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- Hacker News
- In certain personal projects, I have the opposite philosophy where I don't want quality. I got addicted to designing models and 3D-printing them a year ago. Over time, I learned to reduce the amount of safety factor and make items just strong enough for their application - which saves material and printing time. I wouldn't skimp on something like a carrying handle for the printer, where failure would mean damaging the printer. But I would reduce the amount of plastic used in things like art pieces (3DBenchy - who needs structural strength?), end caps for various objects, prototypes for dimensioning. Moreover, sometimes I'm happy to see my parts break because I was thinking of redesigning it or did so already, hence I would be itching to print the new version. Aside from that, just knowing I can reprint a part anytime (without modifications) makes me much less worried about breaking or losing a part.by nayuki
- True … I’m the same, but I consider that good engineering. Designing it with the use in mind, factoring in all the stresses adequately but only just. That’s more like how an airplane is made: weight/strength only where it’s truly necessary.
I wouldn’t say that’s low quality though, just something with a lot more care put into it.
by switchbak - …are you willing to pay for it though? If yes, is there enough of you? If yes, is there a way to tell low quality from high?by baq
- I think we're asking too much of buyers here. You shouldn't need to learn about fabrics and stitching, then check who owns the brand now, just to buy a shirt that lasts.by lateatdesk
- So, given reality, how would you suggest this gets done?
- Easy solution if you like tariffs: all imported items over $100 must have a 10 year full warranty.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
by Animats - Comment is unrelated to the link, except that both have the word "Warranty".by gowld
- Is it easy? What if an organization avoids liability through shell companies and financial engineering?
"The company managing your warranty was acquired by Foobar Inc and their sole building burned down destroying all records. We apologize for the inconvenience."
by pphysch - I understand the strong desire to help the environment, but why lead with that? I think it's become apparent that the average person doesn't really care about the environment. People do care about maximum convenience and minimal cost , which usually leads to waste. We should try harder to create a system that aligns the incentive of taking care of the Earth than we try to force people to care about the environment. Remember, if your reasoning is that "if people would just XYZ", it's bad reasoning.by camd32
- Maybe for Americans but certain countries the people there do on average care.by 0dayz
- According to page 116 of the report of this EU survey: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3752, Sweden and Denmark have climare change as their number 1 and number 2 most important topics to be addressed in the European Parliament respectively. It makes sense to extend that to the OP which is norwegian and say that a lot of the target audience probably cares
I do however agree that making the cheapest/best solutions also be good for the environment would be ideal.
by roer - This is a false pretense. Quality was never the norm.
What is no longer the norm is getting first-hand experience with a product before you buy it. Everything comes in the mail and it's a surprise to the consumer after they buy it. That's nuts!
by danesparza - Seriously. Did this person never have to fix relatives' IE6?
- I agree with this. It's curious that we always talk about "things used to last forever and weren't only made by corporations chasing infinite growth", when those things are often still available, but are almost invisible because we now discover everything through social media or SEO.
You can find great-quality, long-lasting products at great prices (great price doesn't equal cheap, but great for what you get).
I use capable LLMs on high reasoning to run a prompt like this:
"I want to buy a high-quality [category] that will/has/can [requirements here]. I do not want to pay for a brand name that doesn't improve.
Start by finding manufacturing clusters in [region of the world, e.g. Europe] where [category] is made, then find the businesses making [category] in that cluster that I can buy from.
Normal online stores are okay, but also try non-obvious avenues:
-local business registers -stores that may only be available in the local language -factories that sell samples directly" -cooperatives that sell products from multiple local manufacturers
(I modify this prompt, but it's the skeleton)
To verify a given product/brand/store, a great follow-up prompt has been:
"Now find me big brands offering a product of similar quality (ideally measured by objective characteristics) and show me how much it is vs. [store name here]"
This has showed me incredible finds. It's become how I buy most things that go beyond basic trinkets, and I often pay less for far higher quality.
by FinnLobsien - Could your post some example result, so we can judge by ourselvesby mrheosuper
- I personally see two effects that are very detrimental here:
1) "Quality brands", where you pay a premium to get high quality/durability products, are economically incentivized to "sell-out" (cash in the brand name by producing as cheaply as possible). This is because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important than anything else.
2) Increasing trend towards no-name products (or ephemeral brands). This means that producers can sell cheap trash with no drawback whatsoever; slightly more expensive quality products become unmarketable because every customer will assume you're just trying to sell them the same cheapest shit for more.
I used to think that brand products were a universal money waste for suckers, but now I think they can be a very valuable mechanism.
