First, there is a huge difference between art and engineering that the author completely misses.
Because most people are not competent to judge the quality of two similar product does not mean they don't care about quality. They just usually can't tell, so they go for the cheaper (which has a higher probability of being worse). And it drives the prices down, and the quality with it. Or it reinforces monopolies, because only those who already produce at scale can produce better quality at lower price.
But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right? The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.
Then the article talks a lot about art. Interestingly, the author says "I'm pride to not understand art, but let me still explain to you how it works". And then proves it by giving contradictory examples like "people don't care about quality, they will just listen to ABBA or go to the Louvre". You have to not understand ABBA or what's in the Louvre to think like that.
So here is my rant: it's okay to be proud to not be knowledgeable about stuff. But then don't be surprised if people notice that you have no clue if you write about it.
(Yes, I noticed the irony of writing a pedant comment about a mediocre article that prides itself in being mediocre and criticises pedantry :-) ).
I agree. I have made a lot of recent purchases of things for which I would be willing to pay a premium for something better (e.g. more durable washing machine) but where I settled for cheap and not obviously bad because I do not know how to verify the more expensive option is actually higher quality.
> And then proves it by giving contradictory examples like "people don't care about quality, they will just listen to ABBA or go to the Louvre".
True. IMO what is in the Louvre is of higher quality than anything you are likely to find in "some little art gallery showcasing new artists". Is the article seriously arguing that it is probable that some little gallery will have works better than the Mona Lisa?
The problem is that nowadays even companies that have/had a reputation for high quality are cutting corners to increase their margins.
This. I used to spend time researching more premium purchases. Now either the quality of the brands I love has diminished, their prices have skyrocketed, or there are too many players thanks to the ease of standing up e-commerce that I fall back to the mid-range thing. This is especially true with clothes.
I'm not sure if quality is objective or subjective, especially when referring to art.
I read this anecdote somewhere:
A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."
Could have said the same thing about "Starry Night".
> A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."
I wonder, is the quote trying to say something about pretentious audiences, or about pretentious curators?
The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives. Now, I'm not saying "it's terrible", just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".
People speak of Lisa del Giocondo's "enigmatic expression": I see simply a neutral, resting face, there is no enigma for me.
The composition? No, the background has some of the flaws used today to identify AI generated images: Look at the waterline on the right, just below her eye-line, that's at an angle, and contradicts the elements on the other side of her head.
This isn't to diss Leonardo, he and his peers had to invent a lot from first principles, and that's much more difficult than learning the same techniques from others; but at the same time, the fact that we don't need to invent it all from scratch and we can learn from others, means that it's much easier to get to a higher quality standard today — and the corollary, if you want to be seen as a genius on the level of Leonardo, the bar is much higher than "do what Leonardo did with the Mona Lisa".
I prefer the version in Prado, Madrid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gioconda_(copia_del_...
(Now one I will say "it's terrible", to the horror of those that love it, is Der Kuss by Klimt: the woman's head is at such an angle it seems to have been disconnected from her body, rotated 90°, and reattached at the ear).
We don't consider it a masterpiece because we think nobody could do something like that nowadays. We consider it a masterpiece because back then, it was a masterpiece. And we have had time to compare a lot of work from that era and we can say that Da Vinci was worth it.
This particular painting (Mona Lisa) is indeed famous because it got stolen, and that's also why people wait in line to take a selfie with it and completely ignore "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" that is in the next room. But still, its quality is undeniable. As is the quality of the other paintings around. Then of course, you may like the painting or not, that's orthogonal.
Da Vinci started a painting technique called "Sfumato", which is used there. Many other painters used and developed that technique, of course, but it means that Da Vinci created something meaningful there. Famous painters usually had an impact in their time.
We can say that da-vinci, bernini, and cervantes did care about quality, but are all held at a remove, and the story of the critic bieng repremanded, by pointing out they, he not the mona lisa was on trial, is quite exact. Facing a true master piece can be wonder, amazment and elation, or a trial and an afront. Your simple egotist now has an easy solution, by taking a selfie, in FRONT of the amazing thing, but this is leading to fist fights in order to claim the exact right spot, with then certain municipalitys and private owners, building blockades to deter self(ie) seekers. Its the difference between facing something special, or getting in the way, and we all do both one time or another.
That's the heart of it!
I think the faces in Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne looks fairly bad. I much prefer Titian's portraits.
Art is subjective, there’s no right or wrong interpretation of it, and I wouldn’t be sure there is higher or lower quality either. Would you say that a Monet is higher quality than a Banksy?
>I wonder, is the quote trying to say something about pretentious audiences, or about pretentious curators?
About tourists pretending to be a museum audience.
>The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives.
That's a myth, only applicable to mass audiences who wouldn't have the education to recognize, much less understand, the majority of what they saw in the museum in the first place. Da Vinci's work was in high esteem for centuries by the point the painting was stolen, which is also why Mona Lisa was displayed in the Louvre to begin with. That's regardless whether Joe and Jane Q. Public knew about it or read about it on magazine "must see" lists.
>just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".
LOL
>>just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".
> LOL
If it were simply the art itself, and not the name attached to it, nobody would care if a piece in the style of Leonardo was forgery or an original, they would only care if it was good.
There wouldn't even be a word for forgery, in the context of art, if it was really about the art itself.
Possibly both, I guess we're not the first ones to wonder why it's so famous. She isn't even a good looking lady, but obviously the painting must have something going for it, or some other painting would take its place.
I would put Starry Night in that place if it were my decision to make. But it's not.
> but obviously the painting must have something going for it, or some other painting would take its place.
that's exactly what everyone else thinks, and so they just take it for granted
Yeah, me too, but thankfully Starry Night is owned by New York's MOMA. So the french can't have it, but I can see it in New York.
“We all agreed to breathe harder when talking about it, and you have no right of vote here”. That’s how I perceive this art thing. It often is objective, but it’s always amplified 100x+ by some heavy breath and tonal attitude. General subjectivity doesn’t even have a voice here. That curator could use a good collar grab stare.
Doesn't it also happen in software? :-)
All the time.
Not sure why you are being downvoted here...
But yeah, defining "quality" may be difficult for art. Maybe rather for contemporary art, though. I think we tend to have some kind of consensus for older art?
Then for instance in cinema, I think it's pretty objective. It doesn't have to be related to how popular the movie is, though.
Yes, it's puzzling to me how posterity can tell if something has the quality to stand the test of time, but we, the contemporaries, cannot.
Though it seems that eventually, remarkable work does find its way up, even if the authors might not be around to enjoy the belated appraisal.
And in that case, what more can one do but do the work and hope for the best?
Which washing machine did you get? I researched them a bit last year when I needed to buy one (for the first time in my life) and my takeaway was basically that all the "premium" models are crap now too, except perhaps for a few quasi-commercial models (Speed Queen comes up a lot) that are probably more reliable and repairable but also loud and rough on clothing.
> "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now"
That is not the proposition. A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. My sister got a Moto G Play this summer. She's perfectly happy with it. She's got a family of 5 so $550 for 5 phones is quite a deal compared to $2145 for 5 phones.
The Moto G Play also has a micro-SD slot so she can take it to 512gb for $40.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make.
I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product.
I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.
The point is, for the example you have, the difference is not 20% and that price difference is important in the tradeoff. I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. But if the difference is 400% then no, lots of people aren't going to pick higher quality as it's out of their budget, period.
A BMW/Mercedes might be a more quality car than a Kia but someone that only has a budget for a Kia isn't going to even consider a BMW/Mercedes for 2x to 8x more.
On top of that "quality" is subjective. I might agree that a Macbook Air ($999) is better than a $300 window laptop (there's tons of them) but both the Kia and the $300 Windows laptop will serve people's needs. a Kia will get them to/from work. Let them transport their kids. Etc.. A window laptop will let them browse the net, view youtube, write a resume. It's not like the Kia and windows laptop are useless. Plus, for the laptop, they can get 3 of them for the price of 1 mac. So everyone in the family gets one. It's like buying a Vizio TV for every room instead of one Sony TV for one room.
> I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality.
Right, we agree then. People do care about quality. That was my point.
> A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more.
But this is the market failure.
If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over.
At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB.
But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.
A "normal person" is a Starbucks barista making $38k/year (roughly 2000 hours at $19/hour).
That person doesn't spend 3 days' wages for "mainline kernel drivers" -- either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. To them security patches are just an inconvenience.
I don't think "if only people had the right information they'd spend money on the right things" is the right thesis -- I think it's more "why is everyone so poor? how do we make it so that more people can afford our wares?"
My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.
> either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging.
That's also exactly the point. Why is it hard or expensive to repair the device? Would they have purposely chosen a phone they have to throw away like trash and then pay more than a hundred dollars for a new one if they could get one where a new battery is $15 and can be replaced like they do the batteries in their TV remote?
> My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.
Or people have realized that they only use their phone for maps and texting and they don't need a flagship if they're just going to throw it in the trash in two years anyway.
Because repairability has tradeoffs
The biggest tradeoff being that customers don't have to buy a new phone as soon.
> the median Android device spec was actually going down.
What is so great about the top end phone that I should get one? They all have cameras (plural) with more pixels than I can see. They all have a fair amount of storage.... Sure the top end models have more of everything, but is there anything that I as a user would notice?
I was one of the first to have an Android back when the G1 came out - the hardware was lacking, but any phone from 4 years later was good enough (except none had a slide out keyboard that was so much nicer than touch screens)
It's not a "failure" - people don't owe you to behave in ways that are approved by you. They have different priorities, and you can tell them they "actually" need something else until you blue in the face, but they'll buy what they want, even after your disapproval.
Having different priorities is not the same as having different (i.e. less) information. In one case they just want something different, in the other they're not getting what they want because the sellers are taking advantage of an information asymmetry to screw them.
What kind of information do you think would allow you to make the market of the phones substantially different than it is now?
If you think the problem is information, the sales of iPhones is about $200 billion per year. I am pretty sure that whatever is the information you are thinking about, it is possible to deliver it to the vast majority of the customer base for the small fraction of this sum. Which would allow to capture if not the whole market, than the significant portion of it - billions-sized portion. Why do you think nobody thought about doing it before you?
Lots of people thought about doing it.
The problem is this: What people want is existing phones with some minor alterations that make them last longer and be easier to repair, which wouldn't significantly affect the manufacturing cost but would reduce future sales across the industry, because many people could buy a phone and be good for ten years. So the large incumbents like Apple and Samsung don't even offer this, because they have such high market share that losing industry-wide future sales costs them more than making more current sales, and also they have such high market share that they were already the ones getting the current sales.
Then we would expect some smaller company to come by and eat their lunch, right? And you get ones like Fairphone and Librem that make the attempt, but those aren't just "Samsung Galaxy with a removable battery and open source drivers" because Samsung also won't sell you 95% of their existing phone wholesale and let you make those couple of changes people want. So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company, and then the other aspects of the phone aren't competitive, or the price isn't. It's possible that someone will eventually get this right, but that doesn't mean that it's easy, and in the meantime the large incumbents are screwing everyone because the market is insufficiently competitive.
Lots of people thought about doing lots of things. Thinking about doing it and actually successfully doing it are two very, very different things, as any startup entrepreneur can tell you.
> So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company,
Why a big company doesn't do it then? I mean, there are a lot of big companies not having a phone, and a bunch of big companies that used to have a phone and now don't. You'd think they'd do the easy thing and just add the extra 5% and eat Apple's lunch - but somehow they don't. Maybe that lunch is not as easily eatable as you think it is.
> You'd think they'd do the easy thing and just add the extra 5% and eat Apple's lunch - but somehow they don't.
Because the market failure is the size of the companies in the market. If you're big enough to sink the resources to make a competitive phone from scratch then you're expecting to capture a large chunk of the market, in which case you'll behave like a large incumbent with the incentive to sell disposable phones.
To avoid this you need to bust up the vertical integration that makes it hard for small companies to make a competitive phone so that it's possible for a small company to make a device which is overall competitive while they're still hungry enough for market share to give customers what they want.
If you say "people" want something else than what is offered now, then by providing this something else you should be able to capture a lot of the market. Example: Apple produced an iphone, but some people wanted more open, not-so-closed-garden, customizable, moddable phone. And they wanted an OS to go with it. And here it it, Android and a booming Android phone market. Yes, a giant - Google - owns the OS. But another giant - which are many around - could dislodge them if they slept at the wheel.
Another example: Microsoft owned the browser market with their Explorer. Then they fell asleep at the wheel and now Chrome owns the market. Sure, again, it took Google to do it, but it can be done. And it will be done again - when there is a substantial unsatisfied market need.
If this is not happening for a long time, then I think it's time to consider the possibility that it's not that the "market" "fails", but just your ideas about what people should want are not the same as what people actually want. If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.
> If you say "people" want something else than what is offered now, then by providing this something else you should be able to capture a lot of the market.
Suppose you could capture a lot of the market in the sense that the installed base of people using your phones goes from 25% to 40%, but then your repeat customer interval goes from an average of 3 years to 9 years. Your future sales outlook would be down. You're not going to do it.
Now suppose that your existing installed base is below 1%, or you're a new company and it's zero, and by doing this you could capture even 3% of the market. Then you do have the incentive to do it, as long as that percentage of the market can recover your R&D for developing a competitive phone to begin with. But what happens if the existing market is vertically integrated, so you have to do a lot of unrelated work from scratch instead of starting with a competitive reference design? Then your R&D costs are much higher and you don't do it.
And then nobody is making the competitive phone that people want.
> If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.
Let's pick some random midrange device; Samsung A35. It's ~$265, has 8 cores at >2GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2k display, etc. All I want is that with a removable battery and the ability to run a mainline Linux kernel. These are similar specs to the Fairphone 5, which doesn't yet appear to run a mainline linux kernel (they're working on it), but that's $800. Even at that price they're selling them, but which phone is the open competitor in the A35's price range? Can you identify anyone offering this device?
