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by rhizome 1513 days ago
>If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best practices.

>Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.

Match owns almost all of the dating app market because they've acquired who? Startups who created popular apps in a crowded marketplace that they don't already own.

Now, if you want to argue that you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace without accepting a buyout offer from the dominant player, now that's a topic I think is worth quite a bit of discussion.
1 comments
paulryanrogers 1513 days ago
Dating apps likely face a lot of churn because those customers who succeed cancel permanently. So for young apps burning out trying to compete it may be very hard to resist a big buyout from larger players with deeper pockets and fewer moral constraints.
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rhizome 1513 days ago
On the other hand, programmingwise dating apps are simple as heck and require almost no staff (source: Match's presumptive development priorities across their apps). Wasn't Plenty of Fish famously one guy for years and years? Heck, nowadays you can even seed a new app with fake accounts even easier with thispersondoesnotexist.com. Couple that with Facebook's GPT-3'ish release today[1] and you can probably create some pretty convincing activity, including messaging.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243569

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