Make product worse, get money

by zdw • 8 months ago

176 170 8 months 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_2• 8 months 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_11114• 8 months 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.

etchalon• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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/

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/

projektfu4• 8 months 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.

projektfu4• 8 months 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.

catigula3• 8 months 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.

loloquwowndueo3• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

catigula3• 8 months 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.

hamdingers• 8 months ago

And yet, car companies are still incentivized to make unsafe cars, at least in the US.

Bigger vehicles are more profitable, easier to advertise (for features and/or as a status symbol), suffer less emissions regulation. They also are more likely to kill pedestrians or occupants of other cars, and do significantly more damage to anything else they hit.

tonyedgecombe4• 8 months ago

They aren't even that safe for the occupants, they are much more likely to turn over in an accident.

s1mplicissimus2• 8 months ago

Also, in their argument "unsafe" could be replaced with "environment polluting", and it would be just as true

Imnimo• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

This is addressed in the "information asymmetry" section of the article.

robrtsql• 8 months 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.

HPsquared2• 8 months ago

It's like any other "problem solver service". There's always an incentive to farm repeat business.

LorenPechtel2• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months 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.

Madmallard• 8 months ago

luckily for the opportunists that make products that capitalize on human psychology for profit, strict monogamy for life with one individual is not natural!

ksdnjweusdnkl21• 8 months 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.

thewebguyd2• 8 months ago

Then we need a better competitive environment that doesn't rely on VC money and growth hacking

encroach• 8 months 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.)

HPsquared2• 8 months ago

Probably the same reason they don't teach how rhetoric works.

analog31• 8 months ago

The high school that my kids attended did.

fwip• 8 months ago

Mine did, because NY requires you to take an economics course.

AuthAuth• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza

thewebguyd2• 8 months 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.

TheOtherHobbes2• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

yen2232• 8 months 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

heymijo• 8 months 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.

CrzyLngPwd• 8 months 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.

vkou4• 8 months 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.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months 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 not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible.

Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?

camillomiller• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

fragmede2• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

mettamage4• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

How did you meet your wife?

TechnicolorByte• 8 months ago

Can you expand on what types of uncomfortableness you faced and what you mean by effort (to the point of bewildering people)? Curious what worked for you. Not sure if you just mean you forced yourself to go on a million dates and were super selective.

nubg• 8 months ago

Super interesting, please share more details! :-)

starkparker• 8 months 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-s...

ianferrel2• 8 months 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.

immibis• 8 months ago

This is the same pro sports industry that already stops you watching matches on TV once a week, spreads them over several different streaming platforms so you pay several times, and is currently trying to make it so you can't watch matches on devices that can sideload apps. Apparently, their revenue has only been going up, even with all these shitty things already happening...

trollbridge• 8 months ago

I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves, because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.

My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.

WesleyJohnson• 8 months ago

I would add that there is psychology at play as well. Someone might scoff at a $200 ticket, thinking it's ridiculous to pay that much, even if you could then eat at the venue for $20.

But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.

recursivecaveat• 8 months ago

Definitely. There's almost always a strong incentive to move charges as far back into the flow as possible. Knock $5 off your ISP package price, then hit them with a $5 "infrastructure fee" at the credit card screen. For consumers, just because you picked a higher upfront price for a service doesn't mean you'll you won't be nickle-and-dimed later in addition, so it is not trivial to avoid. I guess you can view the "free with ads" model as the most popular implementation: get people in the door and then charge them with their time at crazy rates.

beloch2• 8 months 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.

beloch2• 8 months 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.

LorenPechtel2• 8 months 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.

xigoi• 8 months ago

From what I’ve heard, OkCupid’s algorithms used to be really good, then they deliberately made them worse when acquired by Match Group.

beeflet• 8 months ago

Is 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• 8 months ago

Something 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.

miltonlost• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

projektfu4• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

You just described OnlyFans.

NebulaStorm456• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

zahlman2• 8 months 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).

floren3• 8 months ago

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.

God, Poe's law really gets me sometimes.

amadeoeoeo• 8 months ago

There are dozens of interesting "conflicting interests" cases in business and life.

But...Pizza?

beefnugs• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

Interesting. Where can these old blog posts be found?

s1mplicissimus2• 8 months ago

Very interesting read. One possible explanation that the article completely leaves out, but instantly jumped to my mind is a monopoly(-like).

d13z2• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

andriamanitra2• 8 months 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.

d13z2• 8 months ago

Could this be the moment to start using ultra-capitalism?

andriamanitra2• 8 months 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.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

This is an example of the "information asymmetry" point.

yen2232• 8 months ago

Is it information asymmetry if I only read half the article?

decimalenough• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

Not everyone needs extra space and for those who do the hourly rate for being in mild discomfort on an airline is huge.

It’s less that most people don’t care instead it’s often a completely reasonable tradeoff.

theobreuerweil• 8 months ago

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

Jweb_Guru• 8 months ago

Or maybe consumers do not want to (because it doesn't make economic sense for them, or because they don't want to spend every second of their free time optimizing) spend a significant amount of their time doing this kind of research before every purchase decision? I have never understood this argument that as long as information is technically available companies should be absolved of meeting some minimum level of baseline quality. You're also describing an industry that's unusually transparent (in part because there are not that many models of planes); for a lot of online goods there is absolutely no reasonable way you can know what a particular brand will be like before you buy.

p1dda• 8 months ago

The 'zombie customer base'explains much of everything wrong in today's society packed to the brim by stupid people. If you find yourself in the 98th percentile, prepare to be disappointed by just about everything available in today's society.

formerly_proven2• 8 months ago

I'm certainly not in the 98th percentile yet I dislike buying "durable goods" because it's almost always a disappointment.

VladVladikoff• 8 months 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.

0xCMP2• 8 months 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

I've done my best to remember most of it.

floren3• 8 months 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

econ• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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

cenamus• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

Heat is literally inefficient by definition - it's spent energy which hasn't been converted to visible light.

kukkeliskuu• 8 months 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

knallfrosch• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

even when checked it collapses onto it’s own contradictions

highfrequency• 8 months 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.

watwut2• 8 months 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• 8 months 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.

cs7022• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

A game’s rules are fixed. Customers, societal laws, norms, etc. are not.

cs7022• 8 months ago

Yes, we're talking about Nash equilibria in environments that are gradually evolving.

swiftcoder• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

There can also be barriers to entry, regulatory capture, predatory pricing and other market issues

loxs• 8 months 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_• 8 months ago

What is it with you people and food analogies

This one doesn't even fit

nirei• 8 months ago

Very good involuntary defense of the thing it's trying to disprove.

tpoacher• 8 months ago

Strawman, and bad one at that.

The dating example is an example of the Shirky principle. The others are not.

Make product worse, get money

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