You can't say the market doesn't want something the market isn't offered.
The vertical integration is why the $110 phone exists in the first place…
If you arbitarily move the pricing bar then of course there may be more competitive small companies, relative to the new baseline.
> The vertical integration is why the $110 phone exists in the first place…
There is no evidence of that. If anything more vertically integrated devices (e.g. iPhone, Samsung flagships) cost more, because a vertically integrated market increases barriers to entry and impairs competition.
A Samsung phone might very well have a Samsung CPU with Samsung RAM and Samsung flash made in Samsung fabs with a Samsung battery and a Samsung screen. Galaxy S24 Ultra, ~$1000.
Meanwhile, the $110 phone was the Moto G Play. That's a Qualcomm CPU with Samsung RAM, a "Motorola"-branded battery which is probably Sanyo or Panasonic, and a third party screen and flash because Motorola doesn't make those either. It's $110 because it's full of fungible commodity parts.
The issue is, some of them -- especially that CPU -- are poorly documented and full of tightly integrated but closed source firmware/drivers. Which has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost of the hardware. A fully-documented open-source RISC-V CPU is not going to cost more.
“No evidence”… according to who?
Based on what arguments that such evidence does not exist?
The phones market is completely distorted by several kinds of anti-competitive and purposeful social-engineering forces.
For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.
That is not the proposition. For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box. Is it worth it?
Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone.
Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.
> For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box
FWIW I have teenage kids, and nothing like this has ever happened in their lives.
It seems to me like you are an expert on rationalizing expensive purchases. If that's unconscious, I think it would be good for you to bring it to conscious awareness.
While I disagree with your first paragraph, the other two are spot on. When comparing prices of tech products, people focus too much on the percentage difference, while the dollar difference is not that significant. Depending on the person making the purchase. Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.
> Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.
This is ignoring that many people “afford” these purchases on credit.
To answer this question properly she would have to use both and then make a judgement, no?
> But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?
Wrong. Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now. That’s a problem for tomorrow, hunger is felt now.
That’s why most people choose the cheap option, not some inability to evaluate quality.
I think this is less common than you would assume. Yes, there is a 'poor tax' on low quality items that are more expensive in the long run, but also people have gotten burned enough times paying more for an item that still turned out to be crap, so it's hard to justify taking the risk on such an investment.
I think this is true as well. Paying more does not mean higher quality. There are a few brands which seem to release quality products consistently (Apple etc) that paying more is justified but for many others it is just not worth it.
Getting the cheapest product always means worse quality. The biggest jump in cost/benefit is between the cheapest product and the second cheapest. So if you only care about price, you should always get the second cheapest product, which will almost guarantee at least 50% better quality than the cheapest. After that, the ratio is diminishing.
> Getting the cheapest product always means worse quality.
Not true. New entrants to markets often will price to undercut markets (see Uber and Airbnb in their early days). Also loss leaders are a very much a thing.
Over time markets do typically stabilize and this could be true.
The cheapest accommodation will usually not be listed on AirBnB or Booking, because of severe short-comings meaning the platform won't do business with them for any price.
As for Uber, I guess you're right in many regions. But there's a plethora of Uber competitors around the world, offering a worse experience for a cheaper price.
In 100% of cases, the cheapest product you can find will be of significantly worse quality than the second cheapest product, without bringing much savings. The rest is edge cases.
As you pointed out, I'm talking about reasonably mature markets.
In my country, studies regularly show that the cheapest toothpaste or shampoo (and other similar products) are some of the best. I would consider that mature.
I think it's an interesting heuristic, though.
> Paying more does not mean higher quality.
Exactly! It is actually hard to estimate the quality of a product. And when you can't, most of the time you go for the cheaper one (unless money doesn't matter much for you).
Or you use brand as a proxy for quality and buy the Apple one without actually knowing why or how it’s “better”
In which case you obviously care about quality. That's all I'm saying: people do care about quality.
On average, the people I know to have expensive phones and very big TVs are a lot poorer than the people with cheaper phones. The former eat domino's pizzas. There's a lot more psychological effect at play than just price and amount of food in the table.
Back in the 1990s when researchers went to write about millionaires they discovered most people who look rich are in debt such that they have less to live on day to day than poor people - they have nicer houses and toys but for their day to day budget they are in trouble. When they found people who had a high net worth they were living in poor neighborhoods and otherwise looked poor - but their bank account was big. Then they wrote "The millionaire next door".
After looking at life I've concluded both are wrong ways to live. you should save 10% for retirement (that is a good number for discussion but I'm open to other numbers). Spend the rest on toys - but don't go into debt. You can't take it with you, and do not know for sure that you will be healthy enough to do whatever activity you are saving up for in retirement. (at 50 my body is already such that I don't think any amount of training could get me ready to climb Mt Everest - good thing that was never my dream because it is too late. I could have done that at 30 if I wanted and there are plenty of less extreme things I can still do)
> Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now.
Most of the population in the US has an iPhone. If you were right, they would most definitely have a cheaper phone.
Because they are on contract. Your point does not refute the earlier, it is a cashflow issue. Most people buy phones on contract and pay X per month over Y months rather than paying X*Y total upfront.
And getting an iPhone on contract is cheaper than getting a cheaper Android on contract?
They are around the same price. Given that, most people opt to use an iPhone, for reasons more cultural than quality wise (blue vs green bubble, network effects, apps they want to use, etc), given that high end Androids have similar quality levels.
So when I ask if the iPhone are more expensive than Android, your answer is "given that they go for iPhone or high end Androids, they are the same price"? It means that some contracts are cheaper, for cheaper Androids, right?
Not sure I understand.
A significant number of people have enough money that they can decide between options that cost less or more. Otherwise we wouldn't have $2000 phones or TVs that range from $500-100.000. If the number of people with sufficient budget to choose between options was so small that we can ignore it in this discussion, no manufacturer would bother with market segmentation.
However, they do bother, so it's wrong to just assume baseline that most people just care about the cheapest option because that's all they can afford and that we shouldn't bother.
Many of us strive to get the best possible deal within a budget which satisfies our preferences and delivers a certain amount of quality. The fact that most of us don't have an unlimited budget makes it all the more important to us and this discussion that manufacturers can skimp on quality in a way that's unrecognisable to 99% of the market until a certain amount of time has passed. This has other consequences than just "it's cheaper but it's shitter and we don't know how much shittier". It allows utter bullshit like "I bought this $200 Xbox controller and the bumper broke after 3 months and I got it replaced twice and now the replacement is broken again after another 2 months". And all we can do is shrug because that's just what modern manufacturing is like. Skimping on everything while setting a price point as high as they can get away with using marketing.
Lots of the population isn't paying up-front for their phone, and the monthly fee on a longer lasting phone would be lower in a competitive market.
- [deleted]
> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.
I disagree with this.
Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.
One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.
With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.
Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.
I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.
It feels like we are not talking about the same thing. I totally agree with you regarding "luxury". Buying a luxury Swiss watch can be somewhere between status signaling or art; you don't need a luxury Swiss watch to get sufficient time precision.
But I was talking about quality: how does one compare two laptops costing respectively 400$ and 800$? It regularly happens to me that friends ask help choosing a laptop. Sometimes they blindly trust me when I say "in your situation, I would buy that". Often though, they're more like "okay but you like computers so of course you would want a 'rolls-royce', but for me I think the cheaper one will be enough". Where actually my opinion was that both are not good enough for me, but the cheaper one is a piece of crap for everybody and the less cheap one is good enough for this particular friend.
The thing is, I can't blame them for not knowing how to compare two laptops. And the one thing they understand is price: they see two laptops that look similar, and one of them is half the price. The assume similar quality and therefore go for the cheaper.
Again, it's not that they don't care about quality, it's that they fail to estimate it.
I'm not sure computers are a good example, there are objective tests that can be made to compare two computers, or at least numbers to point at to explain to your friends why one is better than the other.
Are you sure? Before buying the laptop, which test can you (or some reviewer) run that will say if the keyboard will start having issues after 6 months or if the lid will break after 10?
When you look at the numbers (I presume you mean the number of CPUs, their frequency, the amount of RAM, etc), on the paper they all have something similar. How do you know if one has higher-quality RAM than the other?
There are lines of products (like macbooks or thinkpads) where you can check the quality of earlier models, but macbooks and thinkpads are on the higher end. My friends who want Windows don't go for thinkpads...
I agree with this. For a lot of people where midrange-ish kind of specs more than fulfil their compute needs, the spec list practically doesn't matter. So long as they tick some basic numbers it'll be fine. With their needs a gig of RAM is a gig of RAM for the most part.
But that's not really the thing with the laptop recommendation question. It then comes down to how good of a hinge on the screen. How much flex does the body have when you actually hold it and use it. How janky are the ports. Does the trackpad and keyboard feel terrible to use? Do you feel like you risk cracking it in half tossing it in a backpack and carrying it across town? These are things where there aren't necessarily hard benchmarks and can be difficult to ascertain by just looking at listing photos.
Outside of some things like Thinkpads and Macbooks I often have a difficult time making real laptop recommendations without actually going to the store and holding the machine or hearing a trusted(ish) reviewer comment on the relative build qualities. It can be pretty easy to tell case rigidity when its in your hands. You can tell if a hinge feels like crap or not moving the screen a few times.
Where are the objective tests between touchpads, which is one of the most important ergonomic aspects of computer usage, and where MacBooks have been way ahead of competition for about two decades? Just the touchpad adds $200 value to a MacBook compared to other laptops.
I'm not sure how you are disagreeing with the comment you are replying to.
> With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.
So you agree that when people can actually perceive quality, they car about it, right
Didn't you just prove their point / agree with your post? The German car pricing example fits right in the "people can't judge quality adequately and marketing does the rest" narrative:
People buy overpriced cars that are not actually high quality.
or
You/marketing are telling me about how these chinese cars are higher quality and I should by them. While most people have no Idea whether "green engines" are good or bad. I could take your word for it and believe that they are inefficient. But that sounds bogus given that efficiency is a cornerstone of "green".
For the tools that we use day-to-day and week-to-week, it should be impossible for us to not be a judge of quality. A have a tale of ladles... those pieces of kitchenware that we use to slop soup into our bowls. For years and years, I'd only had really horrible, shitty ladles. Those plastic-handled, plastic-everything-ed pieces of garbage that Walmart buys in volume for 3 cents each and sells for $12.99, you know the ones I'm talking about. With bizarro neon-green colors that are so flexible that you know there must be three dozen banned-in-the-United-States plasticizers in them.
And if you could find one that's just plain stainless steel (with or without a nice wood handle), it was paper-thin steel, stamped into shape, that no one had ever bothered to grind/polish the burrs off the edge.
Then, just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were checking out this tiny little Korean grocery store. And the owner apparently orders everything from some Korean supplier. He had several different sizes of ladels. Stainless, in what must be 3/16ths, all the edges soft and beveled. The shape was nice too, not something rough and rushed, but looking like someone who cared about design actually spent time on that. And the small one was like $3.89 and the large was $7-something. This did not come from a Chinese factory.
Am I a world-renowned ladle expert? Do I have a PhD in ladelology? No. Hell, as a utensil, it's probably one that I only use twice a year. I couldn't design a die to make one of these, I couldn't tell you if the hydraulic press needed to be 50tons or 250tons, I'm not very knowledgeable at all about any detail that matters. I just care (some interesting psychology there... childhood trauma or something).
I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use. Everyday experience should suffice, and the only people who might not manage that are kids who have just recently graduated and mama's not doing their laundry for them anymore.
I understand that you generally agree with me: people care about quality.
> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.
In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.
Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.
Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.
> In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.
Isn't it a bit puzzling that inferior ladles proliferate, though? You don't need to work in catering or have any particular training to recognise superior ladles, but it's more difficult to buy a ladle of reasonable quality than an inferior one. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons:
1) Because a sufficiently large proportion of buyers are too inexperienced to know better? Maybe they'll choose the high-quality option next time. This could explain buyers' behaviour - often including mine - but I don't think it explains the behaviour of retailers or manufacturers with brands to protect.
2) Because people pay so much more attention to big purchases than small ones? You might use a ladle quite frequently, and even an inferior one might last longer than a smartphone, so it might warrant some thought even though it's inexpensive.
3) Because too many buyers are poor? If I correctly understand the comment you're replying to, the inferior ladles were actually actually less expensive, but cost could contribute to other cases of buyers choosing worse value products.
4) Because people are suggestible, and the decision about which to buy is partly made for them? Maybe the inferior ladles are more expensive because of the resources put into putting them in front of so many buyers.
I think that for cheap stuff, people don't think too much. They will buy what they found. But if they find a choice of 3 ladles and can know which one is better quality, then the quality will matter.
It's just that they won't spend 2 years finding a Korean store. And for manufacturers, it seems like they make more profit by just building worse quality in the first place.
And that's another point: people do care about quality. Manufacturers do not. Manufacturers care about profit. And economists believe that both align perfectly, for some reason I don't get.
Or the place you went to buy a ladle... aka the poster above suggested the Korean store, but typical bozo is in Walmart already.
I have a prefab solution: avoid shopping at Walmart and their ilk, get familiar with a wider range of stores. "Oh I'm about to go to the big city for the first time in 6 months, time to stock up on puerh tea, because i can't get it locally..."
For long time I used to think about crappy ladles and why steel ones in decent shapes not available in US stores. The kind that I had in India would last lifetime. Finally I found these kind of things in webstaurant store. Seems this kind of stuff is readily available in catering/ restaurant supply stores. Things mainstream stores sell is all inspired from Tv, media celebrity cooking etc. This stuff is more fragile but supposedly fancy looking. I now have stuff more practical, reliable and all steel (or at least part that touch food) from catering stores.
You can buy a good ladle in a US retail store, you just have to pay $30+ for it: https://www.crateandbarrel.com/crate-and-barrel-stainless-st...
