I guess you
| can view the "free with ads" model as the most popular
| implementation: get people in the door and then charge them
| with their time at crazy rates.
| beloch wrote:
| Make 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.
| beloch wrote:
| As for dating apps...
|
| The great thing about the dating app biz is that the
| competition is universally awful at providing good matches that
| lead to long term relationships. The same goes for pro match-
| makers, speed-dating events, etc.. It's a _hard_ problem to
| predict what makes two people click together, even if you get
| them to meet face to face.
|
| These companies aren't enshittifying their products to make
| money. They were just never good to begin with. Dating success
| still boils down to the shotgun approach. So, it becomes a
| question about who can fool the most users with false claims
| and reach the critical mass required to load buckshot in
| everybody's blunderbusses.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No. The problem is that catering to the hookup market is more
| profitable. Any company that actually makes a good dating app
| gets bought out because their data is worth more than they
| are. Look at the market, it's actually almost a monopoly last
| I knew.
| xigoi wrote:
| From what I've heard, OkCupid's algorithms used to be really
| good, then they deliberately made them worse when acquired by
| Match Group.
| beeflet wrote:
| Is google really a monopoly? You can just use another search
| engine or email provider.
|
| I would say it has a good moat in the minds of consumers, but
| not a good moat in reality.
| wredcoll wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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.
| Flimm wrote:
| Amazon made $56 billion just in advertising revenue in
| 2024.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Pizza 1 and 2 are true for when you become a chain and public
| company. Pizza 3 makes no sense on its face.
| libertine wrote:
| Cars it's not about safety, they have been made worse in terms of
| maintenance costs, and that's where a lot of the money is made.
|
| You need OEM parts, or you can't simply buy a piece that broke,
| but you need a whole module.
|
| The trend seems to be locking crap with software.
|
| So in a way, while they improved greatly in terms of safety,
| maintenance and parts it's completely absurd.
| projektfu wrote:
| The ultimate dating app/service would fill everyone's needs for a
| short period of time and make them feel good about it, to have
| them back the next weekend for another go. This means that people
| traditionally left in the cold would get something out of it, and
| people who feel like dating lacks meaning would find meaning,
| etc., but they would get their fill in a date or two, and be back
| looking again.
| zbentley wrote:
| You just described OnlyFans.
| NebulaStorm456 wrote:
| The principal-agent problem is a conflict of interest that occurs
| when an agent (e.g., an employee) acts on behalf of a principal
| (e.g., an owner) but pursues their own goals instead of the
| principal's. This arises from an information asymmetry, where the
| agent knows more about their actions and their motivations than
| the principal, and it can lead to agents not acting in the best
| interest of the principal, even at a cost to the principal.
| kerblang wrote:
| > it's why Subway sandwiches are so soggy
|
| I have NEVER had any such problem. Subway puts what you want on
| the sandwich. You tell them directly. You watch them make it. If
| you ask for soggy things on your sandwich, it will be soggy.
|
| I do not ask for soggy things on my sandwich. That is why I have
| never eaten a soggy subway sandwich, EVER.
|
| I did have a fairly loud argument with one - only one - of their
| sandwich artists ONCE, who refused to microwave the bacon (add
| bacon to any sandwich for $0.50) before putting it on sandwich,
| per STANDARD SUBWAY PRACTICE. I finally walked out on the dirty
| bastard, but I did not file a formal complaint with Subway mgmt.
| I am a busy person. Maybe next time. Perhaps the sandwich
| would've also been soggy, had I agreed to uncooked bacon, which I
| will NEVER do, but I don't know why that would make it soggier.
|
| But I digress: Soggy sandwiches have specific reasons. Wanting a
| cheaper sandwich is not one of them. Bacon will make your
| sandwich slightly crispier, if that helps. It also tastes
| EXCELLENT.
|
| EDIT: To be clear, it is important to be SPECIFIC about how much
| of something you want. The average sandwich artist has a tendency
| to dump the contents of an entire bottle of a given condiment on
| your sandwich, which I admit, could cause sogginess. This is
| because they think they are doing you a favor. I often use bold &
| dramatic hand gestures while bent over slightly, face pressed
| against the glass enclosure of the sandwich-making zone. "STOP!
