3 ms·

This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2-

This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.

yomlica8 3y ago
> 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
- water9 3y ago
  Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy
spott 3y ago
Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.

yomlica8 3y ago

> 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.

water9 3y ago
Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy

spott 3y ago

Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.