For something that should last forever, $30 isn’t too bad.
It’s basically impossible to get a quality product at a Target or Walmart type store.
Crate and Barrel is decidedly for the market segment of "more money than ability to discern quality and wants social status". The last time I went into one, they had $70 ice bucket tongs that looked amazing but had no teeth, which totally defeat the point of ice tongs.
> nobody would go for the worse quality, right?
Some people would, some people wouldn't. Informing people is still important (and something that has been actively destroyed basically everywhere, for decades), so people can make the best choice for their situation.
Also, some people won't make the best choice for their situation. That's also ok for most choices.
Sure, but that's not quite what I meant.
I meant "if you could provably show them". Of course, if I tell you "this one is 20% more expensive but it will last twice as long", you have no reason to trust me. But that's a problem of trust, not a problem of how much you care about quality.
If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one. The whole idea is that people don't have a way to know about the quality for sure in advance, so they can't take the decision based on that.
> If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one.
No, it's not "completely irrational", and also not everybody acts rationally.
People exist in all kinds of contexts and situations. You won't be able to predict what the best option is for every single person.
It's a thought experiment. I am telling you: "What if, for this person, in this context and situation, we could know for sure what is the best option? Would that person go for the best option or not?" and you answer "it's not possible, you cannot know".
You are right: we cannot know (that's the reason for the debate), but that's beside the point. The point is that in my opinion, if people could know for sure about the quality when they make their choice, then quality would matter to them.
I think their point was that it can still be rational to buy the item that is 20% cheaper but will break in 50% of the time. Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.
> I think their point was that it can still be rational to buy the item that is 20% cheaper but will break in 50% of the time.
But that's not my thought experiment at all. I fix the rule for my thought experiment that is meant to convey my point. One can't change my experiment and then say that the modified experiment doesn't work...
> Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.
I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?
> But that's not my thought experiment at all.
Your claim was "if one could prove that the item which costs 25% more will last twice as long, then any rational actor would buy that one". But this is not true: a rational actor which can't afford 25% more will not care about the increased quality, they will rationally choose the shoddier good, fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast. So yes, this is exactly your thought experiment.
> I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?
It's an extremely well studied phenomenon that people don't behave like rational market actors. Unless you define "a better deal" as "the one they would be happiest with", in which case by definition anyone would prefer the "better deal".
But consider this case: some people end up caring for and loving old beat up cars that they struggle with every time they use, and that they spend inordinate amounts of money and time keeping working just one more month. Those cars objectively cost far more to maintain and have worse performance and worse externalities (pollution) than other cars they could buy. Most other people would not even buy such a car. But, again, some people love them and would not in a million years sell them to buy a "better" car. So how do we handle those people? I would call them irrational market actors. You could also call them rational market actors with a highly unexpected value function; in that case if "know for sure which one is a better deal" was specifically tailored to their unusual tastes, then you would be right, and we're just quibbling over definitions.
> fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast
Oooh, I misunderstood your "but will break in 50% of the time". I understood that you meant "knowing that they have a 50% chance of it breaking anyway". As in "you say it's better, but in reality it has a 50% chance of breaking anyway". Which was bending the rules :-).
So yeah, now that I understand it correctly, that's a valid point: if your finances are so bad that you can't afford to pay 25% now, even though you know for sure that this 25% will be compensated to the quadruple in 1-2 years, then it is rational to take the lower quality one. But I wouldn't think that this is the case for most of the western population, and importantly that wouldn't mean that people don't care about quality.
So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).
> I would call them irrational market actors.
I agree, emotional value is irrational (doesn't mean it's a bad thing). And this is a valid and interesting point! However, I believe that it is not in the scope of what the feature article described. People do not only care about quality, and people are not always rational. But the article is arguing that people don't care about quality. I am not saying that the most important thing for people is quality; I am saying that people do care about quality. As in, "given the chance, quality is part of the decision-making process". Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.
What's your opinion on that?
> So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).
No problem, I get how my language was confusing, sorry about that.
> Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.
I would agree with this, actually. People definitely do care for quality to some extent, at least for many categories of products.
You fixed the rule for your thought experiment to emulate something that doesn't exist. Congratulations, you got the result you expected, and it's completely useless.
Yes, for your thought "product" that has a single quality of "how long it lasts" the "people" that all have the universal characteristics of wanting to reuse it indefinitely and absolutely no practical restrictions to cash-flow will pick the better quality one if they are acting rationally.
I see, you're not actually interested in the discussion, you just want to win an argument. You win, I'm out.
In the case of phones lasting twice as long may not be a good thing. There are many phones out there that are old enough they don't have 5g which is standard even on the cheapest phone now. All 3g phones are junk today because no towers exist they can talk to - probably no phone left as 3g, but plenty of cars are still 3g only and thus cannot phone home (farmers paid to upgrade their tractors because they find their tractor calling home useful - the radio itself was designed to run for 50 years, but it was still obsolete)
Is it just me or is 5G not an appealing feature? When I had good 4G signal I never felt limited in terms of speed. Now that I have 5G everything’s the same. What more am I going to do on my phone besides watch one 1080p video stream?
That depends. 5G at low speeds allows for much longer range which I like when I travel in a very remote area. 5G also allows for much faster speeds at very low range, so if you are in a very crowded city you will notice. For most people most of the time they are not in such a remote area that only 5G towers can be affordably built, nor are is data so congested that they would notice the shared bandwidth limitations.
About once a year I do travel through those remote areas where my 4g phone never got service, but as soon as I got 5g I had service (there are still areas so remote I don't get 5g service either)
Economics has the idea of expressed preferences.
So for instance, with that framework, if you choose the cheaper item instead of the inconvenience of understanding the tradeoffs between the items, you obviously care less about quality than price and convenience.
You would be right if it was possible to estimate the quality of the items.
But it generally is mostly impossible. Of course you can read about the products, you can read reviews, and then you can build some kind of belief around that. "From what I read, and assuming that the company doesn't bankrupt suddenly, and assuming that they won't deploy an update that erases all my data, I believe that this one is better". But that's a belief: you don't know anything about the hardware that is inside (other than a list of a few high-level components you think you understand, maybe) or about the software that is running inside.
Yes, but that's because the cost of evaluating the quality is very high, often infeasibly so.
(Seriously, it's pretty difficult. Read reviews? They can give some idea, but it's rare that they do any rigourous testing, and they can be corrupted. Have a brand or specific model that you like and has a good reputation? How do you know they haven't started to cash in on that by cutting quality but still charging the same prices?)
This is where Project Farm provides its value. Consumer Reports ostensibly once filled a similar niche.
But building trust in brands like Project Farm or Consumer Reports suffers from the same bootstrap problem.
IMO that is economists trying to argue that the market is working when the market is actually failing.
If people would like to be informed of the tradeoffs but do not have the information the end result is not optimal.
"look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?"
But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well. But that is not always the case. Case in point my iphone which has display issues within 2 yrs and apple is expecting me to pay half the price of the device to fix it. Against my old android which is 4x cheaper and still working great after 2 yrs.
Quality should not be associated with price.
> But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well.
It's just a thought experiment. In this situation, people would probably go for the higher quality, because they would know it's higher quality.
In reality, it's very hard to assess the quality of a product, that's correct. And that's my point: people do care about quality, it's just often very hard to have a good idea about it.
>But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?
I am not sure if we are living in the same world. No most people absolutely do not make rational choices like that. No matter how you tell them.
Most importantly what you think is best for people is stil a perspective. Especially in the context of tv.
I find it incredible how many times I have to re-explain this. Between those literally trying to find which model of smartphone costs 20% and lasts twice as long and those telling me "there is no point to wonder, because we can't know in advance if it will last twice as long".
Let me restart: the article says that "most people don't care about quality". I disagree, and offer a thought experiment. It is not real, it is just a way to share an idea. "Imagine a world where a person is offered a choice between two smartphones, where one is 20% more expensive but will last twice as long. Imagine that this person confidently knows this (it is impossible in real life, but let's imagine it for the sake of this argument). And obviously, imagine that the person does not have an irrational reason that will completely ruin the experiment, like someone putting a gun on their head and telling them which one to buy. Do you think that this person will say "I will take the one that is obviously worse, because I am completely irrational", or do you think that this person will say "well, the more expensive one is apparently a better deal due to the quality guarantees I know to be true"?
The point that I am trying to make being: quality matters to people. It's not the only thing that matters, and they don't always have a way to know about the actual quality of whatever they buy. But if they could know about the quality, then it would probably be part of the decision process. Therefore it feels wrong to say "most people don't care about quality".
In real life, people don't buy the better quality products, that's a fact. But it does not mean that people don't care about quality.
>nobody would go for the worse quality, right?
people who cannot afford to go for the better quality would, in fact where Smart phones are concerned I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better and people often buy Android because they cannot afford iPhone (of course except for specific subsets of HN who will not buy Apple for various social/cultural reasons)
> I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better
I would debate that.
One thing is that iPhone is one, whereas Android is thousands. It's easier to trust an iPhone than a random Android phone. But there are certainly really good Android phones that are cheaper than iPhones. It's just hard to estimate the quality, again.
I know you are not probably part of this group - but can we stop just comparing Android to iPhones? There are Android Devices which are in a lot of metrics way better than an iPhone and vice versa a lot of iPhones better than a big set of Android devices. But still, depending on different factory like price, ecosystem, habit etc., people go for one or another. It's not 2010, where iOS has been the only (relatively) mature OS.
Really not an Android Fanboy, and had devices from both worlds but this one thing is bugging me out as it is just a blatant product of Apple's "our devices are better because our name is on it" marketing - and it's bugging me out.
This is the most natural thing I've found here in a long long time.
He also completely misses the point here:
> Audiophiles complain about MP3 compression and crappy headphones. Most of us just want to listen to our tunes, not listen to the equipment.
I won't even bother. It's not possible to discuss with people having such bogus opinions.
Agreed. This is the part of the article that I really took issue with:
> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.
There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.
In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.
All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.
>Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't. ...
>There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
I think that is the point he was trying to make. Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of "the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously." Having destroyed the ability to tell shit from shinola, they are now free to sell shit at shinola prices.
> Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of ...
Yes, they abuse whatever mean we have of judging quality to sell us their product. But that's not the point the article is trying to make, I think. That's my point: people care about quality. It's just that it's generally very hard to estimate the quality. And on top of that marketers are paid to make it harder.
> > You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
> Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end.
It's a bit of a tautology: people don't notice things that are targeted to guide them subconsciously. I don't know if that's the point the author was making; either way, it was kind of weak.
You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself. The articles is claiming that most people will not notice, even subconsciously, if, say, a laptop is well designed (say, whether it has a robust body, whether the keyboards clack, whether the function buttons and inputs are placed in usable places).
This is completely orthogonal to whether the marketing campaign for said laptop is well made and hits certain conscious or unconscious buttons to make you want the laptop.
Now, I don't agree with the author, but the reasons are completely different. I would say that differences in design that end users don't notice are not relevant. Any design school that holds that one design is better and another is worse where the end users of those products wouldn't notice the difference is, by definition, a form of snobbery and a bad school of design.
> You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself.
Why did you read this confusion into my post? Was it because I'm using YouTube thumbnails as an example or referring to A/B tests that websites employ to measure engagement?
These were concrete examples used to describe abstract concepts relating to human behaviour. The quality of a design affects how a user engages with the product, how they feel about the product and how they enjoy using it. I never really considered "marketing" in my comment at all. I was talking about demonstrable design elements (composition, mise en scene, copy, typography) and how those elements combine to affect the quality of the finished product .. and how that quality impacts user experience. This applies whether the "product" is ad copy or a physical object bought from the store.
The thumbnail of a YouTube video is marketing for that video, it's not a part of the video itself. It's commonly quite divorced in tone (and sometimes even content) from the video.
It's also a good example: you can have an excellent video, but if the thumbnail (marketing) is not spectacular enough, people won't watch it. Another example about how people care little for quality.
I think more accurately: it takes them a while to learn to judge quality, and in the meantime "at least it's cheap".
Also most people can't actually afford quality, even if they're aware in the long run it's more economical. Same reason pay day loans exist.
Yes buying one solid dining table that'll last a lifetime sounds great, but a poor person just doesn't have that dining table budget.
So I think many of these articles come down to middle class cluelessness, and sometimes narcissism. They either can't understand the situation of the poor, and so come to the conclusion they don't care about quality. Or they're fully capable of understanding but don't want to let this opportunity to subtle brag their superiority go to waste.
Serious question: how do you understand ABBA? Because I consider music listening a journey and songs that I dislike now might be my favorite ones in the future. But I really don’t know how it could lead me to like ABBA.
ABBA is one of the most iconic and beloved pop groups in history, whose songs are still enjoyed by a good chunk of the planet, 40+ years since they were first released. I'm not sure why it's baffling that you too could find something to enjoy about them, when so many people clearly have and still do.
Not sure I get your point, are you saying that I should enjoy them because many people do?
No, it's perfectly reasonable to not like popular music. I was only responding to what I perceived to be amazement in your previous post that someone is claiming you might find a way to enjoy ABBA: I was claiming that, since a lot of people do enjoy it, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that you could find something to like one day.
Conversely, if you said you don't know how you could possibly enjoy, say, the Plastic Ono band (Yoko Ono's band), then it would be harder to suggest it's even possible (not to say that enjoying them, for anyone who does, is in any way wrong!).
My understanding is that they say "it seems pretty reasonable to think that ABBA is of good quality, given all that", and then "because it is good quality, then it doesn't seem completely implausible that you may end up liking it someday".
But again, you don't have to of course :-). But I agree that it feels more likely that you may end up enjoying quality music you don't like now than bad music you don't like now!
Is it ABBA in particular, or do you not like the style in general?
Because there is a difference between quality and preference. You can totally dislike the Mona Lisa, but in its style, it would be very hard to say that it is not high quality painting.