| RIGHT THERE!" I will yell, several times, if necessary. Then
| again, I assume everyone knows this. Or else now you do.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The average sandwich artist has a tendency to dump the
| contents of an entire bottle of a given condiment on your
| sandwich, which I admit, could cause sogginess. This is because
| they think they are doing you a favor. I often use bold &
| dramatic hand gestures while bent over slightly, face pressed
| against the glass enclosure of the sandwich-making zone. "STOP!
| RIGHT THERE!" I will yell, several times, if necessary. Then
| again, I assume everyone knows this. Or else now you do.
|
| This is mediated by culture and/or region and/or personal
| taste. I generally find that they default to fairly reasonable
| amounts and that their notion of "a little" or "a lot" of a
| sauce etc. matches mine well enough that I can make it work.
| The much bigger communication problem is getting them to stop
| assuming you want lettuce and tomato without being asked.
|
| IMX, soggy sandwiches happen mainly because either the sauce
| wasn't applied _neatly_ , or because (as you say) there are
| soggy things on it (the lettuce often has water on it, and
| condiment sauces add up, not to mention the marinara on
| pizza/meatball type subs).
| floren wrote:
| > I often use bold & dramatic hand gestures while bent over
| slightly, face pressed against the glass enclosure of the
| sandwich-making zone. "STOP! RIGHT THERE!" I will yell, several
| times, if necessary.
|
| God, Poe's law really gets me sometimes.
| amadeoeoeo wrote:
| There are dozens of interesting "conflicting interests" cases in
| business and life.
|
| But...Pizza?
| beefnugs wrote:
| This blog post is quite bad on all of its points.
|
| More specifically to dating apps: There is a huge market
| imbalance on it, there are only a few women to pair off to
| whomever they prefer... So they can serve that market just
| fine, then the rest of the men are the ones to jerk around a
| bit: trick them with bots, tell them if they pay they will move
| up the ranks and have a better chance, come up with "studies"
| that show all they have to do is make better pictures and keep
| paying and trying.
|
| How immoral is it really to satisfy a percentage of users...
| and then abuse the rest? Its not like you can properly give
| them what they are looking for anyway. I think its quite
| immoral but thats why I am not a successful businessman.
|
| The pizza and other comparisons are quite dumb and not the same
| thing: A market that requires many participants to benefit a
| few, only some can be helped so do your best with those, then
| figure out how to abuse some/many for profits. If they don't
| figure out how it really works, well, thats a shame that they
| keep participating.
| tecleandor wrote:
| >Why doesn't someone else create a competing app that's better
| and thereby steal all their business?
|
| Oh, they do. But Match Groups buys it and either:
|
| a) they get to cover certain niche of the market they weren't
| monetizing (Indiamatch, Chispa, Ldsplanet...)
|
| b) they leave it to die so people move to other apps (Like
| OKCupid, the only app I know that has less features with every
| update)
|
| Just check their brands [0]: Match, Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid,
| Plenty of fish, Our time, The League...
|
| -- 0:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_owned
| snozolli wrote:
| Regarding dating apps, anyone participating should look up the
| old OKCupid blog posts. The guys who launched OKCupid were data
| nerds and they published some scathing conclusions. Oddly enough,
| those posts were taken down right after Match.com bought them.
|
| I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products
| and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for
| example, makes pianos and motorcycles. I believe that American
| companies hyper-focus on particular markets and try to squeeze
| every penny that they can out of them. Combined with the short-
| sightedness of quarterly targets and a lack of competition
| through things like regulatory capture, there's less incentive to
| create great products.
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| Interesting. Where can these old blog posts be found?
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| Very interesting read. One possible explanation that the article
| completely leaves out, but instantly jumped to my mind is a
| monopoly(-like).
| d13z wrote:
| Short term profit companies usually try to get away with giving
| you the less they can while charging you as much as possible.
|
| There are still mid size company that try to make a good product
| for a fair price, but I have the gut feeling that any company
| that have a board of shareholders will always default to this
| behaviour.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _So why don't airlines rip out a row of seats, raise prices by
| 3% and enjoy the reduced costs for fuel and customer service? The
| only answer I can see is that people, on average, aren't actually
| willing to pay 3% more for 2.5 cm more legroom. We want a worse
| but cheaper product, and so that's what we get._
|
| Who is "we"?
|
| When was the public vote where a democratic majority of all
| airline customers rejected the idea? I must have missed the memo.
|
| How much is that 3% in dollars?
|
| Who came up with the initial seat number in the first place that
| the airline now "has to compensate" by raising prices?
