The article talks about abstractions, but doesn't mention anything concrete that his employer was doing to promote that model.
It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you.
"Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18.
I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it.
There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task.
So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.
> if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business
It wouldn't though, because most pharma companies are diversified somewhat. However, if your company has little in the pipeline except a cure where your competitors are more diversified, you have strong incentives to sit on a cure for a bit.
It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you.
"Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18.
I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it.
There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task.
So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.