And that brings me to another point that I think goes against the philosophy of the featured article: music is acquired taste, if I can say. We generally don't like music we don't understand. Some styles are easier to get (maybe because the music is just easier, or because it's broadcasted everywhere you go), some are harder. I like a lot of different styles of music (from classical to metal through rap, pop and jazz, etc). But in each of those styles, I did not immediately like everything. Of course there is good and bad quality, that's one thing. But the other axis is what I could understand of the style.
In rap, I started with very melodic songs, and then I started to get the rhythm and flow, and then downright the culture and the meaning of what they would say. I still don't like everything, but vastly more than I used to.
In jazz, I liked big bands and "soft" stuff like this until I started studying jazz. I forced myself to listen to jazz styles I really did not enjoy, up to free jazz. I regularly listened to good quality songs (I had to trust my music professor about the quality, of course) in those styles for a few months. And after a while (and I can't say precisely when it happened), I started enjoying some of those, until I could enjoy songs in all of them. Again, I don't like everything, but by learning and getting used to new styles, I got to enjoy them as well.
Of course, in doing all that effort, I improved my musical expertise. So I am now more critical about quality, which I feel like I compensate by being more open to very different styles. By voluntarily staying ignorant, I doubt the author enjoys all styles of music. So maybe they don't ruin the low-quality music of the style they are used to, but on the other hand they miss the high quality music in all the styles they are not used to :-).
Those women's voices are incredible.
Title is patently false. The first part of the article boils down to "most people aren't pedants". The second part is mostly irrelevant because the Netflix pivot to "casual viewing" is a bid to enter a new market. Their viewership (and stock) would immediately tank if they switched exclusively to "casual viewing". TFA acknowledges this when elevating ABBA against something "no one has ever heard of". The insinuation is that popularity equates to quality whereas the opposite is true.
It just takes time.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, people are neither as dumb nor as smart as you might think.
> Fashionistas decry the homogeneity of modern dress. Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine.
Again, most people are neither pedants nor purists.
I think that's the actual point TFA makes, but they chose an inflammatory title.
This post is really funny to see written by an engineer, an entire profession dedicated to the art of measuring precisely the lowest quality we can use while still accomplishing the task.
Having discerning taste is a vice not a virtue. I actively try to limit the number of areas where my taste is ruined by high quality because it makes me noticeably worse off. My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
Now I have to buy the name brand which is more expensive, now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it, now I can't unsee the damn keming or blurry fonts on everyone's computer but mine. Don't be the hi-fi nerd whose ears will be put through a cheese grater any time you hear music through cheap speakers for the rest of your life. Ignorance really is bliss.
> My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
IMO it is possible (and I believe I have done it with effort) to achieve a high level of appreciation for popular, common, basic, what have you things, while also having a high level of appreciation for high quality things.
I completely agree that being unable to enjoy things is a negative, and if lots of people can enjoy a thing you might be better off working out how to also enjoy it. But you can do both.
Does knowledge of good things necessarily make bad things painful? I have cheap earbuds for listening to podcasts or walking around and listening to music, and then some ok HIFIMAN headphones on some midrange dac/amp. Maybe I’ve been too mobile lately, but I find that I get enough time on the earbuds to provide a frame of reference that lets me really enjoy the headphones. It is a nice little experience once in a while; to put the headphones on and really notice the difference.
It is possible I haven’t gotten far enough into the audiophile “hobby” to achieve miserableness. But, I wonder if it is enough to save yourself by staying grounded in a more reasonable frame of reference.
I remember an article posted here that showed that wine aficionados enjoyed drinking wine less than the average person does.
I have a feeling that the best strategy is to avoid the bottom 10% of any market because that is guaranteed to be garbage. Beyond that it doesn't really matter.
I think it's both. I never switched on 120hz refresh rate on my phone because 60hz never bothered me. I also know, if I switch to 120hz I won't be able to view 60hz phones anymore without it bothering me!
But there's some things where buying higher quality definitely offers a much better experience. Everything from soap dispensers to vacuum machines - higher quality ones will save time, look better, last longer, be easier to maintain, etc. Cheap ones will break, be a hassle to use, etc. As I'm writing this though, maybe this is actually in agreement with your post. Those quality issues are frustrating "for me". And one might assume needing to replace 5 out of 6 soap dispensers after 3mo-2yrs would be universally frustrating for all people. But perhaps that's not the case and people simply aren't bothered by these things.
> now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it
Not enjoying crappy Marvel movies any more is a feature not a bug, it means you're growing as a human being.
The problem being that if you truly enjoy something, you will end up becoming better at noticing quality.
Learning to understand music so that you can show off in society is (IMHO) stupid because you ruin your ability to enjoy "average" music. But if you really enjoy music, you're doomed to improve your understanding of it and start becoming more critical regarding "poor" music, however popular it is.
What is the motivation of emulating an ascetic lifestyle by consuming low quality goods? It sounds like you're doing it to save money rather than reduce total consumption, but for what greater purpose?
>> Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine
They are, but with one caveat: you need to have the right figure to pull it off. An important role of the suit is to hide loss of physique. That is why in general the youth can wear jeans and t-shirts, and older people often cannot.
No one is hiding their loss of physique with a suit. You can see it in most people’s faces, and the 1990s era suits where one could have hid abdominal fat have long been out of style.
Any suit does, not just the 90s ones. A t-shirt is very unforgiving compared to a suit.
Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of quality.
Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.
- [deleted]
Seems a bit self-critical of you to believe that ;)
Excellent joke explanation!
Regardless of whether or not your point is right -- I don't think Amazon reviews are a good yardstick for this. Product reviews are a tiny but noisy minority, who may or may not even act in line with their grievances. (i.e. some people just like to complain) A better metric would be return rates and/or sales figures.
That’s not people having a high bar for quality. That’s Amazon being absolutely flooded with low quality products to the point you can’t find anything of even decent quality.
The average cheap household product on Amazon is, in fact, Fine.
If by outrageously high you mean standard expectations from a generation ago I'd be more inclined to agree. I expect to get a minimum of 15 years of service out of a major appliance and really they should last indefinitely with repair and maintenance being a viable option. I expect tools to be made well from the correct materials, properly heat treated where applicable, and for them to withstand at least a decade of borderline abuse, generations under nominal household workloads. I expect any item of furniture I purchase to permanently resolve whatever issue that item of furniture resolves. I shouldn't have to replace a bookshelf in my lifetime.
The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
People care a lot about this sort of quality. Nobody want a refrigerator that dies in five years.
But what can you do about it? It’s not like these things are labeled with a honest assessment of their realistic lifespan. Reviews? That only gives you an early snapshot. That might catch the worst of the trash but it won’t distinguish between a lifespan of 5 years or 50 years. Reputation? Everyone knows how often companies go for short-term thinking and chasing next quarter’s profits. Just because they made stuff to last ten years ago doesn’t mean they don’t make crap today.
So what do you do? Buy the cheapest one and it might be crap? Or spend more and it might still be crap?
> all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory .. there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
It does make me wonder why we aren't really seeing "guaranteed quality" brands pop up. There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy. Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
There are plenty of these: Toyota, Honda, Apple, Maglite, Duracell, Energizer, Gilette, Tide, Pampers, Visa, Lay's, Coca Cola. Before you laugh at the last ones, consider how amazing it is that you can go into a grocery store and buy a bag of chips and it will always taste exactly like the last one, or that you can walk into a store with a piece of plastic and in less than a second pay for things with it.
Isn't this what Anker has largely done. In a world of might be good/might be crap cables, chargers, batteries, etc. You can always select the Anker variety on Amazon. It'll cost you a bit more than whatever random product, but you know they are reliable. It's priced much cheaper than an OEM (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) accessory but is more reliable (quality wise) than no-name accessories.
Anker has a known quality problem with most of their over-ear headphones that they have ignored for many years now. Here's an example:
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/anker/soundcore-sp...
> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.
You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
I would assume Anker chargers and cables are high quality, and simultaneously assume anything else of theirs is low quality and just a way to disproportionately profit off of the brand’s reputation.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition
I think the bottom feeders have driven the cost of garbage down so far that it's no longer a 10-20% price premium to get trustworthy things.
eg grinders. You could (I have a 15+ year old one that has been repaired multiple times as gears have worn out, that withstands 3-6x daily uses) sell a very long-lived coffee grinder (Baratza) for $200. You can buy a piece of crap for $40. Unsurprisingly, that piece of crap is completely unrepairable and doesn't even do a good job of grinding... but it's cheap.
Because consumers have been conditioned to expect that extended warranties are just another layer of scam, maybe to extract consumer data, maybe just to get a slightly higher price. I think if you see these then you have to assume they are unenforceable anyway due to some fine print, and you risk finding this out after spending way too much time navigating terrible robot phone systems and similar harassment.
In a lot of contexts, consumers will never be able to trust products/manufacturers again. What can work though is if stores/distributors provide the warranty though, because unlike consumers, they may still have some power.
For many people, that's Apple. You pay a premium, but the product will not shitty in many ways that the competition can be. Sure, they drop the ball from time to time (see the MBP keyboard fiasco c.a. 7 years ago), but at least they try.
I just received a $400 check in the mail for my troubles on that one.
Baseless speculation on my part: investment is going to be tricky to acquire when you're talking about what amounts to a lifestyle business with monster capital requirements to get off the ground. Tooling up for manufacturing isn't cheap, and making shit doesn't offer the kinds of returns that investors find attractive?
> There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
I would be interested in knowing if any of those people change their behaviour though. What people say is irrelevant. Do they actually buy differently?
If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works.
And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.
People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...
...people will choose Airline B every time.
The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they kick you in the groin, you’ll make bank.
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they crash once a month, you’ll go out of business before you can say “but FAA regulations make that impossible anyway.”
People care deeply about airline quality on the axis of how good they are at keeping you alive. They don’t care so much about amenities. That’s not “don’t care about quality,” that’s “don’t care about a specific notion of quality that you believe everyone should care about.”
The fact that people choose the cheapest of something does not mean they don't care about quality. It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.
To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
>It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.
That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality.
>but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
So if A & B are have the same (low) price, and B is higher quality, you would still choose A?
Plenty of people will never, ever, fly RyanAir. And plenty of people choose an airline based on the airline's loyalty rewards program which gives them a higher-quality product (earlier boarding, more leg room, easier changes to flights). It's quite routine among people who travel a lot.
If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.
>If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
I consider 95% of all people in a population to be the "close enough please shut the fuck up about it and be reasonable for once in your god damned life" threshold where "everybody" becomes an acceptable descriptor.
What percentage of people will ever, in their entire lives, fly first class?
Are we pretending their sentence ends at the word first-class then, so it's as if you're countering their argument when you actually aren't?
https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/airlines-increasing-p... Key number "53 premium seats per flight"
https://i0.wp.com/crankyflier.com/wp-content/uploads/image-8...
> most people aren't pedants
They should come visit HackerNews once in a while :D
Ooof. Also god I miss n-gate.
I must be dense, what is TFA? I thought it was the blogger, but it looks like his name is Terence Eden. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
The effing Article (TFA)
Ah, thanks. That was one of my lesser guesses, but it's always hard to tell. I try not to assume swearing if I'm not 100% sure.
TFA is HN parlance to refer to the article. It’s not really profane, some people expand it to “the fine article”, but in my usage it has meaning independent of its expansion, akin to how lol does not actually refer to laughing out loud.
"the fucking article"
Such a dire outlook. There is a huge chasm between Domino's and great pizza, and between great movies and Netflix assembly-line productions. A lot of people care enough to land somewhere in between, not at the lowest common denominator. There is room for both pop culture and art.
The comment on the photography is also clearly misguided: people might not be able to explain why, but the vast majority will feel that the more professional picture is pleasing/better in some way.
My take: people "don't care about the details" when it's beyond understanding, but the outcomes are still materially different and meaningful at a subconscious level. Ask anyone on the street to name a movie Elvis was in... meanwhile [insert your favorite movies here] still show up in popular vote even decades after going out of fashion. Selling mediocre products might be more lucrative, but not everything is about money.
When I lived in NYC I had access to great pizza and I would take advantage of this. But there were times when I wanted Dominos (usually a hangover or similar state of mind/body) and I'd just order it because it's a totally different thing. I don't even know if I'd call it pizza (their pan pizza, etc) per-se but rather a simulacrum of pizza that was engineered to stimulate very primitive impulses in my brain.
Every now and then being trashy is nice.
I know I didn't go to the right places but all the pizza I had in NYC was either bad, or bad and expensive. So while there is good pizza there, there's also a ton of bad pizza where I would have rather had <chain pizza> because at least I know what I was gettting.
Now the bagels on the other hand...do bad bagels even exist there?
This is the reality. A lot of NYC style pizzerias have opened in Cincinnati lately. They are spot on but it is not good pizza. The dough was designed to be eaten while walking the streets. Therein lies the root of all the compromises to quality. All the pizzaiolos are paranoid that you are going to try to eat it luke warm and practically beg you to heat it up before eating. Some include instructions sheets with every pizza. Ugh.
Grandmas are actually decent if they manage to ferment the dough long enough. I have bit into my share of 24hr dough. Not recommended.
As someone who lives in the NYC area I feel the same about Dominos. It's different from what I really consider pizza, but sometimes it's exactly what I want and that's totally fine.
My take is that the differences matter according to purpose. If I'm eating a Big Mac to avoid being hangry, the fact that it isn't a gourmet experience may not matter to me.
If I'm putting on a movie as a distraction to have sound in the background -- perhaps I am only half-watching it as I do other things -- I may not care that isn't all that good. I might not notice subtle characteristics anyway.
There are levels of quality -- e.g., level 0 of the hamburger might be ending hunger -- and how much they matter depends on your purpose. If I'm looking for a movie to inspire me or make me think, that's different from playing something in the background as I clean the apartment. Etc.
