9 ms·

Make product worse, get money

• chankstein38 1y ago
  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_ 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
          People are explicitly not buying Tesla because of Musk and his politics. What do you call that if not a boycott?
          • bigyabai 1y ago
            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 1y ago
              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_ 1y ago
        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.
  • etchalon 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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/ 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/ https://www.nocontractnocoffee.org/
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • projektfu 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        I have no idea what you’re talking about here.
        • joshstrange 1y ago
          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.
• Imnimo 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    This is addressed in the "information asymmetry" section of the article.
• robrtsql 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    It's like any other "problem solver service". There's always an incentive to farm repeat business.
  • LorenPechtel 1y ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
    > 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.
• ksdnjweusdnkl21 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Then we need a better competitive environment that doesn't rely on VC money and growth hacking
• encroach 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Probably the same reason they don't teach how rhetoric works.
    • analog31 1y ago
      The high school that my kids attended did.
  • fwip 1y ago
    Mine did, because NY requires you to take an economics course.
  • AuthAuth 11mo ago
    What can be done to counter balance the weakness of markets? Mainly the incomplete information aspect. It seems like that will always be a huge problem with no solution that I can think of.
• byronic 1y ago
  What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 11mo ago
      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.
      • 11mo ago
• starkparker 1y ago
  > 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-sports https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5561909/ticket-prices-s...
  • ianferrel 1y ago
    >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.
• beloch 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
• miltonlost 1y ago
  Pizza 1 and 2 are true for when you become a chain and public company. Pizza 3 makes no sense on its face.
• libertine 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 11mo ago
    You just described OnlyFans.
• NebulaStorm456 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    > 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).
• amadeoeoeo 1y ago
  There are dozens of interesting "conflicting interests" cases in business and life. But...Pizza?
  • beefnugs 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
  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 11mo ago
    Interesting. Where can these old blog posts be found?
    • norenh 11mo ago
      [dead]
• s1mplicissimus 1y ago
  Very interesting read. One possible explanation that the article completely leaves out, but instantly jumped to my mind is a monopoly(-like).
• d13z 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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 11mo ago
      Could this be the moment to start using ultra-capitalism?
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• andriamanitra 1y ago
  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 11mo ago
    This is an example of the "information asymmetry" point.
    • yen223 11mo ago
      Is it information asymmetry if I only read half the article?
  • decimalenough 11mo ago
    > 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 11mo ago
• VladVladikoff 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI-vFq39-I I've done my best to remember most of it.
    • floren 11mo ago
      > 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
      • 0xCMP 11mo ago
        I get it, but part of the reason they're on motorcycles is cars are too expensive for them. Would making it safer and costing $20-30k base like it does in America be more or less ethical? I don't think there is a clear answer. Safer car means owners of the car survive more and more often: which is unequivocally great. Making it cheaper means there are more people in a safer vehicle than before which can reduce their likelihood of getting hurt/dying, but they're not as protected as they could be. This is, on the whole, also really good. It just so happens car makers pick to make it cheaper. It's good for business and good for those who couldn't afford it before. It is bad for those who encounter the situations where additional protection would have saved them.
• econ 1y ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
  • cenamus 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      Heat is literally inefficient by definition - it's spent energy which hasn't been converted to visible light.
      • hmry 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
          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 11mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
• knallfrosch 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  > Instead of selling water for $17, why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? ¿Por qué 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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    even when checked it collapses onto it’s own contradictions
• highfrequency 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    A game’s rules are fixed. Customers, societal laws, norms, etc. are not.
    • cs702 11mo ago
      Yes, we're talking about Nash equilibria in environments that are gradually evolving.
• swiftcoder 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    There can also be barriers to entry, regulatory capture, predatory pricing and other market issues
• loxs 11mo ago
  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_ 11mo ago
  What is it with you people and food analogies This one doesn't even fit
• nirei 11mo ago
  Very good involuntary defense of the thing it's trying to disprove.
• tpoacher 11mo ago
  Strawman, and bad one at that. The dating example is an example of the Shirky principle. The others are not.