|
| The airline would reduce both revenue and costs, but somehow the
| raised prices only factor in the lost revenue and get to ignore
| the reduced costs. That's not even a question for the author?
| jacknews wrote:
| The reasons given are all contributing factors, but the central
| issue is this:
|
| Business, particularly under capitalism (where ownership is
| detached from operation) is about making a profit, not making
| great products or services
|
| So price discrimination, corner-cutting, price gauging, vendor
| lock-in, planned-obsolescence, monopoly power, are all tools to
| increase profits.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| > capitalism (where ownership is detached from operation)
|
| That is a really eloquent way to phrase one of my main gripes
| with capitalist societies. Thanks, I will be stealing it.
| d13z wrote:
| Could this be the moment to start using ultra-capitalism?
| andriamanitra wrote:
| 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 one has time to do
| such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly
| difficult to find objective information about any commercial
| product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets
| drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews,
| astroturfing, and brand tribalism.
|
| Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence
| are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than
| quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash
| people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a
| product enough for them to notice - especially if the product
| already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand
| out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where
| _money is valued over value_ , and making better products is
| often a terrible business strategy.
| zahlman wrote:
| This is an example of the "information asymmetry" point.
| decimalenough wrote:
| > _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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| theobreuerweil wrote:
| 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.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Or maybe consumers do not want to (because it doesn't make
| economic sense for them, or because they don't want to spend
| every second of their free time optimizing) spend a
| significant amount of their time doing this kind of research
| before every purchase decision? I have never understood this
| argument that as long as information is technically available
| companies should be absolved of meeting some minimum level of
| baseline quality. You're also describing an industry that's
| unusually _transparent_ (in part because there are not that
| many models of planes); for a lot of online goods there is
| absolutely no reasonable way you can know what a particular
| brand will be like before you buy.
| p1dda wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I'm certainly not in the 98th percentile yet I dislike buying
| "durable goods" because it's almost always a disappointment.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| >Cars: "The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is
| expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars." This
| analogy does not feel equivalent. The equivalent analogy here
| would be that automakers want to sell more cars so they make them
| as cheap as possible with intent to make them not last long.
| Which is actually somewhat accurate.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| Unfortunately it simply is true. The "same car" in another
| country is made cheaper. There are a variety of ways to do it
| and often it's justified as better than the alternative. For
| instance in India the goal is getting people off of motorcycles
| as that is a huge cause of driving deaths. To do that they
| remove various airbag systems, auto braking systems, and etc.
| which are not required in India... but are required in America
| or the EU.
|
| Even between the EU and America there are differences in
| regulation with the EU often getting the stronger regulation
| first.
|
| This video is my source for all of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI-vFq39-I
|
| I've done my best to remember most of it.
| floren wrote:
| > For instance in India the goal is getting people off of
| motorcycles as that is a huge cause of driving deaths
|
| "Your traffic laws or lack thereof are so insane that riding
| a motorcycle is basically a death sentence."
|
| "Ok, we'll get people off motorcycles then!"
|
| To abuse a meme, men will do literally anything to avoid
| obeying stop lights
| econ wrote:
| People (nowadays?) have no pride in what they do. Greed is
| praised not frowned upon. Money hungry maniacs without an ounce
| of even the most basic decency are idolized. It's pretty wild
| that people are also surprised by the outcome.
|
| People use to believe they would burn in hell for all eternity,
| now even their prayers are selfish.
|
| LOL
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| 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.
| jackyinger wrote:
| Pizza does not have network effects like social media. Social
| media only works well if the network scale is huge. Pizza works
| well for me if it tastes good, doesn't matter how many and who
| the other people are eating it. But if I sign up for a dating app
| with only a handful of other people odds will be slim and odd.
| jongjong wrote:
| Good article. I think the combination of information asymmetries
| and the fact that a lot of people have bad taste both play a
| large part. If you produce something of a quality which is above
| your target customers' perceptual capabilities, then you will
| lose because your costs will be too high relative to your
| competition.
|
| This also creates a perverse incentive to use the media to
| condition your customers to have bad taste.
| anovikov wrote:
| Agree with this line of thinking, however with dating sites, i
| just don't agree. They are working as designed because their
| paying users are men who want to hook up, competing for a very
| small number of very picky women just because fewer women want to
| hook up and those who do, can usually do it without using apps.
| It's just simply a market asymmetry of supply and demand. And
| Tinder is explicitly not about relationships.
| LMSolar wrote:
| 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 this
| under-thought blog product.