Nah. You misunderstood OP about photography. There's a level in photography, as is in many other fields, where it's good enough to be used in print or on the Web without it being a major disaster. Anything beyond that will only speak to professional photographers, and not to all of them at that.
In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low. Anything beyond that is not accessible to the general public, it will never know the difference. There are very few areas of expertise where anyone can easily measure / understand the quality. In most areas the only way to know is to rely on experts, subconsciousness isn't going to help you there, just like you wouldn't be able to divine the composition of the concrete with which the house was built prior to it possibly collapsing (if the concrete was low quality) without knowing how to use the tools necessary to measure that (subconscious level isn't going to help you here).
Even for professionals, testing for quality is very hard because of how many factors come into play, and how to weight those factors against each other, and often the impossibility or expense associated with testing. It's beyond naive to think that subconsciousness will somehow solve this problem...
I've spent most of my software career in the Medical Devices industry. One point that stands out to me is when a previous employer released an instrument and Marketing focused on its high quality, only to find out that customers (large hospitals and medical labs) didn't care about quality.
Made no sense: it's a medical instrument. Who doesn't care about quality?
Well, digging deeper, they found that the customers simply assumed that by virtue of being FDA approved, pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!) so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
Yeah, there's a bar and often it's much lower than you think it is.
> pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!)
But presumably they all had adequate quality level. As in they all met strict requirements.
> so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
This is not that surprising to me. How does quality translate to profit is always the question. Sometimes there is a direct relationship (better quality requires less maintenance, or the number of adverse events is lover) but sometimes it doesn't.
Imagine if you are a company CEO and I come to you proposing that I can supply the same computers your workers already use but with a solid gold case instead of the aluminium one. I could even provide you with white papers saying that the new solid gold cases are much much more resistant to corrosion. And that is true. Gold in that sense is better than aluminium. Higher quality! Would you buy my laptops? Does that sound like a good deal? I don't think you would, unless you have significant laptop case corrosion problems.
> But presumably they all had adequate quality level.
They all do what they claim in the sense that they set forth Safety and Efficacy goals and achieve them. From that perspective all Approved Medical Devices are essentially the same.
But as you say, translating quality to profit isn't obvious. Expressing quality aspects of speed, throughput, reliability, etc. was a clearer benefit to the customer than, e.g., showing that our fluid handling had a Coefficient of Variation of under 5%.
The problem is that all of the qualia that can only bee seen and articulated by a professional practitioner aren't necessarily stacked in a heap. It's more of a Jenga tower of mutually reinforcing practices. Maybe some of the blocks lost to cost cutting weren't load bearing, but as each one comes out the structure gets more fragile.
There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.
I'm talking from a perspective of someone working with QA in my day job. And I do have to answer questions about the quality. Like, "did the quality of the product increase in the last release?" or "is our quality higher than the competition?" or "will this drop in quality be acceptable for the majority of our customers?"
And, really, every time I'm called to answer questions like these, I know full well that no matter how much time I spend analyzing the test results, coverage, test strategies, dissecting JIRA etc. my answers will be based on little more than a guess (and no, it's not the subconsciousness, it just means that I'll be probably wrong!)
I wish I could just "let it go" and observe the gestalt of the product and say lgtm! (or not). Just because my subconsciousness told me it's so. :)
No, it's not like Jenga. It doesn't reinforce each other. There's always a possibility to drill down to details, which makes the discussion and comparison easy (or easier), but the more complex the thing I'm trying to assess the quality of, the worse it gets.
Is ZFS better than Ext4?
Is MariaDB good enough, or should we switch to a more "high quality" PostgreSQL? How about Oracle?
Is Python 3.13 objectively better than Python 3.10?
What about Ethernet vs IB?
Answering any of these questions would get experts twisted in a knot of endless arguments precisely because quality is very hard to assess. It has too many faces, too many metrics...
> In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low.
Except in some odd cases like datings apps where this bar is in orbit or has left the solar system entirely - see my other comment for details
Everything in the first post are very obvious errors that anyone can avoid if they think about it for a few minutes. You can take decent photos with a phone either by learning a bit or just by accident with enough attempts.
The issue with dating apps has more to do with women being able to be incredibly picky. Better photos let’s a average looking guy get a chance. The top 1-5% that all women want to match with don’t need to bother with this at all.
Maybe OP didn't describe the intricacies of photography well enough, but I had to take photography in an art college... but I have a better story to tell.
So, my father is a somewhat famous persona in the world of animation. When I was little, he used to take me to the festivals. And that being the time when movies were distributed on film, in anti-tank mine shaped containers... the editing was done with glue and scissors.
We were friends with the editor who usually worked with him on his films. I remember leaving the screening with her once, and she was talking to my dad, and in excitement she said: "Oh, had you seen the cuts? Such an amazing job!" And by that she meant the few frames between shots that the editors used to leave for their own navigation and other conveniences in the film they edited. Like, you may remember random letters and geometric shapes flashing for a split second on the screen? -- She was super excited to see that! Not the movie itself.
When it comes to photographs: you need to speak the language. Same things done deliberately or accidentally will mean different things. Overexposure? -- perhaps done deliberately for dramatic effect, or perhaps just an accident. Choosing a more grainy film over a finer one? -- Maybe just a lens with not enough light, or maybe the author was going for a special feeling of an older photographs. The main character in the portrait not in focus? -- you cannot tell if that's intentional or not, unless you can tell why.
There was a fashion movement in fashion where high-end clothes were photographed with extremely bright flash mounted on the camera (as opposed to more typical studio setting with diffused light from multiple sources). An artistic adaptation of amateur style. Go figure! It was hip like 20 years ago. But, to read it, you need to know the history. You need to know that it was the style at the time, and through that lens you can look at it and find other things the author had to tell you (whereas w/o the background you might just dismiss it as poorly lit picture).
I’m going to apply this to an unpopular opinion on web development, just as one example:
Most users don’t care about your SPA.
I have built every app as a MPA with page transitions for a nice fade. I have had multiple complements on how it’s so fast. Nobody, not one person, among 8000 users, has complained about the page reloading.
This is just one example where I think the article is accurate: engineers tend to overshoot the mark on metrics nobody cares about, or try to improve “experiences” that nobody cares about, or rationalize complexity forgetting that even Amazon doesn’t bother with an SPA.
I think your last para is spot on. There are dimensions of quality people care about, and dimensions they do not.
Websites are a good example. The article says a designer will notice jank. I usually do not care about the design: I want the content, and I care a but about usability (in a limited way - e.g. things that are hard to find annoy me).
Websites and UIs in general are often made worse by people whose measure of quality is aesthetics rather than usability - there have been multiple HN discussions about articles on this topic.
Different people may care about different ones (e.g. one person might want a high performance car, another a comfortable one).
I found the bit about actors accents amusing. American attempts at British accents are always annoying, and it even happens with British actors in American produced things having weird or wrong accents. It is sloppy but its rarely puts me off something I like otherwise. Dealing with other countries and cultures is often done sloppily. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a good example too to anyone who recognises the language people in one village are speaking which is spoken a very long way (certainly well over a thousand miles) from where it is set.
As for SPAs, I do not think preferring MPAs is an unpopular opinion on HN.
> I found the bit about actors accents amusing. [...] It is sloppy but its rarely puts me off something I like otherwise.
From a non native english speaker's point of view it's even more amusing. Why should I care that the accent is from the wrong borough of one of the anglo-saxon countries? They all sound like english to me...
> Websites and UIs in general are often made worse by people whose measure of quality is aesthetics rather than usability
Let's take this opportunity to remind them designers that there are things like contrast and readability, and marking items that can be interacted with as items that can be interacted with...
> They all sound like english to me...
it just sounds wrong if you know the difference. Imagine you are watching something like that and a character shows up supposedly speaking your native language, but actually speaking another language that sounds vaguely similar.
> Let's take this opportunity to remind them designers that there are things like contrast and readability,
Many years ago I worked for a website aimed at people of, or approaching retirement age. The designers initially used small grey text on a white background.
- [deleted]
Quality affords power. The author of the article is in effect asking those who strive for quality to relinquish power.
A weird case on photography is dating. Apparently absolutely flawless professional-grade photos are entirely mandatory for men, and heavy depth of field is a hard requirement.
It comes off as total nonsense to me. Smartphone pictures of people look great to me and depth of field isn't something I give a shit about on a dating profile, in fact in any picture I'd prefer to be able to check out the background details. But I apparently live on a different planet from the people judging these photos. Even as a bi person I can't empathize at all with these fellow androphiles who apparently vomit and convulse at the sight of an unblurred background in a profile picture.
Alas, from the evidence, you need to be a highly skilled photographer with expensive equipment and perfect photos to get responses on those apps: https://killyourinnerloser.com/why-your-tinder-pictures-suck... https://killyourinnerloser.com/inspiration/
So it's one case where the fine details absolutely matter to outcome, even if the women on the other end may have a hard time articulating what's better about one photo than another.
(God, being a man with a dating profile is so exhausting - where has our species gone that something like this guide with millions of words is required for men to be successful? Wasn't there a time they could just be themselves? I'm eternally grateful I don't have to play that game anymore now that I'm in a great relationship.)
> from the evidence, you need to be a highly skilled photographer with expensive equipment and perfect photos to get responses on those apps
I don't know, I'm not in the market... But if you want to learn what it takes to "score a date", going to a website called "killyourinnerloser" where a guy describes how he has all the sex and threesomes and foursomes and knows how to please all women, posts a bunch of erotic/pornographic material, and literally asks for $1 to change your life is very much like going to an actual porn site to learn what it takes to satisfy a woman.
Not showing your dirty dishes or toilet in the background, and not taking pictures in the dark is common sense. No need for macho photographer to tell you how to sex the ladies.
But let me put your mind at ease further. I needed a chuckle and read the mistakes to avoid, together with his own fine example of nine winning pics. In no particular order:
- Don't wear the same clothes in multiple pics. Proceeds to wear the exact same sweatshirt and gold chain in no less than four pics in different settings, even restaurant and gym because it's his "everywhere" sweatshirt. Then wears the exact same overall outfit in another two pictures. Then the same cap in two pictures.
- Don't be too far away or bad angle. Posts a picture with his back to the camera in which he is ~1-2% of the whole frame.
- No staged or stiff pose and definitely no static posture. Posts three pics with the exact same blank and stiff facial expression and static posture. All but one picture look extremely staged poses.
It has always historically been that significant portion of males don't find a mate and there is a small percentage who get many, just because of the status, hierarchy, etc. So men have always needed to outcompete each other. With so little material in dating apps to compete with, these details will matter so much. Having professional photos also implies a lot of desirable qualities about you, like you had money and wisdom to do that in the first place.
It's weird because when I see super polished professional photos on a dating profile, I feel like I'm looking at a stock photo or an advertisement, not a genuine person on my level. I don't even find those pictures inherently pleasing, if anything I have an urge to skip over them immediately in the same way I've been subconsciously trained to skip over ads on a website without adblock.
What about product photos?
[dead]
How often do you flush the coolant in your car? How often do you jack it up and check for play in your ball joints? How often do you clean your Refrigerator Coils? How often do you clean your exhaust fans in your home? Do you seal any grout every year? Do you test your GFI outlets monthly like recommended? When was the last time you Lubricate Garage door springs and tracks? You drain your water heater yearly and remove sediment, right?
These are basic life tasks that everyone can and should do as a basic functional adult adulting 'properly' and 'correctly' with best outcomes more important than finding/eating good pizza, but probably don't. People just can't sweat all of the details of daily life, and they definitely can't for basic daily sustenance nor entertainment, and that is OK and actually a good thing.
Talladega Nights is extremely mediocre no matter how it's ranked/placed. Elvis movies weren't meant to be remembered 60 years later, they were meant to give people a happy afternoon in the moment, and by their success at the box office it looks they did that. A fleeting moment of happiness doesn't need to be a 60 year artifact. It can be just a fleeting moment of happiness. (But the fact you are talking about them 60 years later actually kinda says something, doesn't it?)
Domino's is better than the majority of rich people ate throughout history ate. It's delicious. The fact that there is something more delicious doesn't change that. It's hot and comforting and comes right to my door quickly and consistently in a way I can afford. I'm not going to enjoy it less just because... something else exists. Something else ALWAYS exists. It's a bajillion times better than a bowl of oatmeal which is the other staple food I can have for the same effort.
Spotify/Netflix's algorithmic generated music/shows are better than the majority of entertainment throughout history. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyLsO6LpLSI
Temu mass produced textiles washed and cleaned before each use are better than the 'we'll just brush it a bit and it's clean' fancy, worn all winter for 10 years with just some brushing, wool suit 'custom tailored' to fit a now much changed body.
Take a breath and appreciate rather than critic. The world is AMAZING. Anyone can be a critic. It's the easiest and least regarded job in the world. Ever had a QA department that thought their job was to be critics instead of do actual QA? They were always the worst/most useless/annoying QA department when it came to actual good software. This whole Netflix hate thing is the same. If Netflix did somehow turn into an art house it would SUCK at it's intended purpose. We need fleeting moments of entertainment as much as we need 60 year relic films.
I've logged in after 10 years to express my disagreement with this misguided and shallow post.
1. Taste is trainable, and far more malleable than the author believes. Good examples of this include "unclassifiable" films such as Parasite, which reached immense global success with both critical and popular audiences, and stood out precisely because it was so different, along with a remarkable depth in its craftsmanship (a given).
2. Overconfidence in hermeneutics. For one, little details are critical and are precisely the mark of superior craftsmanship (or shoddy work if they are neglected). You can see this in the dialogue around detecting AI-generated images. A cool example is the 4-second crowd scene in Miyazaki's The Wind Rises (2013), which took an entire year to animate.