What would really help in my view though is to force companies to stick with their brand, to incentivize them to invest into it and to make "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
by myrmidon - > is to force companies to stick with their brand
Punishment is never a good long term solution. Because punishment is related to revenge. And revenge reinforces the punishment - but on the other side.
Perhaps questioning the underlying assumptions we make about products, money and capitalism is an alternative approach:
- money is just a means, not an end. Allowing faceless investors to pump money into brands and then have them force companies to turn a profit at any price (i.e. by decreased quality at higher prices - it's a brand after all). The euphemism for this is "increasing shareholder value". The only value being increased is money.
- why does advertising build on our fears of being "different" (not belonging to our assumed peer group) or "not being happy" (if you buy this product, you'll be as happy as the person shown here in the advertising). Or missing out on something. The euphemism here is "increasing brand awareness". They that shout the loudness will remain memorable.
- why has everything and everyone become a product to be sold and repackage to fit into the latest trends. Intelligence is now also become a product in the form of AI with folks outsourcing their intelligence to a machine "oh AI can do this better than I could so I won't even bother".
Unfortunately we make too many assumptions that it has to be this way. Science and nature have yet found the unifying law of capitalism or brandism, let allow law of influencism.
So until the next bubble bursts and much time is spent saving large bloated inefficient corporations from bankruptcy because interested parties have their fingers in the pie, the game will continue.
The whole thing is becoming a giant game of monopoly with no end. At least monopoly eventually ends with the winner gloating over their success and everyone else quietly walking away.
by Towaway69 - Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!by mattacular
- Something I've noticed is every maybe 3-4 years there's a new "hot person athleisure" brand that appears, prices at a premium, bombards social media, drapes every single person you see running outside in your city in full sets from it, before getting turned out and replaced by basically the same exact thing with a different name.
So they've gotten quite good at the pump n dump of getting everyone in the spin class on some new $300 polyester outfit every two weeks. It is probably brutally formulaic how refined the playbook is for these sorts of companies.
by asdff - I see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.
As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.
I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.
by vladms - > "cashing out" on good brands a universally bad decision.
For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.
It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.
People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.
Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.
by DanielHB - > Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important
That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.
That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.
by kqr - One big problem is that prices are easy to compare, while quality is not.
I recently bought a tub that was advertised as stainless steel on Amazon. I was suspicious but decided to take a chance. Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way. But the difference matters significantly in terms of performance and quality, especially for certain kinds of products and use cases.
There’s no “sort by quality, best to worst” system like there is for price. No “genuine stainless only” filter. You just have to know certain things.
Shopping in person obviously helps, but you still have to know what to look for. Refrigerators are a good example of this. Most people shop for them in person, yet it’s not at all obvious whether model A or model B will last longer. You can try to use price as a proxy for quality, but the more expensive refrigerators are actually more likely to fail years earlier because of the added component complexity. They’re basically banking on the fact that you don’t know how to read a wiring diagram.
To combat that, lots of people turn to YouTube or reviews to figure out quality. And sure, you can find some good sources that will tell you that top freezers will last longer than a French door model at basically any price, and they might even explain why. But all of those platforms are muddied with perverse incentives, affiliate programs, sponsorships, etc. Again, not always obvious.
We need to make quality obvious. We need to make it comparable, sortable, filtrable, and guaranteed. Poor design needs to be a valid reason to return an item. Manufacturers should be required to label products with an estimated lifespan. Give tax breaks or other incentives to products that include a warranty for its full lifespan.
We have to figure out how to improve the efficiency of making high quality goods, so that everything doesn’t just get more expensive. There should be a public database of the best known designs and techniques for making long lasting items. Patents that relate to longevity could be given extra time to encourage research, but then after, say, 3 years there could be a requirement to license the technology so that it can go mainstream.
This doesn’t solve everything. Some products need more specific approaches. Food quality is a problem. Housing needs to be both more affordable and higher quality. But I think with enough changes to incentives, the culture could shift towards seeing the value in making things well.
by sholladay - > One big problem
This is THE biggest problem for me. I'm happy to pay for quality when I need quality. But there's almost sorcery involved in finding quality.
- A simple indicator for quality should be the return rate by brand. You need two things: a law that offers a long enough warranty, and a public registry of returns where customers can check that their return is listed.by abyssin
- I finally subscribed to consumer reports. It is the only independent place we can trust for that information. However they only review a subset of the things I want to buy.by bluGill
- Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
by pif - Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
by red369 - It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.by asdff
- Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.by narag