|
| Seriously, not mentioning useful regulation and standards as a
| countermeasure to the negative trends the author describes seems
| like willful blindness.
|
| [1] Phoebus Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
| cenamus wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Heat is literally inefficient by definition - it's spent
| energy which hasn't been converted to visible light.
| hmry wrote:
| And hotter light bulbs produce proportionally more visible
| light (higher luminous efficacy) than cooler ones.
|
| An electric heater at 100C is an incandescent light source
| with 0% luminous efficacy :)
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Hotter _incandescent_ bulbs (e.g. tungsten wire, halogen,
| etc.) produce more light than cooler ones, but the heat
| is still wasted. That's why such bulbs are going away.
|
| With non-blackbody bulbs (e.g. florescent, LED, etc.) the
| light is produced directly. Any extra heat is still
| wasted, but we can (and do) engineer to reduce it, thus
| making the bulbs far more efficient.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| The article completely misses the point about the dating apps. It
| is not that the inferior product wins, but that if your product
| is so good that people only need one in their lifetime, you will
| quickly reach the limit on your sales. Planned obsolescence is a
| well-documented phenomenon in many fields.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Most people just have a very limited economic understanding. They
| can't comprehend anything more complicated than "product sucks,
| merchant is evil."
|
| Psychologically, they also never admit they're at fault
| themselves.
|
| People love swiping, but hate being swiped upon. Renters love
| complaining about prices they are willing to pay - and so on. How
| many consumers factor in customer support when choosing a
| carrier? None. They choose on price and then complain when the
| support sucks.
| rckt wrote:
| > 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Making products worse and getting more money only works if you
| don't have competition or the competition does the same.
|
| The moment someone does things better, he can be ahead of the
| competition.
| yapyap wrote:
| > 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.
| tedggh wrote:
| 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.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| 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?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Instead of selling water for $17, why don't venues sell water
| for $2 and raise ticket prices instead?_
|
| _?Por que 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > 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.
| gverrilla wrote:
| even when checked it collapses onto it's own contradictions
| highfrequency wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| Tiny low calories pizza is non existent problem in my world. They
| are almost twice as big as I need and not exactly a low calories
| food.
|
| I like pizza, but the usual is that you are getting 2 meals with
| one pizza.
| rererereferred wrote:
| Same reason why Duolingo is bad for learning languages, or
| progress in games with microtransactions is so slow. Better
| alternatives exist but they require more investment from the
| user, be it money or time.
| cs702 wrote:
| The OP's author is at the beginning of the path towards
| understanding that Nash Equilibria are _everywhere_ in the
| economy. I say this because the OP doesn 't realize that's what
| he's talking about: Nash Equilibria.
|
| A company's strategy, tactics, and individual decisions are
| _always constrained_ by its competitors, customers, societal laws
| and norms, etc. For example, if a company faces a competitor that
| is grabbing market share by offering a cheaper product that is
| slightly worse, the company may have no choice but to lower the
| quality of its products so it can compete successfully.
| fogzen wrote:
| A game's rules are fixed. Customers, societal laws, norms, etc.
| are not.
| cs702 wrote:
| Yes, we're talking about Nash equilibria in environments that
| are gradually evolving.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Why doesn't someone else create a competing app that's better
| and thereby steal all their business?
|
| Isn't this just your "information asymmetry" point over again?
|
| The average user has no way to actually compare outcomes between
| dating apps - at best, they can run a limited A/B test on short
| term outcomes (do I go on a lot of dates? Do I click with my
| dates?), or they might have anecdotal evidence from the
| success/failures of their friends dating on the same apps.
| vladdrak wrote:
| There can also be barriers to entry, regulatory capture,
| predatory pricing and other market issues
| loxs wrote:
| The answer to the final question in the article is: "Mostly,
| because the government forbids us from solving this problem".
| Start a company? That will be 2k for incorporation and 3k per
| year for auditing/bookkeeping. You want to build something
| physical in Europe? What a bummer, come here and pay the
| exorbitant carbon tax. You still think you are very smart? Your
| will pay 70% effective tax rate if you want to hire someone else
| to help you.
| mouse_ wrote:
| What is it with you people and food analogies
|
| This one doesn't even fit
| nirei wrote:
| Very good involuntary defense of the thing it's trying to
| disprove.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Strawman, and bad one at that.
|
| The dating example is an example of the Shirky principle. The
| others are not.
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