Unless it’s some utopian value-based family company, the goal of any company will ultimately become to maximize profit and/or growth because that is what shareholders want.

It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.

It really doesn't, at least in the legal sense. Managers have wide legal latitude to run the business as they think best. However, in practice corporate boards tend to vote the short-term numbers, which combined with decreasing CEO tenure is a strong incentive for CEOs to do short-term, exploitative things. That's not always the case, though. Bezos, for example, built Amazon to its juggernaut status by ignoring the short terms numbers and doing a lot of long-term investment with a focus on increasing customer value. It's only lately that it's turned to exploiting its customers as well.

Regulations will catch up to it, maybe in 50 years. Look at cars, they started out as cobbled together death traps, but today they are very user friendly and safe (not the software, but the machinery). Those things didn't happen thanks to car companies being nice, but thanks to regulations.

No it bloody well does not. The "maximize shareholder value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of better ROI [1]).

Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in the short term. There are other ways to grow, and they tend to require imagination and long-term planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely voluntary choices of taking the easy way out.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...

Yes but it doesn't have to be upheld in a court of law. It just has to be what corporate officers are ordered, selected and incentivized around. It doesn't need to be legally required for people to do something.

For decades now bilionares have bought companies, improved numbers in the short term, and sold them for a profit

This stupid meme needs to die.

It does when one of, if not the only, important metric is growth. And for many publicly traded companies that act in the social/dating space growth tends to be a key metric. After some point the "natural" growth and contraction of the market will be a limiter. It's also arguably easier to handle a recurring user than having to spend time on acquiring new users to a platform.

>> That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business.

Sure, but VCs and big companies want to maximize profit, not just be profitable. When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

> When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

Or just "I'm done with this shit". It's remarkably difficult to run a small (software) business in the US. Section 174, multi-state income tax filings. It's a bloody pain if your goal is not just to operate the business and be overhead, but to actually do stuff. Regulatory/tax complexity thresholds depending on business size would be a welcome improvement.

The point is, even if it works, if you need 4 months for it to work instead of 1 month, that is 4 times the revenue for them.

So yes, it have to work, at least for their reputation, but it also have to not work that much.

Sorry to point out that whatever you could make helping your clients happily leave you forever, you can make 5x that making them suffer. It is simple math.

Also you'll be acquired by Match.com

This is not a convincing argument. If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it, just like any other product/service you pay for that doesn't work.

Casinos are very profitable.

A casino with no physical upkeep ?

Yeah I think this is the missing part. Even if enshittification is more profitable, people should still be able to just change services to a better one.

Change to what? Another match.com-owned service?

Yeah that's the part I haven't figured out. Why isn't there a offering for the market demand for something like old OKCupid? A dating site doesn't seem like an enterprise that needs a lot of startup capital or anything.

The user won't leave simply because the product doesn't work; they'll leave if they believe it won't work. For dating apps, tricking users is more profitable than trying to match them. Hence all the psychological warfare: fake profiles, new account boosts, fake likes, blurred out likes, paid boosts, swipe stack interface, etc. etc.

> If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it

And if it succeeds in getting people to match, they definitely stop using it.

"Likely to stop using it" is the better outcome for them in terms of customer retention

Most relationships don't last forever; people come back to what they know worked before.

Unless you have competition.