5 ms·

All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost. The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention. The dynamics are qualitatively different. The

by tikhonj 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  - lolc 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  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
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- heymijo 11mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
CrzyLngPwd 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      > 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.
camillomiller 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      Auto makers make safe(ish) cars because they are legally required to.
      - pixl97 11mo ago
        Exactly... unsafe at any speed was written for a reason.
fragmede 11mo ago
> 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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
> 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 11mo ago
  How did you meet your wife?
  - mettamage 11mo ago
    On Tinder, after autoswiping 100k to 200K profiles :') I wish I had the exact stats but I just got some crappy JS code from some Github website, edited it a bit and within 10 minutes the swiper was swiping. I'd then go meticulously go through every "match" (looking at photo's, reading the bio's, all of it) because if you only have around 250 "matches" each month (for each 50K women I swiped right on auto pilot), you can actually take the time. I unmatched a lot of them and was left with my real matches. I met her in Valencia. She was on vacation and I was digital nomadding at the time. She asked me on a date and I was really tired and really didn't want to go because of it. But I remember thinking "you have to shoot all your shots and take all your chances." I'm so happy I did, she made me forget I was tired in a heartbeat and we were goofing around for the whole 3 hours, to the point where I realized I hadn't even asked one normal question and didn't know much about her haha (and vice versa). I love conversations like that, just fun vibes.
- 11mo ago

by tikhonj 11mo ago

SeanAnderson 11mo 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.
- lolc 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
heymijo 11mo ago
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.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]

CrzyLngPwd 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
> 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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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.

camillomiller 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    Auto makers make safe(ish) cars because they are legally required to.
    - pixl97 11mo ago
      Exactly... unsafe at any speed was written for a reason.

fragmede 11mo ago

> 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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago

> 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 11mo ago
How did you meet your wife?
- mettamage 11mo ago
  On Tinder, after autoswiping 100k to 200K profiles :') I wish I had the exact stats but I just got some crappy JS code from some Github website, edited it a bit and within 10 minutes the swiper was swiping. I'd then go meticulously go through every "match" (looking at photo's, reading the bio's, all of it) because if you only have around 250 "matches" each month (for each 50K women I swiped right on auto pilot), you can actually take the time. I unmatched a lot of them and was left with my real matches. I met her in Valencia. She was on vacation and I was digital nomadding at the time. She asked me on a date and I was really tired and really didn't want to go because of it. But I remember thinking "you have to shoot all your shots and take all your chances." I'm so happy I did, she made me forget I was tired in a heartbeat and we were goofing around for the whole 3 hours, to the point where I realized I hadn't even asked one normal question and didn't know much about her haha (and vice versa). I love conversations like that, just fun vibes.
11mo ago