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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
luckily for the opportunists that make products that capitalize on human psychology for profit, strict monogamy for life with one individual is not natural!
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
>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.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadLike 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.
It took a lot of wrangling to get them to be safe. They were coffins on wheels for decades.
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.
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.
1. The miracle of markets (supply and demand, "the invisible hand," etc.)
2. The weakness of markets (incomplete information, monopoly, etc.)
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!
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.
Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.
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.
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-s...
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.
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.
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.
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).
God, Poe's law really gets me sometimes.
But...Pizza?
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...
--
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.