Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 213 posts

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#41

Post by beej71 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #19
sharkweek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.” I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times. Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I thi…

“ I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality” Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them. Oh… you want to buy a high quality leather [whatever], better start learning about leather grades, leather tanneries, stitching thread, stitching types… so it doesn’t blow out in a year. Except we can’t all become experts in all pr…

Trying to find a quality laptop battery for an older machine is the ultimate exercise in futility.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#42

Post by wpietri »

VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #5

> Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen Unlikely—breaking the laws would likely just become a business cost, and make everything even more expensive for everyone.

I doubt it. Surveillance advertising is mainly the domain of huge businesses, because you need scale to get eyes on all the people. Small companies may find it easy to be scofflaws. Large companies tend to be quite conservative, because they are big and slow, making them easy regulatory targets.

A good example here is cheating standards. It's in the interests of pretty much every car company to cheat on mileage standards, safety standards, emissions standards, etc. But very few cheat and then pay the fines. Why? Because the regulators know how to size a fine to make them pay attention. Volkswagen got hit with a $2.8 billion fine for the emissions scandal, and total costs to them were estimated as over $30 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#43

Post by omginternets »

xrd wrote: post #38

I've got three kids. We have so much crap all around the house. We buy the junk that is constantly advertised to us. We purchase from Walmart which mostly sells crap too. If we stopped for a minute and got off the social media train of consumption, and bought only high quality things, but a lot less of them, we would have a much better life and no clutter. But we don't.

Impulse purchases?

As someone who is as immune to advertising as one gets, I find your post intriguing, and I feel like asking what is probably a naive question: can’t you just not buy the stuff? Where does that break down?

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#44

Post by antiterra »

foobarbecue wrote: post #12
plugin-baby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bought an espresso machine from a facebook ad that turned out to be an elaborate scam. More about this, please!

Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/BaristaService365/posts/10258694519... I clicked the link and went to the website, which at the time went to sarisell.com , a professional-looking storefront (they move to a new domain and update the ad every week or two). I thought there was a pretty good chance it was a scam since this is an $800 machine supposedly selling for $300, but I figured I would be reimbursed if it was,…

It might not be the case here, but lot of these are drop ship outfits that don’t do any kind of stock check and are susceptible to whatever the actual manufacturer in China is up to. I learned about it buying a moon lamp and it taking over 6 months. When it arrived it was a lopsided 3d printed thing (isn’t that relatively expensive at any kind of scale?) I also discovered a lot of these drop shipping outlets are the product of get-rich-quick passive income courses that give you a Shopify template to copy. It being passive income is an impulse for allocating zero budget for customer support.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#45

Post by figassis »

spicyjpeg wrote: post #10

I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the bi…

It’s not true that established brands made cheaper products to compete. Their prices remained the same or got higher, but quality still suffered. It’s just greed, no complex reasoning required. I recently bought a gym bag from Nike. Feels super cheap, like I could have gotten it from Aliexpress. The zippers keep locking into the fabric. Feels completely disposable.

Bought a pair of running shoes from Skechers early last year, had to throw away this year because the soles got worn out and I kept getting injured on one foot because I was stepping unevenly.

I bought Skechers because I had once had a pair of sneakers that lasted me the entire 5y of college. No such luck now.

No reason, just greed.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#46

Post by cushychicken »

flappyeagle wrote: post #18

My feeling throughout reading the article is best summed up as "Y U mad bro?" He harps on an "anti-woke" razor company that tries to market themselves as an alternative to Gillette and Harry's — the big point is "they spend 800k/month on marketing, so it drives up the cost of the razors". Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder? He cites a study that says…

I suspect targeted ads are a part of the phenomenon the article is talking about.

Since targeted ads got so cheap, tiny little businesses could buy super targeted social media ads for less money than they could selling their products wholesale at a store. Net result is that they can flood social media with targeted ads for some geoarbitraged thing that tiny startup found on AliExpress decided to sell DTC, and end run around consumer wholesaling and all rigamarole involved there.

The barrier to entry for that is super low. All you really need to be good at then is matchmaking some real niche product you found on Alibaba to a real niche consumer need.

Net result: lower prices, greater net profit for the company, tons of new entries to the game of social media enabled DTC.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#47

Post by spamizbad »

flappyeagle wrote: post #18

My feeling throughout reading the article is best summed up as "Y U mad bro?" He harps on an "anti-woke" razor company that tries to market themselves as an alternative to Gillette and Harry's — the big point is "they spend 800k/month on marketing, so it drives up the cost of the razors". Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder? He cites a study that says…

> Does he know how much Gillette spends (saved you a search: 600M/year)? How do they fund that I wonder?

Jeremy’s volume is probably a Gillette’s rounding error. A better question is what is their CAC and CLV - and Gillette’s are probably much better.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#48

Post by alex7734 »

sharkweek wrote: post #15
spicyjpeg wrote: post #10

I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the bi…

I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.” I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times. Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I thi…

> I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”

Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)

Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).

Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.

The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#49

Post by antiterra »

idopmstuff wrote: post #33

The combination of the author's clearly simmering rage (arguably even reaching a boil at some points in this post) and some fundamentally incorrect assertions make this tough for me to take seriously. Not far into the piece, we get: > The point is that Jeremy's has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimpin…

Compare to the Stratechery article on Dollar Shave Club in 2016: https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disru...

I assume Jeremy’s is a blatant attempt to mimic Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club which were known for acceptable (less so with Harry’s) products and disrupted the existing offering to where Dollar Shave Club got a billion dollar buyout from Unilever. Harry’s went for $1.37B to Schick.

Re: Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

#50

Post by Swizec »

figassis wrote: post #45
spicyjpeg wrote: post #10

I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the bi…

It’s not true that established brands made cheaper products to compete. Their prices remained the same or got higher, but quality still suffered. It’s just greed, no complex reasoning required. I recently bought a gym bag from Nike. Feels super cheap, like I could have gotten it from Aliexpress. The zippers keep locking into the fabric. Feels completely disposable. Bought a pair of running shoes from Skechers early l…

Running shoes are good for about 600 to 700km fyi. After that, the foam breaks down too much to provide adequate cushioning and the right sproing.

Having the external hard rubber last longer than that is just unnecessary weight.

You may just be in better shape than you were in college. Distance stacks up fast and running faster wears shoes out faster.

sauce: I run marathons and go through about 6 pairs of running shoes per year

Post reply on HN