3. A superficial and overreaching view of art. You can see this both in the way they discuss artistic value (external activity and metrics), and also their limited artistic vocabulary (the Louvre as a whole, Elvis, Abba). What about Edo period Japanese painting? What about Abbasid architecture? What about that simulated black hole in Intellerstar (to give a technological example)?
This kind of technological slop drives distrust with other industries (especially creative ones), rather than the productive and empowering dialogue we should be having. I hope we can do better on HN, and that for his own sake, the author gains some faith in art again.
This is basically the difference between creating art and creating commoditized product. The distinction and the unwillingness to acknowledge the distinction (even though it’s made regardless) creates a lot of friction.
The masses don’t give a damn, and if all you’re trying to do is extract maximum revenue as efficiently as possible, there is no reason to expend the additional resources (and incur the additional risks) of doing more than the necessary minimum.
The artists/craftspeople have a vision and they care. Then the money arrives and none of that matters to the money.
Examples are everywhere. Video game studios discover that they can make a billion with crap story so stop investing resources in story, only the people who care even notice, and there aren’t enough of them to matter: they aren’t the audience anymore. Etc.
> The masses don’t give a damn
More important, even people who _do_ give a damn, don't give a damn about everything. And even the things they do give a damn about, they don't give a damn about every time they "do that thing".
I give a damn about music. I have a collection of about 3,000 LPs, a few hundred 12" singles, and over 5,000 CDs. I love to draw the curtains and sit in my dark lounge room, power up my 80's vintage all analogue hifi, and critically listen to albums on vinyl - no distractions, focusing on the music and performance.
But that's only maybe 1% of my music listening time. I spend a lot more time listening to music with my earbuds in while exercising or grocery shopping, or in the car. I spend way more time streaming music around the house while doing chores or cooking or reading. I have playlists of music without vocals that I listen to while doing work I need to be able to concentrate doing. Hell, I have Apple Music streaming right now while reading (and posting to HN.
I _do_ care about music, but you'd need a decent private investigator to find out, it sure as hell isnt obvious to anyone that's not close to me. And even if you tracked my credit card bills you'd see way more streaming subscription spend than vinyl/cd purchases (which are mostly bought for cash at show merch desks these days).
I find most people are passionate about _something_ in the "care about" sense here. I love it when I meet someone new or who I don't know well, and can get into a conversation about "their thing" - whether it's knitting, or building traditional Inuit canoes, or stage lighting for amateur theatre, or ultra light carbon and titanium bicycles, or building a plane, or sailing the north west passage, or setting a land speed record in some very specific class. All things I'm unlikely to ever even consider wanting to do, but which are fascinating to hear about from someone deeply involved in it.
I think (or at least optimistically hope) that "the masses" do give a damn. About _something_. You just need to steer the conversation around a bit to find out what their thing is, and be curious and enthusiastic enough to get them talking about it. Its a wonderful thing when that happens, even if what you end up talking about is the drama in purchasing hand dyed yarn from that one woman in Germany on knitting forums, or the history and current land speed record in the 50cc streamlined motorcycle with gasoline fuel class, or what the recommended shotgun shells are for protection against polar bear attack.
Ask any Japanese mechanical pencil manufacturer: it is possible commoditize excellence via mastery through refinement and then uniformity by making zillions the same way.
> This is basically the difference between creating art and creating commoditized product
I came to say the same in essence.
The author is using too many generalizations. I think his internal pendulum is swinging from extremes, missing the nuance in reality.
Many people care about quality, and often they are sophisticated buyers and tastemakers. Those people, when they find quality, praise it to whomever will listen. Others, often not as discerning hear the praise and jump aboard due to the hype.
Sure, there are people that can't really tell the difference, but they still have the year's hottest DSLR or whatever, and the experts are often the people that communicate what those are.
I don't think that reality makes for a great blog post, however.
This connects quite well with another post discussed in the previous days here on hn, the age of average
Since OP mentioned quality to me that's almost always synonymous and things like TDD and Agile which I view as a false prophet to quality.
Sadly, I have to agree with him.
I still do my best, though. I just know that it's like pissing a dark pair of pants: No one notices, but you get a warm feeling from it.
As long as I am prepared to deal with no one being willing to pay for Quality (solved, by not being paid for my work), and people completely disregarding -even complaining about- the things that I consider "my finest work", then I'll be OK.
I write UX that "doesn't stand out." It "just does what it's supposed to do," without flash. When someone uses my apps, they don't see cute little "Look at how cool this is" animations, or whatnot. There is likely to be an animation, but it will just be a quick one, there to smooth a transition, not to please the user. etc.
People like my apps, but they don't rave about them.
The reason that I know it's working, is because they are constantly using the apps. Many "eye candy" apps get used a bunch, for a little while, then folks get sick of the flash, and stop using them.
But no one would be willing to pay for this. I just made a release, that incorporated some major-league changes, with very little indication in the UI[0]. It took a couple of weeks of testing, and fixing small bugs, but many folks would have shipped right away, and the app would probably still be used.
People do care about quality; it's just that there is wide variation between people's ability to notice, and care about, quality. To put it simply, for a particular work, the amount of people who would notice it's quality and care about that, is small, but not zero.
I do notice that the more people have experience with a field, the more they appreciate simple things that work well. As in, their taste matures. Most people on this site do appreciate web design that is free of clutter of gaudy flashy animations and ads, etc.
Some people just don't have a sense of taste, and their appreciation for quality might never mature. Also, even when a person appreciates quality, it is not the case that they value it so much in a particular instance that hey would pay more for it. But, in specific instances, yes, they will demand, and maybe pay for, quality
There’s a bunch of evidence that this isn't true.
People seem to choose quality when they have an option. The rise of Apple is not because people are “sheep”, it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid.
People can forgive poor quality with innovation, or in the pursuit of pure art- but the more crappy things get the more you notice people gravitating towards higher quality items/content.
The “issue” is when there’s a total monopoly or an oligopoly that is racing to the bottom, which seems to happen quite often, because building high margin things tends to be more risky, and MBAs are risk averse.
I think given enough time and experience where people can discover rock bottom dollars isn’t working, they will gravitate towards higher perceived value per dollar.
Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners".
>Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
Apple has won for people who can afford quality. If a student has $400 for a laptop, it doesn’t matter how much they appreciate quality, they can’t afford the MacBook and will buy something cheaper.
Anecdotally, I work in a coworking space with lots of businesses in Australia, and I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
What quality? We had to sue Apple in a class action because the motherboard in our MBP (and many other people's) died 7 times and the 8th time it happened Apple wanted to charge us $1200 to replace it again. We had to sue them, but we won.
> I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
That doesn't prove quality. All it proves is you are in an echo chamber. I've worked in lots of corporate environments that were all PC and some that were all Apple, and a few that were mixed. All it really depends on is if the company values appearances or functionality, and appearances are one of Apple's main value propositions.
AAPL 3.785T > MSFT 3.134T. In the only measure that matters for American companies, Apple won.
That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them.
Except that they aren't in the same business.
On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins.
In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
>On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass.
Microsoft won in the enterprise. They are steadily loosing market share outside of it.
Arguably in the long run, Amazon is winning enterprise in ways Google never did. MSFT owns enterprise desktop / desktop collab use cases (and any virtualization / server side stuff to support it) only.
> The only place Apple "won" is on mobile
They won on MP3 players.
They won on music stores.
They won on mobile.
They won on laptops.
They won on headphones.
Etc.
I'm not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but it's immediately obvious that they've "won" more than just the mobile market.
>They won on MP3 players.
Sure I guess if you're still living in 2010. Nobody uses an "mp3 player" anymore. Get with the times grampa. Everyone has a cellphone that plays MP3s today.
> They won on music stores.
Spotify is at 36% market share compared to Apple's 30% of the music streaming market.
>They won on mobile.
And Apple did not "win on mobile" - only in the US are they popular, but globally Android has 72% market share. Apple lost the mobile market to Android a long time ago.
>They won on laptops.
No, Apple did not "win on laptops", they are still at about 9% market share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...
"As of the third quarter of 2020, HP was cited as the leading vendor for notebook computers closely followed by Lenovo, both with a share of 23.6% each. They were followed by Dell (13.7%), Apple (9.7%) and Acer (7.9%)."
Nothing has really changed since 2020. Apple will always be a tiny portion of the personal computer and laptop market.
>They won on headphones.
huh? There are far better headphones than anything Apple makes. Are you talking about earbuds? There's a difference.
No, Apple has not "won" on anything but having overpriced hardware. $3600 for a VR headset? Yeah, I guess they "won" most ridiculously overpriced hardware ever.
Everyone is a winner of their own story
Apple has never "won" in the sense that Windows has always had by far more installed desktops.
Android also by far runs more phones than iOS.
Apple "won" the wealthy Western market, which is all that has ever mattered to them.
It's also good to remember that Macs weren't exactly that stable until Mac OS X.
Even so, the more Windows machines I had back in the day, the less real work I got done. Something was always not working, with no obvious pattern. Most problems took work to fix.
I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to.
The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
>Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself.
It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
Nor was Windows in the 95/98/Me era, it was a Hobson's choice back then.
They were stable enough and the plug and play actually worked.
And yet people kept buying windows and whining about it many versions of OS X later.
> Apple won only after windows...
Apple won after Sony dropped the ball on HDD Walkmans and Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and Blackberry failed to reject carrier bloatware.
Macs are a side hustle for Apple, and MS is still the dominant player for desktop computing.
During that 20 years experts dismissed Apple as dying and too risky windows was the smart investment just like VHS.
Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware.
Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain.
At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones.
Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
$240 for that, huh.
I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster.
It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
The iPhone especially in America is a unique case.
Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. But all of the major and even minor carriers either subsidize the phone or have no interest payment plans between 24-36 months. The price difference is negligible over 3 years.
No other product is like that. Even today in the US, the Mac only has around 15% market share.
While I agree with your larger point, I just wanted to point out some inaccuracies
> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android
FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments.
If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories.
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case
The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations.
iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”.
I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.
> They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories
Not sure what you define as budget categories, but apple sell the iphone se for $429 new on their site now. And you can get one through eg Tmobile for $250 or $50 + $10 a month for 24 months. Or the 64gb version for just that $10 a month. So I think they do compete in the budget category?
A lot of the world doesn’t have subsidized phones so I exclude carrier deals.
The SE is considered a mid range device imho in a lot of classifications. Budget is usually <300, mid range goes from 300-600 and premium is upwards from there. Of course with some deviation, but it’s how a lot of sales figures tend to split it up.
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case.
iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.
> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android.
The only honest way of comparing Android to iPhone pricing, in my opinion, is to compare flagships.
The S24 and the Pixel 9 are the exact same price as the iPhone 16. The S24+ is more expensive than the iPhone 16 Pro.
And if you only talk about market share in the premium market, it’s even more skewed to iOS.
Google Pixel phones only make up 4% of the US market.
https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their...
And Samsung sells around 31 million S24 phones
https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-...
Android users aren’t buying high end phones for the most part
- [deleted]
The phones also last a long time, being very durable and getting updates for a quite a while, so you can buy an older refurbished iPhone and save quite a bit of money.
I only just upgraded a year ago from an iPhone 7 I had owned for about 4 years and bought refurbished for under $300 (that still worked fine, I just wanted to start developing mobile apps again and needed something with the newest iOS) to a refurbished iPhone 12 for $250, and it feels plenty modern to me. It still has the latest iOS version on it as well.
I think most people choose value, which might mean that sometimes quality plays a factor, but rarely means it is the sole factor.
It feels like a cheap shot to bring up the mechanical keyboard situation that is close to the hearts of most techies - but sometimes "value" can mean... quality.
Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
Quality is almost always a component of "value", but competing with other priorities, e.g. cost.
I think mechanical keyboards are a good example here, but maybe not in the way you were expecting. You may note that most PC sales are laptops these days, and nearly all of them eschew mechanical keyboards in favor of other priorities. And also, most desktops still ship with membrane keyboards, and only a tiny fraction of users replace them with a mechanical keyboard -- as you say, "techies". It's a niche preference that "most people" (from the title) do not find value in.
> Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
It's not a binary choice.
Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year.
In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
I've tried mechanical keyboards a few times. Wasn't a fan. Didn't like how they felt or the noise they made The idea that they're automatically better seems very odd to me.
They cost a lot, and the main reason is the quality of the components.
They definitely are "better", as in they're a pure luxury good that serves no purpose outside of being a higher quality product.
There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you, yet, it's a quite large industry with many disparate manufacturers and standards and so-forth.
> There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you
There absolutely is, if you spend all day typing. Chiclet keyboards give poor tactile feedback that for many, leads to more typing mistakes. There is also value in the "pleasantness" of the experience - it's hard to quantify, but if it feels better to use something then you are certainly getting value from it (for another example, a cheap and uncomfortable vs expensive and comfortable chair).
I don't know what percentage of mechanical keyboard users this is, since there are certainly many that view it as a hobby or collector's interest, but I am one of the other side that use them exclusively because they make typing easier and more comfortable.
>it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid.
There’s a bunch of evidence that this is also not true.
Apple doesn't have 100% market share and the title is "most people"
The fact that Android has a larger market share, and Apple has a larger share of revenue and profit actually goes to show that the larger mass market doesn't care about quality as much as price
I absolutely care about quality and I choose Android.
The fact that different people choose different qualities should surprise nobody.
(Some people are obviously price constrained out of the Apple price bracket, but there are also plenty of people who actively prefer Android)
It still kind of low-key boggles my mind that so many developers choose iPhones and buy into that ecosystem. Not criticizing them... everybody makes their own choices and gets to decide what's good for themselves. But I just don't get it.
(And it's not because I haven't heard the stated reasons. They just don't resonate with me.)
Catering to the masses is indicative of catering to system 1 thinking. System 1 thinking is extraordinarily cheap compared to system 2. When a movie has good cover art, an alluring trailer and one name you've heard of before, it is good enough so long as you don't engage system 2 thinking. The same can be said for your domino's argument - picking a good pizza place takes a lot of thought: deep dish vs new york style, delivery vs pick up, price point, etc. Domino's is just there, in-app, and cheap.
