r/technology • u/thinkB4WeSpeak • Sep 11 '26

Society Dating Apps Are Dying

https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/dating-apps-are-dying/
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u/HansBooby Sep 11 '26

complete own goal. greed, stupidity and complete lack of morals.

615

u/fancy_crisis Sep 11 '26

It's so weird how this keeps happening in every industry and arena; almost like it's the inevitable endgame of our socioeconomic system or something...

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u/NightSpaghetti Sep 11 '26

They just keep sabotaging their companies long term in order to bring ever more money short-term. You can't just have a company racking up a stable but modest profit every quarter anymore. It's depressing.

89

u/FatAuthority Sep 11 '26

Hey that's what we're doing to planet Earth! Same tactic, same result. You'd almost think it's a reflection of the values we've placed in our societies...

Healthy lives? Clean air? Happiness? Socioeconomic equality? Mental health?

Money.

19

u/jimbo831 Sep 11 '26

It’s because of the incentives. The executives are given stock awards that incentivize them to prioritize the short term stock price over everything else. They don’t care if the company goes to shit in five years. They’ll be rich by then and can just retire or move on to the next company.

2

u/sherrintini Sep 11 '26

Also you try to stay honest a shady shittier company will eat profit margins for short term bursts, and now your VCs and board members are demanding their dividends. Everything is bloated and short term.

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u/3141592652 Sep 11 '26

There needs to be indefinite growth in a company year over year in a company otherwise it's considered a failure. Gotta appease the shareholders. 

10

u/begrudgingredditacc Sep 11 '26

Doesn't help that, IIRC, it's legitimately illegal to not appease your shareholders.

We will all die for the sake of shareholder profits, which we've placed above love, happiness, morality, and even basic survival.

6

u/dragunityag Sep 11 '26

The law is you can't do something that will purposely lose your shareholders money. CEOs can take a long term gains stance which would lose money in the short term but make more over 10 years, but shareholders will fire them because they prefer short term gains.

2

u/Rather_Unfortunate Sep 11 '26

I find it kind of baffling that companies don't routinely engage in massive stock buybacks to bring themselves back under their own control and free themselves of that sort of self-destructive behaviour.

3

u/3141592652 Sep 11 '26

The only reason they'd do that would be to up the value of stocks which would be doing the same thing again. Only thing to do would be to a stock buyout to go back to being a private company. See valve that's pretty much on good terms with its customers. 

5

u/Butterfly_and_Bee Sep 11 '26

So true. When the goal is continuous growth, the end result will always be a balloon bursting. The game for the elites is to jump ship just before and keep riding the next one up until eventually, everyone else is poor. 

3

u/fancy_crisis Sep 11 '26

As the old saying goes, "infinite growth is the mindset of the cancer cell"

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u/HansBooby Sep 11 '26

ensure that by the time you’ve pissed enough customers off by exploiting their every click and abandon ship, you’ve made enough cash your descendants never have to work again

4

u/HansBooby Sep 11 '26

i’m slowly warming to the idea of a phone only retro phone

2

u/green49285 Sep 11 '26

Hey, now! Youre starting to sound like a commie, friend...

2

u/fancy_crisis Sep 11 '26

Oh my gosh, you're so right, uh, shoot, um, I love the freedom of getting to pay an insurance company hundreds per month that they'll use to fight tooth and nail to not help me when I finally need to call on them!

How'd that sound? Did they buy it?

2

u/d9niels9n 21d ago

Somebody said it!! Comments beating themselves up to figure out the logic, this is just capitalism at work friends😂

1

u/Suspicious-Button777 Sep 11 '26

Thats bc they're all optimizing for shareholders

1

u/Largeitude Sep 11 '26

All they need to do to prevent this is cut up monopolies and oligopolies.

And all people need to do is stop buying and using garbage products.

1

u/fancy_crisis Sep 11 '26

It's going to take a lot more than that. Systems are what they do, not what they claim they are, and what our economic system does is incentivize every company in every industry to extract as much value as possible with as little consideration for the moral and human cost as is possible. Until that changes, this will keep happening, it doesn't matter how big or small the conglomerates are.

1

u/Largeitude Sep 11 '26

It really won't. The reason corporations are shitting everything up is because doing something like making a product generate a few cents more by cutting a tiny corner here or there adds up to millions of dollars of revenue saved across the national or international market.

Cutting up these giant companies so that they're smaller will make cutting all these corners less incentivizing to them, as they'll also have other companies to compete with who's product will be better than theirs. If our system cuts up companies that control more than 50% of the market share in a single state or the country, then those incentives will no longer be as powerful.

Its why new businesses that become popular tend to have very good products, and why the products of those businesses get shitter over time when these new popular businesses dominant the market.

The only other thing needed is to raise taxes on highest earners so businesses won't overpay executives and will instead reinvest that money into their product or workers.

1

u/fancy_crisis Sep 11 '26

Well, I'm certainly not going to argue against any of that, since I fully support every bit of it, I will just say I'm skeptical that'll do the trick permanently. But I've been wrong before and would hope to wrong here.

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u/Cormophyte Sep 11 '26

Its not the system, it's people. People will always try to get the most they can with the least risk and effort possible. Capitalism kept them from declaring divinity and enforcing it at the pointy end of a knife (fascists hate this) but didn't prevent them from monopolizing all the resources because they had the most resources to begin with, so we broke up the monopolies. Wasn't good enough, though, and here we are.

The economic system is just an attempt to keep the world's natural state of perpetual snowballing from rearing its head. Some people don't like that so they try to sabotage it by inserting loopholes that they're positioned to take advantage of with as little risk and effort as possible.

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u/Treesrule Sep 11 '26

Don’t tell op what happens in other economic systems (hint: the same thing)