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It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by pro

It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that never work out." OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the service they purport to provide. They don't want people to have long term relationships, they want people to use a dating site. There are "societal good" functions that companies might provide, for which a profit motive is wholly un-applicable without destroying the function itself. There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.

pohl 3y ago
It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    given trajectory of birth rates, plumetting sex amongst youth, and various governments ratcheting up incentives to have children, this may be more likely than you think...
  - failuser 3y ago
    Singapore has a government dating service, SDU, right? They try to do eugenics on top of that though, so the long term relations might not have the highest priority as well.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere
oooyay 3y ago
> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome? Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid being any different.
- phonon 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcupi...
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Slow release may not be a bad thing. Modern dating seems so dehumanizing...if the NPC you're matched with doesn't check all of your preference boxes, reroll them. But if OKCupid drags this process out so you only get n matches per month, they maximize revenue while maybe encouraging people to appreciate each other's differences. Like getting a "crappy" CD from Columbia House...might as well listen to it. Maybe it'll grow on you!
saint_fiasco 3y ago
> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms. Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest. I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.
- YouSuck2 3y ago
  And do they return the money in the case of divorce?
  - saint_fiasco 3y ago
    Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a divorce that means the relationship looked like it was going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed to marry. No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.
- petsfed 3y ago
  There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts. Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large. There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a scam to me It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall
fidotron 3y ago
You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference. So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees. This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument? Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear. But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and normally on their own for free no problem if you put them in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive
  - jerf 3y ago
    "or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?" I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market caused the entire banking system to become insolvent because all the dates they were holding on their books as marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything but immature, and consequently must be marked down to their actual market value of Zero. I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status? Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way around.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    A lot of people don't seem to do it in today's society. Hence the need for these sites.
- krisoft 3y ago
afarrell 3y ago
A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do. Revenue sources would include: - Ads for local businesses, classes, and events. - Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants. Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity. Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex. Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.
- janeerie 3y ago
  There did used to be one like this and I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. My friend didn't meet her husband on it, but she did meet her future husband's roommate.
- flanbiscuit 3y ago
  > Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do. Back in the early 2010s there was a dating site that was based around this premise. You would post a specific activity and see if someone wanted to join you for it. I didn't personally use it (as intended) but it was a great place to get fun date night activities with my partner. I think they realized that use case (date night planning) and eventually added this as a feature. I don't remember the name of the site unfortunately, someone else might. I would be surprised if it's still around. edit: Found it! it was called HowAboutWe.com. https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/ https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/ https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consolidated-iac-buys-howaboutwe-dating-site/ https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/1...
  - iamdbtoo 3y ago
    That's also similar to a service OkCupid had separate from the main site called Crazy Blind Date. With this one, however, you defined the qualities you were seeking and the times and part of the city you were available for a date. They would match people up based on the time, location and OkCupid match rating (mostly, I think) and would ask if you wanted to meet the person. It gave you just their basic info and a distorted photo. I used it for a while and don't remember why I stopped but it was one of the best dating apps I've used. None of the dates went anywhere, but it was a really simple and easy way to meet new people.
xapata 3y ago
Contracts can help. Knowing that marriage is at least somewhat likely for happy couples, site users could sign an agreement that they'll pay the site $1k in the event that they become married to someone they meet through the site. Of course this could lead to freeloaders who try to avoid triggering the agreement, but that just means the contract may need optimization. Freemium models can work.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  People are avoiding marriage these days and experimenting with noncontractual arrangements like polyamory. Even before the fraud materializes, the proposed system would be a total failure based on societal changes. Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others time to find a way to cheat you.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    I think 40-60% of people are still seeking escalator-style relationships that would result in marriage (even if they're not seeking such relationships immediately), which is an enormous number of people
