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Brands got worse on purpose

worseonpurpose.com

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Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#111

Post by refulgentis »

xrd wrote: post #106
refulgentis wrote: post #27

Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/ They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209 , flagged off main page) Don't let them get away with this,…

I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up. I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD. Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of say…

If the byline said "written with AI assistance, anecdotes verified," I'd have no issue. The problem isn't the tool, it's the undisclosed institutional author using a sympathetic topic as a vehicle.

Editing suggestions are qualitatively different from writing the thing wholesale.

The anecdotes appear fabricated. I couldn't source the DC Shoes / Florida designer claim.

Generally, I'm sympathetic towards this worldview, and it would be disruptive to its impact to have obviously AI-written articles being passed around as authoritative grounding.

Even if 100% correct and verifiable, "obviously AI-written" and "100% correct" is enough for people who aren't as sympathetic as us to the overall point to dismiss it.

I'm sympathetic to their case, the phrase I'm trying to make happen is "AI DDOS'ing" - we can't people new to the material to read and verify endless reams of words, they approach infinity in the limit.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#112

Post by grey-area »

xrd wrote: post #106
refulgentis wrote: post #27

Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/ They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209 , flagged off main page) Don't let them get away with this,…

I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up. I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD. Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of say…

> the unsourced "anonymous anecdotes" are made up

This would be enough to make me distrust the whole thing.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#114

Post by timacles »

wholinator2 wrote: post #53
igleria wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except for the shareholder's wallets. sometimes.

We really shouldn't be creating and allowing a society where the rich can get rich off of destroying the quality of life for everyone else. Smells like guaranteed eventual revolution to me. Also, don't these people understand that they are destroying everything they was good. Like, surely they understand through all the corporate speak and distended responsibilities that they are directly making everyone's lives wors…

They do it because, In the words of Gordon Gecko, they can.

To them, theres a never ending line of hungry vultures right behind them, and if they do not do it, someone will take their place and do it and profit from it. So naturally they MUST do it, because it will inevitably be done also.

> What is it that these financial frameworks actually do that helps anyone?

They are supposed to clean out inefficiencies in economies. They theoretically expose weakness and exploit it, so it can be rebuilt stronger.

Its hard to argue against the premise - In a true capitalistic system. The problem is, the good old USA is a crony capitalistic system, and the politicians are for sale. When private equity can simply erode your business structure with policy, and then buy you out. It is not real capitalism.

At the end of the day, capitalism is the best system we have. The problem is the corruption of man, until we patch that bug, its going to keep causing these exploitable buffer overflows. Unfortunately, the code is in our limbic system, which is really old legacy code

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#115

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #31
vharuck wrote: post #24

I (or really, my parents) were burned by something like this recently. They bought my kid an FAO Schwarz marble run tower for Christmas. It's made of terrible plastic, with rough seams, and every play session ends when a marble gets stuck somewhere nearly impossible to reach. It requires partial disassembly, bending, and a screwdriver to pry things out. I was shocked that an FAO Schwarz toy sucked so much. I looked a…

FAO's used to be a prestige NYC brand. Of course, they carried many other branded products but those were mostly top-shelf (and expensive) as well. A LOT of formerly pretty high quality brands have ended up getting sold off to brand management companies and the like. I just got a few pairs of shoes from AllBirds because while the name will live on I have no doubt the quality will become pretty generic now that it's n…

[deleted]

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#116

Post by xrd »

refulgentis wrote: post #111
xrd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up. I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD. Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of say…

If the byline said "written with AI assistance, anecdotes verified," I'd have no issue. The problem isn't the tool, it's the undisclosed institutional author using a sympathetic topic as a vehicle. Editing suggestions are qualitatively different from writing the thing wholesale. The anecdotes appear fabricated. I couldn't source the DC Shoes / Florida designer claim. Generally, I'm sympathetic towards this worldview,…

Really good points, thanks so much.

This feels like the new frontier for "journalism": can we easily verify it?

That feels like a step in the right direction, regardless of how it happens.

People like Steve Bannon know this, and have called what you describe "flooding the zone" and it works. Our brains can't process excess information so we search for simple answers. AI will make this exponentially more effective as a tactic for spreading narratives.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#117

Post by J_Shelby_J »

keyana217 wrote: post #58
boringg wrote: post #22

Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true. What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?

Author here. The goal is a permanent public record of who owns what, and what that ownership has done to the product, so consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. The long-form essays are the investigations, the Brand Ledger is the ongoing reference. Readers tip me on brands to dig into, and entries get updated as news and reader reports come in. Consumers have power to affect change with their dollars... pro…

Can you make this but for local health services so I don’t end up at a dentist owned be PE who spend more time hard selling me than cleaning during appointments?

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#119

Post by AlexB138 »

lamasery wrote: post #5

I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it. Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy . Y…

This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.

That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#120

Post by footydude »

awakeasleep wrote: post #79
neurobashing wrote: post #67

one thing to note (I didn't see it in the article or the comments as of this moment) but a thing that happened a lot with eg LL Bean was, people were buying old Bean stuff from yard sales and so on, then returning it for a new one, under the lifetime warranty. The implicit "customer for life" cycle was thus broken, and they were giving all-but-free stuff to people who had little intention of ever buying new.

Part of the marketing for a consumer hostile change like this is cooking up a reason to blame the victim. Look at the implicit assumptions we're supposed to make in the story you shared, like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud. Like they hadn't built this m…

> Like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud.

It's entirely possible that a hack/fraud like this existed at a relatively small scale that was 'tolerable' to the business, but subsequently became more popular to the extent it became unsustainable to continue to offer the guarantee.

I could easily image that happening a couple of ways -

* a 'life hack' like mentioned gets spread around in forums/online, raising awareness of the 'hack' which sees return volumes increase beyond what they had modelled/expected when pricing the cost of the guarantee into their product

* The above, combined with the growth in peer-to-peer used clothing sales (things like Vinted in the UK, or ThreadUp? in the US) means there's money to be made taking advantage of things like this - people could absolutely earn a living/earn money finding used clothes in thrift stores, cashing in on the manufacturer guarantee and then reselling the subsequent items on via peer-to-peer sales as unused/unwanted clothing where they'd undoubtedly make a sizeable mark-up vs. the cost of buying potentially quite used clothing in a thrift-store.

On that second point - I personally know people who supplement their modest incomes by doing similar things - scouring things like Facebook marketplace/freecycle for items they know they can turn around and resell online for a small profit. Feels like way too much work per £/$ earned for me, but undoubtedly it happens).

Of course...you could be absolute right, it could just be a convenient scapegoat to point to when removing a previously offered service that the business has deemed no longer viable/not worthwhile to offer.

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