The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality • Hacker News Board

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#631

Post by microtonal » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #568

WalterBright wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?

Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products. The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in t…

Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so.

We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#632

Post by trod1234 » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #326

ants_everywhere wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline. The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate. This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it…

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article: > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer. For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization bel…

You are talking in circles while missing the point, and ignoring quite a lot of established literature on economics.

I'd suggest if you are limited on time that you read Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. You seem to conflate need for demand in your examples. The two are not the same.

Need includes anyone who could benefit/find valuable from the use of something, the value being derived from productive human action.

Demand in reality includes only the people who would make an actual exchange at a specific price point. The former is a superset of the latter.

You end up misleading others, and going into delusional territory when you ignore this nuance.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#633

Post by antithesizer » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

Reading through this comment section of people whose 'big brains' won't even allow them to come to the correct conclusion about whether or not products have declined in quality over time, I am awestruck by the fact that knowledge of anything is ever possible under any circumstances.

Truly, human beings deserve no respect. Only pity.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#634

Post by lumb63 » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #494

lotsofpulp wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history. Value has always been subjective, people in previous eras simply didn’t have the tools or technology to figure it out as quickly as today. For exam…

Yes it is lower quality: doesn’t look as good as massive wood or other quality wood, less stable, breaks or loosens up after moves, so light that it easily falls over and must be anchored, etc. What you’re saying is that low quality furniture is worth it to you for various reasons.

You and parent comment are not going to see eye to eye because of different definitions of “quality”. They are using the term synonymously with the economic idea of “utility”. To them, a higher-quality item is that which provides them the most value.

To the contrary, you are using “quality” to mean something else; maybe you could elaborate on what “quality” is to you, what characteristics make something “high quality”, and why the categories you’ve used to measure quality are the “right ones”.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#635

Post by boomlinde » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #567

boomlinde wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that this is a challenge my assumption. You are talking about the lack of information and of alternatives; factors in how the demand for poor quality products can exist. That naturally affects where the balance point is, but I don't think that rebuts or even addresses my fundamental assumption. In my view there is such a balance point regardless of how the demand has come to exist. A market without perf…

Let me be clear, I didn’t mean I disagree with the rest of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow with my comment. Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive). It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone w…

> Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).

I'm talking about "perfect information" in the ideal, economic sense: in this case knowledge of every piece of information that could affect a consumption choice. With perfect information you would of course know which brands gave the best value for the money. All brands would necessarily compete by being the brand that gave the most value for the money for different segments of consumers with different ideas of what exactly "the most value" entails. A company that could produce equivalent goods and sell at lower prices would leave competitors in the dust, because you would know about it and have no reason to consider other options.

Of course, the $100 dress that lasts for 10 years might still be less valuable than a $9 dress of similar appearance that lasts for one year in those terms, depending on how much of a cost there is to making the purchase in itself and disposing of the broken dresses.

> I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.

There certainly was a fashion industry and an awareness of ongoing trends, but I don't think the pace of dissemination and proliferation of new trends was nearly as high then as it is now. I don't know, but I'm betting that the pace picked up when television became a commonplace household item and then again with the advent of social media.

I also don't think they could have produced a $9 1/10 durability alternative to the $100 dress. The difference in production cost between shoddy products and high quality products may have been smaller with the state of the art of the 1940s in terms of production chains, alternative materials, labor, time.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#636

Post by hylaride » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

breppp wrote: post #586

WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

i'll try mine because they are a fantasy of people who have never once in their life seen what happens to a company with a strong union or excessive worker power, they become repressive towards newer employees among other things

I'll half-disagree. There are situations where "workers" having a seat at the table can produce favourable outcomes. Some German companies have union representation on the board and it results in workers sometimes willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, so long as they also then benefit if an upside materializes. It can also benefit the company as the top-down decisions can also receive comments and concerns from a different viewpoint within the company.

But it's also very much a cultural thing. The anglosphere tends to treat CEOs and corporate leaders as the smart drivers of corporate success, where as Germany and other European companies are more comfortable with some collective ways of working.

There's benefits to both models, but there's no arguing against the fact that the "anglo" way does seem much more successful at the entrepreneurial stages, especially with new ideas and industries.

I myself prefer the anglo-model, but I try my best to find places that appreciate and trust their workers. I also find myself appreciating goods that last a lifetime from "boring, but stable" companies. People like Jack Welch and his acolytes ruin companies.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#637

Post by atoav » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

SpaceNugget wrote: post #455

atoav wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image…

> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the…

> That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard.

Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem.

I too could envision a solution that theoretically works perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool – now I have a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain resolutions, etc.

I get that more data means higher frequency and that this directly translates to more problems, but nobody (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn't work 100% of the times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic failure.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#638

Post by 0xabe » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #497

cyanydeez wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to factor in planned obsolescence. The fundamentals of the market simply does not make sense when your product is cheap and lifecycle is long. Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed and for them to maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.

A lightbulb is a fascinating example, because there’s an argument to be made that a “minimum government specification” lightbulb would be superior to what the market provides (read: under-spec’d cheap caps that die due to heat https://www.edn.com/ensure-long-lifetimes-from-electrolytic-... ).

I’m tired of having to replace whole LED light fixtures instead of being able to replace a bulb. I am currently waiting on a special order to arrive with 2 fluorescent light fixtures. I refuse to put up more LED fixtures that will go bad in another 2 years.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#639

Post by atoav » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 7:13 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #552

atoav wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image…

> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, t…

Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers).

HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#640

Post by trod1234 » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

gtowey wrote: post #575

Der_Einzige wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz. I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials. Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big bran…

It's not just being stupid, it's that the information space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google to search for companies direct…

The noise is so loud, you can't find any signal. Shannon's Limit has been reached.

Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.

Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing, construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting things that look the same but aren't the same.

With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once). Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely strong).

You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops, or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).