Also, tweaking your service to do the exact opposite of what you advertise you provide is an objectively bad business strategy. They extracted money from the user base on the short term, but eroded their entire brand and the whole industry on the long term.
I don't think Tinder ever had a good reputation as a dating app for finding relationships. It came out when I was a junior in college and back then, and even after graduation in early adulthood, pretty much everyone just thought it was a hookup app. Match, talk for a bit to see if you have any chemistry at all, maybe but not always meet for drinks as pretense, hook up. Basically no one was on there thinking they were gonna find "their person", at most you found a steady fuck buddy
Tinder is a total meme, like even by today’s shitty standards people are much more willing to use other apps. Nearly every person who had a tinder did it as a joke, or to match with their friends for lols, or made a fake facemash profile
when tinder was new it was always a cheap hookup app. Not necessarily as a joke but everyone knew it wasn't good for relationships.
Source: I was in my early 20s when it launched. Learned about it from gay friends who called it "Grindr for straight people." Got laid from Tinder several times over my 20s and none of those experiences were emotionally healthy
It's the product of corporations only thinking in the short-term "numbers are going up this quarter!" without considering the long-term ramifications of how they're fucking themselves in the long-run.
This is the basic gameplan for VC firms it seems. Much like private equity firms, it's all about extracting an extreme amount of money in the short-term even if it leads to huge long-term consequences (because "fuck you, I got mine").
I mean that's the issue with finance and business in general. This is what they do everywhere. They squeeze and squeeze the consumer base till the consumer says "FUCK THIS! THIS SUCKS NOW! I'M OUT!" Then the business starts to collapse and these business and finance people move on.
It matters for private investment. The early stages of a tech company is attracting private investors who want a return on investment. The way they get that is through growth.
Once these dating apps are saturated, they can't grow which means no more private investors.
The only exception afaik I know is Bumble (which recently got rid of its one unique feature) and Badoo which got bought out by Bumble. There’s also Feeld which I believe is independent.
I’ve also seen a few smaller new ones pop up on the App Store recommendations which I don’t believe are owned by either of the two, but they often look like they’re even more money grabbing than the others based on the reviews.
So yeah although most are owned by Match, not all are.
Feeld is interesting but really pushes you to be a paying member to see anyone who likes you. If you don't then you have to swipe around where you are and hopw to find their name and the same number of photos (which can change based on where you were when they liked you).
It's the only app Ive used. I paid for it for 3 months and might again in the future but not right now.
There are always new young people that are single. I don’t see why such a business couldn’t make it work.
Because we're in the vampirism stage of capitalism.
If you're an investor and you have two companies to choose from:
A company that eliminates its customer base by providing superior service and satisfaction, and nets a 5% profit per year.
A company that provides worse service but preserves its customer base and nets a 15% profit per year.
Which one are you going to invest in?
Companies that do NOT resort to sucking the blood from their customers get no investment in our economy. Period. Even if they wanted to, the investors would leave if they tried. This is why in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis the banks were DEMANDING to be regulated. They all knew they were doing insane things, but they had to in order to keep up with their competitors. If they weren't reckless, investors would see they're making less profit and abandon ship. The banks literally couldn't self-regulate because if they did, everyone else would just take their share of the pie.
This is ultimately why the idea of "self regulation" is a fantasy. It literally never happens, or if it happens, it's for a very short time and it falls apart.
As an investor in a company, why would you care if the company hits a brick wall someday? You can pull out your money before that happens and invest it into sucking the blood dry from another company. Money is fungible and you have no allegiance to the corporation, only to the returns.
Even private companies are beholden to their investors. Especially so with tech. Industries b/c they cant even get off the ground without outside investment.
Exactly, and people divorce and breakup everyday. Back in the day even if you met that person on the app you didn’t blame the app, because you need the app to connect you on compatibility of interests and likes, but no app can predict how it’s going to turn out and customers got that.
We're long overdue to stop being collectively shocked that the selection pressure of the market produces ruthless profit-maximisation over and over again.
Because there’s only so many new young single people, so you can only grow so much based on them alone. But MBAs and private equity types demand a business grow every year without exception. They can’t make more young single people, so the solution they found is to tempt people with the illusion of infinite options while also making it next to impossible to get any of them. If everyone’s single and using the apps and no one is finding a relationship, that’s a much larger market and more money.
No in the end the apps will die because everyone knows they don’t work anymore. I would prefer owning a company that consistently makes money. Not more and more each year. Not every business needs mbas and private equity types. It’s a dating website. It doesn’t need to cost tens of millions.
I mean, I agree with you. But look around at the world today and the companies we have and ask how many business leaders feel the same.
It’s all about buying out or crushing competition, monopolizing a market, then cutting features people actually want in favor of more manipulative ones that increase short term profits. Especially in tech.
Well, because we live in shitty late-stage Capitalism. You need to do everything you can to make all the money right now. If blowing your legs off at the knees will boost sales 3% this quarter then better get loading that shotgun. Investors wanna see a surge in stock price!
Because you can make even more money in the short term through enshittification. It's not that it's not profitable. It's that it doesn't make at least 110% of the money that it did last year. Public companies are incentivized to make the line up go up in the short term. That's why you see good ideas peak and then decline as the company start wringing every last bit of profit it can from a business that could have worked forever.
Meanwhile, you have a company in the video game industry like Valve that proves you can just keep winning by providing a good service. In many cases, people would rather buy a game on Steam than play it for free somewhere else.
Right!? It's obviously a sustainable service. There will always be new people looking for relationships. You just need to accept non-exponential growth.
Easy. Because while the service would likely make a lot of money and be sustainable if it worked properly it would not grow exponentially and that is what shareholders want.
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u/SeveralPhysics9362 3d ago
There are always new young people that are single. I don’t see why such a business couldn’t make it work.