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Alternatively hear me out you could have people who actually care about other people make a website that treats people like they want to be treated charges a modest per month fee to users looking to do a good job and turn a profit. Unless you've already signed a deal with the devil with people who don't give a fuck about other people it doesn't have to be a maximal profit per user it just needs to be more than the cost to run the site. If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and message like minded users. A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics of not making people sick so you can cure them they have agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of them do.
rurp 3y ago
While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.
- koromak 3y ago
  It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    It really doesn't, at least in the legal sense. Managers have wide legal latitude to run the business as they think best. However, in practice corporate boards tend to vote the short-term numbers, which combined with decreasing CEO tenure is a strong incentive for CEOs to do short-term, exploitative things. That's not always the case, though. Bezos, for example, built Amazon to its juggernaut status by ignoring the short terms numbers and doing a lot of long-term investment with a focus on increasing customer value. It's only lately that it's turned to exploiting its customers as well.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Regulations will catch up to it, maybe in 50 years. Look at cars, they started out as cobbled together death traps, but today they are very user friendly and safe (not the software, but the machinery). Those things didn't happen thanks to car companies being nice, but thanks to regulations.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    No it bloody well does not. The "maximize shareholder value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of better ROI [1]). Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in the short term. There are other ways to grow, and they tend to require imagination and long-term planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely voluntary choices of taking the easy way out. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholders-meeting-tim-cook-tells-off-climate-change-deniers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...
bwanab 3y ago
I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore. The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts stay healthy at minimum expense. An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to be healthy!
  - mhb 3y ago
    It's an argument for having dentists compete, as they do, and picking the one who does a good job.
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      It's not like a layman can have a good idea of whether a dentist has done a good job, except in cases where the job was clearly botched. People can't realistically make an informed choice based on dentist competence, so soft metrics like patient comfort and general bellyfeel dominate. Moreover, people hopefully don't need dental services very frequently, so gathering enough data takes a long time.
      - mhb 3y ago
        OK. But a single payer addresses none of those issues.
        Sharlin 3y ago
        Single payer has many, many more data points from which to draw conclusions.
amelius 3y ago
See also doctors and medicine.
jrvarela56 3y ago
Would be great if you could bid: the user signs a contract where they commit to pay $X if they get married. The more you commit to, the more priority the algorithm gives you as it wants you to get married asap. This could be easily gamed as the users could just commit to absurdly high amounts and never get married - while getting prioritized by the site.
jjkaczor 3y ago
Ding ding ding, I met my current partner on OKCupid 9 years ago, don't think I will ever need to return. (fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood, [insert-platitude-here) Seeing as I have a "face for radio", I doubt I would ever manage to date seriously on "swipe right/left" platforms.
nonameiguess 3y ago
> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. This wasn't necessarily true. I actually met my wife on OkCupid, all the way back in 2007 originally, and she wasn't even the first long-term relationship I ended up off of the site, which was back in 2004. OkCupid used to have social features, allowing you to maintain a personal blog and follow other user's blogs. A whole lot of us had a pretty nice community, couchsurfing, visiting each other when we traveled for work. That was even how I met my wife, through the blogs, not by direct solicitation of a date. We didn't even live on the same coast when we met, but eventually moved to the same city by chance and ended up together. When Match Group bought the site, they killed these features and there was no longer any reason to stick around, but a lot of us had stuck around long after pairing off and marrying. For a long time, we even stayed in touch via other means and continued meeting up in person when we had the chance. Unfortunately, Facebook was the main place they all settled, and I did not want to stick around on Facebook, so mostly I've lost touch with these people now. But we had a nice community for a long time, even a nearly global community, with people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Heck, even the reason I originally joined OkCupid wasn't with the intention of finding dates. It was because of an old vBulletin forum I was on for Armenians in Los Angeles where a bunch of people took the personality tests and compared results, so I joined to do that. But things were different enough in 2004 that I didn't need to seek out dates. Women just messaged me and asked me out because they weren't yet overloaded with spam and jaded from the Internet turning to shit. The Internet was different in a lot of ways back then. OkCupid was founded by nerd grad students that mostly wanted to prove they could apply math to romance. But then they discovered math could actually make them rich, and Match Group never gave a shit and only cared about money from the start. I suspect much of what eventually became shit started that way. Larry and Sergey were probably legitimate math nerds, too. Mark Zuckerberg probably just wanted to hot-or-not his classmates. But then they all discovered they could get rich and investors killed the fun.
autoexec 3y ago
Generally, the things that are valuable to society, but can't be delivered by corporations who are only interested in maximizing their own wealth and power are good candidates for something that would be better run by government. Maybe a dating site actually would make for a good social service... Assuming that what we'd gain in terms of the stability and happiness of the population is worth more than what it would cost to run the service it might not be a bad idea. Especially in areas where dating is uniquely difficult like Iceland where apps exist to make sure you're not dating someone closely related.

