Make Product Worse, Get Money

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.

>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.

>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.

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.)

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!

> 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...

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Strawman, and bad one at that.

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

>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...

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  0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_owned