System 2 thinking compounds. Once you've really tried great pizza, studied film, felt good product design, drank good wine, and so on it is hard to go back. Even when operating in system 1, after you know what makes things good, you can just feel the lack of quality. This is what some people use to term "snobishness" because it can lead to turning one's nose up at something that's good enough to the untrained eye.
The minimum bar for is a great measure for society's system 2 quotient. The more deep thought, focus, and experienced a culture is, the higher the quality bar is. For instance, as a community becomes wealthier there are more shake shakes rather than burger kings because with more money people have more free time to experience good foods, leading to a system 1 preference for a higher quality bar. I'd love to see how this plays out over different communities and cultures.
My understanding was that System 1/System 2 thinking is unproven conjecture[1] that can't even be replicated[2]. It would be unwise to analyse behaviour using this framework.
1: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-hovercraft-full-... 2: https://replicationindex.com/2016/01/31/a-revised-introducti...
I don't want to argue the basis of system 1/system 2 as described in [1], because the point I'm taking away is more about whether they interoperate at times of decision making. The point I'm making is system 2 is a far more costly (effortful in the article) mechanism of decision making.
The point I'm making is, as an organism we avoid utilizing higher-effort or higher-cost actions when unnecessary. An untrained lower-cost (IR1 in the article or System 1 in my definition) decision will result in not caring about quality. A trained lower-cost decision will utilize heuristics to bias for higher quality.
The point of the links I've shared is that there is no such thing as System 1/2, and decision effort/cost is not a factor.
Respectfully, I don't think you took away the correct implications. Specifically in the implications section of [1]:
"The key to effective intuitive decision making, though, is to learn to better calibrate one’s confidence in the intuitive response (i.e., to develop more refined meta-thinking skills) and to be willing to expand search strategies in lower confidence situations or based on novel information."
and
"Relatedly, it also means we should stop assuming that more conscious and effortful decision-making is necessarily better than more heuristically-driven intuitive decision-making."
I would say that while the article makes very interesting objections to the S1/S2 thinking framework, its objections are that they are far more intertwined as measured. However, the article still very clearly agrees that S1 is lower cost than S2.
> most notably that many of the properties attributed to System 1 and System 2 don’t actually line up with the evidence, that dual-process theories are largely unfalsifiable, and that most of the claimed support for them is “confirmation bias at work”
The article absolutely does not agree that S1 is lower cost than S2, as the article does not agree that S2 exists at all.
I see so this may be semantics then as the article agrees with intuitive decision making. I think I understand where we’re saying the same things. I will consider replacing my terminology in the future, thank you!
My personal theory (which is also baseless speculation) is that we use intuition to consider the decision pipeline closed and the matter settled. We keep at it until it feels right.
In this representation, "system 1" is simply an early pipeline decision, where one intuitively feels that it is the correct decision immediately. And if a satisfying decision doesn't come up, we keep looping over the decision, adding more factors, until we finally find the factors that make our intuition agree with it and close the matter. The longer we try to find a satisfactory decision, the more factors we try out, and therefore, someone came up with "system 2", but I see "system 2" as a particularly bad misrepresentation: it is still the same system looping, we are just staying in it longer.
The source of my theory is the interesting effect of a broken intuition: OCD sufferers are unable to break from this cycle, and even when intellectually satisfied with a conclusion, they perceive their brains as "stuck" in the question.
So fundamentally, I agree with your general idea: intuition plays a major role in this system, and when it breaks, people get paralyzed in it, no matter how good the decision is intellectually. My only point is that there is no division of systems. It's one single subsystem, integrated with many others, forming one single blackbox entity. The fast/slow thinking framework is a misrepresentation that doesn't really help one understand people's behaviors. It's a bad map.
Most people may not, but that doesn't really matter.
You should care about quality because shipping things that make the best of the time and skills you have then is a great feeling. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough that you feel like you gave it a good shot. This bootstraps a positive feedback loop of wanting to incrementally improve that, or do even better next time.
One thing I've realized as I've been learning front-end design is that most websites aren't actually that visually pleasing or even necessarily well-designed. They're just okay enough that it doesn't get in your way. That's quite a low bar to cross!
I'll also die on the hill that people can tell when care and attention was put into things they use. They may not be able to consciously perceive it, but it's there, and it builds trust, which is essential if you're trying to convert a visitor to a paying user.
>They're just okay enough that it doesn't get in your way. That's quite a low bar to cross!
I so wish that were true. I feel like I'm regularly fighting "good enough” sites that get in my way. Or worse, dark patterns that are deliberately making it hard for me to complete a task.
I think you only start caring about quality once you have sufficient depth of experience in the subject that you actually care about.
Example would be audiophiles - most people can't hear the differences that they trained themselves to hear. Also an illustration that training yourself to prefer quality is an expensive choice. :)
My personal thing is high CRI LED lights - most people don’t notice the difference but the flat-looking 80% CRI lights that are installed everywhere really bug me.
I put some effort to choose high-CRI light sources at home, but I have to say the difference is not very notable in many everyday situations, only when doing specific things (e.g. playing a board game where colors matter). What irritates me more are badly dimmed LEDs, i.e. too low frequency, causing a visual "stuttering" effect on moving things, espcially reflective objects.
But generally, I agree.
I’m in charge of the laundry at home and I tell you it for sure helps me tell apart my wife’s dark blue tights from her black ones when I’m sorting things into piles. :)
Perhaps like me you are somewhat blue/black colour blind. It’s apparently a deficiency in rods in your eyes.
Audiophiles can't hear the difference either. They usually fail blind A/B tests.
Everything can be taken to extremes but up to a point you can definitely hear the difference - e.g. MP3 vs FLAC, quality vs budget headphones etc. I never wanted to go any deeper than that for fear of escalating costs!
lol we made same comment at same time :D
Most be true then :)
eh, it's a spectrum.
i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.
> i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps.
That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
When luxury earbuds became a fad, every major company pulled their high quality cheap ones off the market, and marked everything up. It caused me to panic because I loved a cheap ($15) Sony line that I would usually have to replace yearly, and when I went to replace them, they were gone. Every cheap good earbud was gone. I managed to find a case of the Sonys on Ebay shipped from Mexico, and have only gone through half the case since. I can compare, so I know how good (not $1K good, but good) they were. Most people can't.
> That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who can tell a 320 apart from flac, except on some specially-crafted killer samples. a well-encoded 192 is often near transparent, but much more dependent on the genre / sample. pre-opus, 256 VBR was my go-to.
> that I would usually have to replace yearly
this is a foreign concept to me; i usually buy stuff that's designed to last, and dont mind paying for it.
With all products there are diminishing returns and there are connoisseurs who thrive on pushing past those and straight into veblen land.
Wine is similar. Most can tell a $5 bottle from a $20 bottle but $100 or $1000 is unlikely to be as discernible. Even the alleged experts fail blind tests. Some can even confuse some reds & whites in true blind tests.
Japanese dudes are just built different.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.
It's the same for wine drinkers.
People get confused because quality is multi-dimensional and most people only see the dimension they care about.
X always buys BMWs because he thinks their design and driving dynamics are unmatched. They can’t understand why people settle for less.
Y buys Toyotas because they’re reliable. They think X is crazy for buying something that’s going to cost so much to maintain and repair.
They’re both high quality products, but in different ways. X prioritizing design and driving feel over reliability doesn’t mean they don’t care about quality, same for Y. They just care about different things.
The Netflix thing is a perfect example. We see those guidelines and think, this is a recipe for low-quality trash. And if you’re looking for something to devote your full attention to for an hour, you’re probably right. But it’s plainly not meant for that. In the context of its purpose, it can be high quality. If it’s meant to be on in the background while you do stuff, it should be judged on that basis. And if you’re looking for something else, go find it.
It gets mixed up in social signaling too. Judging a movie’s quality by acting skill and subtle, meaningful scripts is seen as high class. Judging it by special effects or having famous actors is low class. That gets interpreted as the latter not caring about quality, but nothing makes those qualities inherently less worthy.
It’s funny, judging food by its ingredients is seen as high class. “The cream was sourced from grass-fed cows on our partner farm in Wherever.” High quality! But don’t try it with a movie. “This movie has Elvis in it.” Low class, you don’t care about quality!
Most people care about quality. They may not agree with your specific, personal idea of exactly which dimensions of quality are important.
Your actor/media production example is not reflective of my reality. There are actors that convey a higher “class” movie, and there are actors that convey a lower “class” movie, and they are constantly in flux.
If Elvis isn’t a good actor, or someone like Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel keeps making movies with the type of acting that is considered lower “class”, then they set that expectation.
But you put Meryl Streep or Robert DeNiro or Denzel Washington etc in a movie, and people will judge it is a higher “class” movie.
I was thinking of actors who are only there because of their fame, not talent, like Elvis.
But there’s a whole spectrum, for sure, depending on why you want to see that actor. If it’s because they give realistic, subtle performances, that’s high class, you care about quality. If it’s because of their physical prowess, that seems to be so-so. If it’s because of their physical beauty, low class, bad movie viewer, you don’t care about quality. Which amuses me, because being aesthetically pleasing is a huge part of high class quality in other things.
This is a pretty mainstream behavior that is maybe particularly prevalent in America. Though I think it’s abated elsewhere more by regulation than consumer preferences.
People will generally pick the cheapest/worst version of things if it’s more accessible/convenient or if the ability to discern value per dollar is difficult. In those situations people generally decide less dollars / fast is best.
I think this is why the “middle” is hallowing out for most product segments. The masses want bad/easy/cheap and the 1% want exclusivity/highbrow.
For some product segments, the economics of software development and mass production have completely eliminated the high end. The classic example is in smartphones: you can spend around $1000 for an Apple iPhone 16 or Samsung Galaxy S24 but there's literally nothing else more exclusive or higher quality available. I can't get a better phone at any price.
Completely true in some segments and you can see apple even tried the 1%er watch thing with the ceramic editions. They did keep the Hermes straps around, so it’s really just veblen good accessorizing now.
On the other hand there’s the old line about how America is great because the minimum wage worker and CEO both drink the same Coke.
Nowadays food has stratified far more and you’re more likely to have the bottom end drinking discount label house brand soda while the 1% doesn’t even drink Coke but instead some artisanal small batch thing you’ve never heard of for $5/can.
I'm not sure what you'd be looking for in a better phone. They're bounded by current CPU, battery, and screen technology, and flagship phones are pretty close to the best that's possible. Unless you literally want a gold bezel.
It's easy to imagine better - you would get the contruction worker phone features - extreme durability, quick swappable batteries, standard charging dock - with the high-end camera and other specs of the iphone. You could even imagine hot-swappable batteries, perhaps.
Apple has the lead here because majority of their competitors are takers / assemblers of off the shelf components.
Whereas Apple is more vertically integrated and driving supplier component designs multiple years out.
Leading edge vs trailing edge basically.
I guess one could also argue that actually Apple has diversified into so many SKUs that there is indeed a high end. HN/techie crowd is always buying the latest and greatest version Pro/Pro Max or whatever every year or two,.. but look at the phones your parents/in-laws are using.
Apple will happily sell you current year - 1, current year - 2, or the infrequently updated SE model. Mass market is the people buying those and holding them for 3..4..5+ years. We often go out with friends who are teachers and one had the iPhone 11 she apologized takes bad photos so please take group photos with ours, while the other had the 13ish with error messages popping up about his free iCloud being full. My FIL uses a hand-me-down iPhone Xs for banking because he doesn't trust his Android security, etc.
Those ARE high end. What are you talking about? :D
No, they're really not high end (at least not in developed countries). Any upper-middle class person can afford the best smartphone on the market. There is no meaningful exclusivity. It's not like with luxury cars where there are real high end products available that are completely out of reach.
I think electronics stand out as an area where veblen goods don’t really exist. Partially this is due to scale vs bespoke artisanal works.
That is the differentiation between a 50k vs 200k vs 1M car is often the hand crafted mechanical and luxury touches. Often the core platform of these vehicles is even shared in the case of the VW group and its various halo brands. The things that make a luxury car better are not mass produced.
One cannot hand craft an artisanal CPU better than Apple/Arm designs in a TSMC fab, nor a screen better than Sharp/Samsung, nor a cellular modem better than Apple/Qualcomm, etc. The things that make electronics better are the result of billions worth of R&D/infra with the intention of producing tens of millions to billions of devices.
> In it, the author (correctly and fairly) skewers Netflix's model of producing huge amounts of low-quality content for an undiscerning audience.
I think somebody forgot about the before-times, before streaming giants were producing many critically acclaimed TV shows.
I like to spelunk old media, because I get to learn things about culture which I did not appreciate when I was young. I also have a HDHomerun tuner wired up to JellyFin so I still peruse broadcast TV in addition to watching some old broadcast TV shows.
Most TV shows have always been profoundly crappy in the very same way Netflix shows are. We forgot for a hot minute, because the streaming giants were competing with each other for prestige TV shows to drive subscription growth. It feels like to me this is a trend which is getting walked back after some major mergers.
Springsteen memorialized this with 57 channels (and nothing on.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_Channels_(And_Nothin%27_O...
Heh:
> The title may be a reference to cable television, which carries more channels than terrestrial television.
DTV these days is in that ballpark for channels - I think I get about 63. And I'm a good ~40 miles out from a major city. There's probably more if you're closer to the city.
I think quality and art are two different things, quality is craftsmanship employed in solving a problem and art is a form of creative expression.
Even for Netflix, sure the content on Netflix may be for casual watching but from a product design perspective I feel it is far superior to prime, max and disney. I strongly believe that I keep paying for netflix because of this, it is the easiest place for me to watch and reduces all friction in the entertainment experience.
