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Selling Lemons

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Re: Selling Lemons

#41

Post by mattmaroon »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

Not just The Internet. All of tech, and likely, other industries, as well. I was told that this was what happened to Etsy. When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real, handmade goods, at fairly high prices. Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-lo. The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale. I see this happening everywhere.

I now throw public festivals and it happens in meatspace too if you don’t actively prevent it. One minute that brand new themed festival is all vendors making cool clocks out of old vinyl, local glassblowers, local apiarists.

Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu.

Curation is the answer.

Re: Selling Lemons

#42

Post by mattmaroon »

jamestimmins wrote: post #12

I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it. Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree. Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.

Amazing how fast I just went from “yeah Amazon does kind of suck these days” to ordering something there.

Re: Selling Lemons

#43

Post by fsckboy »

just a quibble, a lemon market is not a stage of a market, it's a market with information asymmetry which affects prices which affects market participation.

the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those products.

used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you discovered that you have been ripped off on a purchase, you have an incentive to unload what you bought, and you could call that a lifecycle stage of a product, but "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets.

also, the term lemon refers to the slang "lemon cars", cars with defects, and has nothing to do with a market for lemons where people seek the sour taste.

Re: Selling Lemons

#44

Post by maxwellg »

jamestimmins wrote: post #12

I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it. Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree. Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.

I’ve bought several of the WAOAW sleep masks as well. They’re great for the price point - I have a nasty habit of forgetting them in hotel beds though. I tend to go through one every few years or so. My wife enjoys hers as well.

Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?

Re: Selling Lemons

#46

Post by Rooster61 »

somenameforme wrote: post #18
reactordev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. I went to school for this very purpose. It led me down a maze of software engineering jobs and eventually prof serv that I'm in now. (Yey?) The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to create a website, create a game, create anything, content or otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with their best intentions…

Reviews are the filter. They can be gamed, and that's a real issue, but it's combatable. And in any case even if you get the market down to just 'thing with good reviews' and 'thing with good [fake] reviews' that's much more manageable. So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not especially difficult if you have something half decent.

> Reviews are the filter.

While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.

Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.

Re: Selling Lemons

#47

Post by johnfn »

> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform

I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.

There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.

Re: Selling Lemons

#48

Post by chubot »

toss1 wrote: post #37
thiele wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the MZOO sleep mask as well and it’s the best I’ve found after trying a bunch of different brands. I bought a second as a backup and would rebuy in the future if needed.

This thread of comments seems like very nice example of "The exception that proves the rule". Both are satisfied to have found good products, and somewhat surprised, at least tacitly acknowledging by even finding it worth commenting, that the productscape overall is basically a sea of lemons. Cool

Yeah that is nice, but ironically we can only have this discussion because Hacker News itself is not full of lemons

I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"

Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".

So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"

(Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think, although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)

Re: Selling Lemons

#49

Post by bitwize »

righthand wrote: post #35
rusk wrote: post #14

There’s definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market. So hard to get one that’s “nice” y’know what I mean. There are some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct. In the high street, it’s lemons all the way down. Even reputable brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple’s whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon. The only time they came close, inc…

Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons: https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-... Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone…

The first 2006 Intel MacBook Pros had a bad batch somewhere. I knew a bunch of guys who bought one as soon as they came out, and within a week every single one of those MBPs was in the shop. I bought a $900 Compaq Athlon64 laptop. It still works today and never needed repairs.

Re: Selling Lemons

#50

Post by volkk »

thiele wrote: post #17
jamestimmins wrote: post #12

I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it. Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree. Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.

I have the MZOO sleep mask as well and it’s the best I’ve found after trying a bunch of different brands. I bought a second as a backup and would rebuy in the future if needed.

Turns out this entire article is thinly veiled marketing for the MZOO sleep mask :D
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