pohl 3y ago

It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.

hooverd 3y ago
Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  given trajectory of birth rates, plumetting sex amongst youth, and various governments ratcheting up incentives to have children, this may be more likely than you think...
- failuser 3y ago
  Singapore has a government dating service, SDU, right? They try to do eugenics on top of that though, so the long term relations might not have the highest priority as well.
- grotorea 3y ago
  I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere

oooyay 3y ago

> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again. That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome? Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid being any different.

phonon 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcupi...
jstarfish 3y ago
Slow release may not be a bad thing. Modern dating seems so dehumanizing...if the NPC you're matched with doesn't check all of your preference boxes, reroll them. But if OKCupid drags this process out so you only get n matches per month, they maximize revenue while maybe encouraging people to appreciate each other's differences. Like getting a "crappy" CD from Columbia House...might as well listen to it. Maybe it'll grow on you!

saint_fiasco 3y ago

> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms. Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest. I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.

YouSuck2 3y ago
And do they return the money in the case of divorce?
- saint_fiasco 3y ago
  Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a divorce that means the relationship looked like it was going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed to marry. No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.
petsfed 3y ago
There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts. Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large. There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a scam to me It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall

fidotron 3y ago

You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference. So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees. This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

RugnirViking 3y ago
or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument? Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear. But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and normally on their own for free no problem if you put them in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive
- jerf 3y ago
  "or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?" I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market caused the entire banking system to become insolvent because all the dates they were holding on their books as marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything but immature, and consequently must be marked down to their actual market value of Zero. I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status? Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way around.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  A lot of people don't seem to do it in today's society. Hence the need for these sites.
krisoft 3y ago

afarrell 3y ago

A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do. Revenue sources would include: - Ads for local businesses, classes, and events. - Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants. Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity. Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex. Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.

janeerie 3y ago
There did used to be one like this and I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. My friend didn't meet her husband on it, but she did meet her future husband's roommate.
flanbiscuit 3y ago
> Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do. Back in the early 2010s there was a dating site that was based around this premise. You would post a specific activity and see if someone wanted to join you for it. I didn't personally use it (as intended) but it was a great place to get fun date night activities with my partner. I think they realized that use case (date night planning) and eventually added this as a feature. I don't remember the name of the site unfortunately, someone else might. I would be surprised if it's still around. edit: Found it! it was called HowAboutWe.com. https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/ https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/ https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consolidated-iac-buys-howaboutwe-dating-site/ https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/1...
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  That's also similar to a service OkCupid had separate from the main site called Crazy Blind Date. With this one, however, you defined the qualities you were seeking and the times and part of the city you were available for a date. They would match people up based on the time, location and OkCupid match rating (mostly, I think) and would ask if you wanted to meet the person. It gave you just their basic info and a distorted photo. I used it for a while and don't remember why I stopped but it was one of the best dating apps I've used. None of the dates went anywhere, but it was a really simple and easy way to meet new people.

xapata 3y ago

Contracts can help. Knowing that marriage is at least somewhat likely for happy couples, site users could sign an agreement that they'll pay the site $1k in the event that they become married to someone they meet through the site. Of course this could lead to freeloaders who try to avoid triggering the agreement, but that just means the contract may need optimization. Freemium models can work.

jstarfish 3y ago
People are avoiding marriage these days and experimenting with noncontractual arrangements like polyamory. Even before the fraud materializes, the proposed system would be a total failure based on societal changes. Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others time to find a way to cheat you.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  I think 40-60% of people are still seeking escalator-style relationships that would result in marriage (even if they're not seeking such relationships immediately), which is an enormous number of people
michaelmrose 3y ago
Alternatively hear me out you could have people who actually care about other people make a website that treats people like they want to be treated charges a modest per month fee to users looking to do a good job and turn a profit. Unless you've already signed a deal with the devil with people who don't give a fuck about other people it doesn't have to be a maximal profit per user it just needs to be more than the cost to run the site. If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and message like minded users. A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics of not making people sick so you can cure them they have agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of them do.

rurp 3y ago

While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.

koromak 3y ago
It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.
- wpietri 3y ago
  It really doesn't, at least in the legal sense. Managers have wide legal latitude to run the business as they think best. However, in practice corporate boards tend to vote the short-term numbers, which combined with decreasing CEO tenure is a strong incentive for CEOs to do short-term, exploitative things. That's not always the case, though. Bezos, for example, built Amazon to its juggernaut status by ignoring the short terms numbers and doing a lot of long-term investment with a focus on increasing customer value. It's only lately that it's turned to exploiting its customers as well.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Regulations will catch up to it, maybe in 50 years. Look at cars, they started out as cobbled together death traps, but today they are very user friendly and safe (not the software, but the machinery). Those things didn't happen thanks to car companies being nice, but thanks to regulations.
- Karunamon 3y ago
  No it bloody well does not. The "maximize shareholder value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of better ROI [1]). Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in the short term. There are other ways to grow, and they tend to require imagination and long-term planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely voluntary choices of taking the easy way out. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholders-meeting-tim-cook-tells-off-climate-change-deniers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...

bwanab 3y ago

I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore. The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

Sharlin 3y ago
Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts stay healthy at minimum expense. An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to be healthy!
- mhb 3y ago
  It's an argument for having dentists compete, as they do, and picking the one who does a good job.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    It's not like a layman can have a good idea of whether a dentist has done a good job, except in cases where the job was clearly botched. People can't realistically make an informed choice based on dentist competence, so soft metrics like patient comfort and general bellyfeel dominate. Moreover, people hopefully don't need dental services very frequently, so gathering enough data takes a long time.
    - mhb 3y ago
      OK. But a single payer addresses none of those issues.
      - Sharlin 3y ago
        Single payer has many, many more data points from which to draw conclusions.

amelius 3y ago