4 ms·
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 examp
by beloch 11mo 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 11mo agoAs 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 11mo agoNo. The problem is that catering to the hookup market is more profitable. Any company that actually makes a good dating app gets bought out because their data is worth more than they are. Look at the market, it's actually almost a monopoly last I knew.
- xigoi 11mo agoFrom what I’ve heard, OkCupid’s algorithms used to be really good, then they deliberately made them worse when acquired by Match Group.
- beeflet 11mo agoIs google really a monopoly? You can just use another search engine or email provider. I would say it has a good moat in the minds of consumers, but not a good moat in reality.
- wredcoll 11mo agoSomething people rarely think about in these discussions is that google acquires all of its actual value, its search indexes, by spidering third party sites. Lots of these sites only allow google to scrape them. (This was a thing well before LLMs existed). Also they have a near monopoly on web advertising.