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!

> 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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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.