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Comment by bitter_michael | Hacker News Reader

This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is relative to your evaluation function.

If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.

Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd

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But we are not in control of the evaluation function.

It is heavily manipulated by ads and other patterns.

You can control your own evaluation if you are actively working on it but market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter

Nonsense. If you want really nice, high quality furniture then you can just pay a local craftsman to make it for you. This is always an option regardless and some of us are not easily manipulated by ads. Of course good furniture will be expensive.

The mass production discount must not be overlooked, whatever most people want becomes the most cost effective, and it appears that most people want cheap, and so anything beyond the absolute minimum costs a lot more relative to the quality.

I don't believe the "people want cheap" spiel. Sure, they want affordable.

As consumers can not tell the quality of products beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap.

I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1], so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product.

[1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time defects show up months later and the one-star reviews arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.

Last time I wanted to do this for a desk which perfectly fits a particular nook in my home, the local craftsmen quoted 20x the price of Ikea and an 8 month lead time.

Needless to say, I got an Ikea desk delivered 3 days later.

Yeah, you prioritized price and availability over sheer product quality. Millions upon millions of people made the same choice.

I mean I bought an Ikea desk like, 15 years ago and have moved it through multiple home offices in that time and it's holding up fine. I also bought it because it was cheap enough I wouldn't worry about taking a jigsaw to it to get it customized just right for me (which was mostly cutting a hole for my tower computer case to sit just right in).

The problem with "you want real quality" people is they mostly seem to advocate buying expensive demonstrative items, rather then properly evaluating what they need.

If a desk has successful held my things and enabled me to work at it for over a decade, what exactly is "quality" meant to be and be bought for?

That's true: millions of people bought a desk right for their needs but we are comparing it to some super expensive (in real terms) item from 80 years ago.

You can’t do this for a washing machine of a tv or a phone.

Even if you can now, it is getting more difficult.

And there doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid it as every washing machine is becoming “smart”, worse at actually washing clothes and using internet to send your data so it can be sold for more profit.

You can buy a dumb washing machine on the commercial market.

https://speedqueencommercial.com/en-us/products/top-load-was...

Idk. I feel like at some point we have to blame society as a whole for things or things will never get changed. Social change in the past has been hard fought to get public perception to change. When my grandparents were kids, for example, black people were not allowed to use the same facilities as white people and a majority of people supported this. Sure powerful interests in the media promoted this view, but ultimately the majority was wrong and had to change.

Blaming society seems like a pointless exercise to me. It doesn't help solve any problems, and even could make some people give up on trying to do better. Society can change pretty quickly if people make an actual effort to do so and education people to new ideas and realizations.

Except of course we are in fact in control of the evaluation function. Hence, lots of people do not buy into mainstream for each thing. The thing about capitalism is that each person still spends their money according to their evaluation function. Ads might tell me I should discard close as soon as possible, sorry but I don't. Ads also tell me I should buy a new computer, and I might. Now have I been manipulated by ads or not?

If there are ads and manipulation for every possible thing, then what you end up buying still depends on your personal tastes and preferences.

At the end of the day, ever living creatures depends on its extend environment to some extent. The idea that this ever could be different is not realistic. Even if you band all ads, other things would simply take its place as the environment your exposed to.

That said, I'm not against limit some kinds of ads and specially in some places. But we should just outright claim people are not capable of making their own decisions, that's a bad road to go down.

> market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter

Except it does matter because we do not live in a state controlled system where if 51% people believe pants should be green, 100% of people wear green pants. Even a small number of people can be enough to create a small market for something. Go look into retro computers. The majority clearly doesn't care about old Amiga hardware and software, but yet you can buy it in various forms. There are countless examples.

Ads can be sometimes good, I got recommended the ad for Zeiss SmartLife lenses. Then I did my own research on youtube and I took the shot. I must say I am liking my pricey purchase.

> If you want something light weight and affordable,

Affordability has nothing to do in the quality evaluation, it is already taken into account in the quality/cost ratio.

Also, where did you get this idea that particle board furniture were particularly lightweight?

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