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The reverse effect works too. When an overhead cost drops, people consume crappier versions. Free online news is a striking example. If you walked down to the news stand and paid $0.75 for a physical newspaper and the content was all Clickhole listicles you'd never buy it again. But people consume plenty for free.

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There was and still is plenty of Clickhole-level crap on newsstands next to the newspapers. People buy it.

In fact IIRC people buy printbait considerably more than they buy actual newspapers.

That's not the reverse effect, that's supply and demand, and people forgetting opportunity cost of time. Newsstands sell plenty of junk like US Weekly.

It is literally the opposite of the effect described in the article.

That being said, both the Alchian-Allen effect and its opposite are a fairly direct consequence of basic supply and demand effects.

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