Quality matters but it needs to be more holistic - the world doesn't care for your pixel perfection but solving the need - in this case casual entertainment.
I think the author is right, but it presents a great opportunity for people that appreciate quality over newness. Old stuff that is good- from media to cars to clothing is practically free, and the new stuff that is garbage quite expensive. There are so many excellent old movies and music you can never have time to explore it all in a lifetime.
It’s not just that people don’t care about quality- it seems to me that they cannot tell at all, but insist on newness instead for some reason- perhaps hoping that it will make them appear discerning to others? Is there some other explanation I am unaware of?
Some truth here, and you do see this in home construction. My parents horrific Formica & linoleum 80s kitchen and hardwood floors still looks the same as they did when I was a child.
My new construction “luxury” condo had serious wear damage within 5 years. I’ll have to gut the kitchen and replace my faux wood floors while my parents place remains indestructible.
LOL at the “luxury” faux wood floors. I know the feeling, my previous condo was like that. The marketing is absurd these days.
I learned the hard way that if luxury is in the name, it’s not actually luxury.
I hate fake wood floors with a passion… they are so slippery they are fatal- I had a dog become paralyzed by slipping and breaking his neck, and an Ex break a foot falling on these. They are so hard they hurt your feet, look disgusting even when brand new, wear out quickly, and disintegrate if they get wet. They are a safety hazard and should be illegal.
That sounds awful.
Dryness is also an issue - we had a lot of people in the building who weren't keeping their units humid enough in winter end up with the planks warping significantly.
The other day my wife spilled, MAYBE 2-4oz of water MAX and took 1 minute to wipe it up.. next thing you know we had a plank warp a full half inch upwards. We had to place barbells on it for days while it dried out to remediate.
Oh and these idiotic faux wood plank floors are also what they put in the kitchen & laundry closet so water damage is basically guaranteed.
I have noticed traveling that in many other countries it is the norm to have some type of totally waterproof flooring in bathrooms, kitchens, etc. so that it can be simply hosed down, and the inevitable leaks don't destroy everything... but in the USA it is the norm to put flooring that cannot handle getting wet, right near or under appliances and fixtures that will inevitable frequently leak.
cost saving basically :/
For the initial builder... overall long term cost is much higher.
Where can I find a quality old car for practically free?
I’ve regularly bought and sold good running 70s/80s/early 90s Volvos and Mercedes for under $1000 (and sometimes under $100) on Craigslist and at auto auctions- close to their scrap metal value, yet these are vehicles that will last a million miles with regular maintenance.
Ironically, supply and demand can make something more reliable cheaper- these cars just don’t die, so there is too much supply and little demand.
For $8k you can get a ~20 year old Porsche or Audi with low mileage, that has been meticulously maintained, always stored indoors, and looks and drives like it did when new.
Getting a good deal on a used car requires some mechanical knowledge to identify a car that is going to be reliable. I look for cars previously owned by mechanically savvy people that have already spent the money to mitigate any known design flaws or potential issues on that particular model.
One point I wanted to add- an older car like this is fully depreciated, and will often increase in value if you manage to keep it in the same condition. Buying older cars- especially models with rarer desirable traits like a Turbo or manual transmission, I've often been able to drive them for years, and ultimately sell them with enough profit to recoup all of my purchase and parts costs.
There's a somewhat tongue in cheek book "Porsche Boxster: The Practically Free Sportscar" that makes a pretty solid case that if you but the right model of car right at the age where the price is lowest, it can appreciate enough to virtually cancel out the full ownership costs. Although for the math to work out you need basically not consider the cost of a garage to keep it looking nice, or your time to maintain it yourself. Which is, I think a fair point if you consider the car a hobby, and get joy from taking care of it.
Facebook marketplace or craigslist. $5k will net you something running with a solid motor and transmission. $500 will get you a project that'll eat a year or two of nights and weekends.
The problem isn't that people don't want quality. The problem is that people can't find quality a priori.
Sure, I can tell the quality once the thing is in my hand. However, that's far, far too late.
I was willing to pay more for my Chevy Volt, but GM discontinued it anyway. I'm willing to pay more for soap without perfume and chemicals, but Proctor and Gamble discontinued their scentless, antibioticless Ivory Hand Soap and then changed the formula on Ivory Bar soap. etc.
I'm willing to pay double for a better plumber, but I can't find him. I'm willing to pay someone double ot triple the amount of money for some bespoke clothing, but I can't find him. etc.
If I can find the thing I want, I buy it. A lot of it. But I can't find it.
Some of it is this.
I often buy things I suspect are low quality. Why? I can't really figure out what is or isn't low quality, so I am basically purchasing the cheapest raffle ticket so the cost of being wrong is minimal.
Same with a lot of services. I often cheap out and DIY. Might I screw up? Absolutely. But family experience with trades has shown that they are also a crapshoot outside a few certifications. Breaking a few locks or light fixtures is cheaper than screwing up once on a locksmith or handyman.
People want to maximize the value they receive in exchange for the money _and time_ they've spent. Quality is one metric which often fully captures this ideal.
You're willing to spend more time and effort to get a product that you perceive as being a higher quality provided you can find it. You're willing to pay more for a better plumber but you realize it takes quite a bit of time and experience to identify that plumber.
Life is filled with these compromises. Attempting to understand the notion of "quality" through Netflix's offering is unlikely to reveal anything pertinent. For precisely the same reasons that bad plumbers exist and still get enough custom to support themselves.
>Sure, I can tell the quality once the thing is in my hand. However, that's far, far too late.
True, and I believe that at some point in the past products came with a relatively generous return window.
People will accept low quality shockingly often (to me at least) but even when they have little experience, complete laymen will be able to tell well-written software, solid ux, nice suit, good skiing form, etc from their lower quality versions, especially side-by-side.
On the other end, there are enthusiasts of virtually anything and, with the Internet, you can find them and bask in their wisdom or outright use their expertise. You can boot Linux, have world-class coffee in any large city, find an old-school tailor, import the nichest of niche gadgets.
It is the worst of times, it is the best of times.
Neurotic designers often misinterpret their personal affects as design decisions. If people don't care about the quality of something, maybe it's because it actually doesn't matter, no matter how much time you spent on it. Most websites are irrelevant, so colors and fonts aren't going to make much of a difference. When people actually need a thing to work, like a car engine, tools, a battery--they appreciate quality. When they value some artistic medium, they appreciate quality. Even this "nobody appreciates quality" writer doesn't appreciate the quality of something, somewhere, because every single thing can't matter to him. Why should it be surprising that people also don't appreciate every single effort that it is possible to make. Designers need to get over themselves. Maybe people don't appreciate the quality of their work simply because it doesn't matter to them, and that's actually a totally reasonable thing to do.
The article makes a mistake conflating accessibility issues with pedantry. Keyboard navigability isn't just a “nice to have”; it's something that makes the difference between usable and unusable for a minority of users. Now imagine you're such a user and you're told to stop being such a pedant and you should learn to be content with lower quality software. It's downright offensive. It's like telling a deaf person to “just listen properly”.
This reminds me of another article, not exactly on the topic of "people don't care", but more "people can't tell":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41311135 - We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad (2024-08-21, 310 comments)
Quality is value to some person (who matters). This formula is a high quality definition of quality (to me). With this definition I can think and see straight about this subject.
“Most people don’t care about quality” therefore is a way of saying “any standard of quality I find interesting and can bring to mind right now seems to be held by a minority of people.”
This is interesting to me only in the sense that it implies a lack of rigor and imagination on the part of the writer, as well as the diversity of tastes among people at large.
Surely it is easy to tell if most people care about quality in video: just show them randomly generated images (literally white noise) and see if they prefer that to images that seem to tell some kind of story.
The author probably means that almost no one invests in quality past a certain point that is good enough to fulfill a purpose they have in mind, and that the demandingness of human purposes decays according to some sort of power law.
(this message edited twice because I am especially fussy about typos)
A frustration I have about the current crop of shows and movies generally, but with exceptions, is that so often things seem to just largely happen for no reason other than the writer thought it would be fun/interesting. They lack causality, and I find it so boring.
Instead of "this is happening because this happened," I feel like a lot of modern media is just "this happened and then this happened".
It's the Minions formula, and it's showing up everywhere.
In a 2:15 video (that's 2 minutes, not two hours), half of which is just setup, Matt Stone and Trey Parker talk about this in the context of writing South Park.
One of the reasons I hold modern Hollywood in open contempt right now is that so much of their output fails this basic test, at scale. Not only is Hollywood largely not writing at a Writing 101 level, they're not writing at a first day of Writing 101 level. It is so sad seeing all the other professionals in the industry get utterly crippled by writers hired for every reason other than whether they can tell even a competent story, let alone a good one.
> "this happened and then this happened"
Honestly, this sounds like the formula so many comedies in the 1980s took. A series of vignettes that are loosely connected by some thread of a story that's secondary to the hijinks and then a brief semi-dramatic scene in the last act and a happy resolution. It's a pretty tried and true formula and I think it works because the audience doesn't have to think much or pay attention the entire time.
I've been thinking about this in many times over the years.
First time, around 20 years ago now, at university: they gave us preparatory interviews, I had written "Committed to quality" on my CV, and I was therfore asked to explain my understanding of "quality".
They didn't like what I said.
They gave an example of a fancy sports car: high quality, right? But if you want to just go down a hill quickly, you may genuinely prefer a go-kart and be worse off for having a high-end roadster.
More recently, architecture patterns. We software developers love them so much we keep inventing more of them like they are poems. Users don't care, and can't tell.
Multi-platform UI frameworks, those have been around for ages of course. Never quite as good as native, but that doesn't matter because we get given a single Figma design that's shared between iOS and Android and it only passes QA if we ignore all the native stuff anyway.
I would say that it's not that people don't care about quality, but rather it's that the qualities we care about are the very obvious in-your-face issues we know how to spot. Conversely, in cases where we don't know what a mistake even looks like, of course we can't judge things for such mistakes.
I've just bought a house and the roof had a leak (true story). I noticed that, when it happened. Quality really matters at times, it's just hard to judge. And what matters to normal people isn't what matters to professionals — I assume the builders have opinions about which tools are the right ones for their jobs, that I'm as oblivious about as they would be about VIPER vs MVC.
Most people can't afford quality. Regardless of outcomes of pixel perfect or loudness wars, often we don't have a choice. We just have to deal with it.
Most people do care about quality. There are so few things of great quality that most have to remain content with the available options.
Like in the article, anyone watching Netflix's badly written shows have probably watched all the great ones there - and there are not a lot of great ones to go through in most niches.
- [deleted]
This only discusses the difference between professional and non-professional users, but forgets the amateur side : it will not take long before an amateur becomes picky about their hobby.
Also, picking the "crappy" choice because it's the safe choice in a social context is yet another matter... (the quality there is one of helping socialization !)
I initially agreed with the author but at a second thought, I found the author made a big mistake of not distinguishing different types of quality.
The article talked about mostly entertainment or art related quality. However when it comes to utility related quality, it is a totally different story. It is obvious. I even don't need to expand on that.
Like most of us, I'll take a bit of trash from time to time, but I really do find the old adage "quality, not quantity" to be true, for me at least, most of the time.
Generally, though, I'm happy to be the kind of person who makes things with qualities "most people" don't care about, and I'm happy to be the kind of person who cares about, pays [more] for, and compliments people on those qualities in the things I consume.
There are more great TV shows and movies than I will ever watch.
There are (far!) more great books than I will ever read.
Using thoughtfully designed and well-made tools and gadgets is much more satisfying and often works out better, too.
etc…
"Most people" is not something easy to grasp: can we even know if we belong to this group?
Beside, i'm not sure if this idea of necessarily mediocre majority is actually relevant. Take competitive businesses, sports, or even arts: any edge over the rest can make a big difference.
I wouldn't say they don't care in general, but everyone care for something different depending on subject matter & time. That being said, you should know and build for your target audience.
They don't care about quality to the extent that it doesn't affect their lives.
Everyone I've talked to agrees that Netfix is full of crap with some things worth watching. Some of that is because people have different taste, but even within their preferred "thing" they say the same.
But a few do. And if you put extra care into the taking and selection of photos that you publish in what remains of the social media scene for me (small Whatsapp groups and Strava) and one person notices and comments favourably, that makes it all worthwhile. As feedback to a a creator. Of course, if this was about money and you could produce two crappy things that earn $1.50 for the effort of producing one good thing that earns $1... do the math.
My hypothesis is the lack of quality is being driven by our quantitative and empirical obsessions. It's more difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to accurately quantify qualitative outputs. But I think if enough research was done, it would show that quality is an ultimate driver of success in many domains. It's a sad state of affairs that starts at the top, where governments are mostly driven by things like GDP.
I am glad to read this article which poke around the idea of "Pixel Perfection", for me that is indeed time-wasted, and I don't know why there are lots of company keeps saying they want this kind of "Perfection".
But I do believe people care quality, what they did is comparing the quality with price, Netflix is a bad example since it's so cheap (compared to seeing movie or a show in theater). The viewer saw a bad movie they will just think, oh well, I don't care.
Pixel Perfection is for the designer so they can claim credit and shed blame to the implementation.
He's right of course. His argument builds on the "newspaper effect," where articles in your area of expertise are full of errors, but those outside it seem accurate. The elephant in the room is that AI-generated content doesn't need to be better than Pulitzer Prize winning authors to automate novel writing. It just needs to be better than Colleen Hoover.
This reads like a giant self deception to steer himself away from skill issue criticism. The subtext boils down to "I hate pros getting paid for what I don't understand".
Devil's in the details. Whether the pros are aligned with profit, that's a different issue, but subtleties you never care to acknowledge... they're real.
How can there be 350 comments and only one mentioning AI, when it is the perfect crime for generating such superficial, conventional, everyone-thus-no-one content en masse? The author missed an opportunity to identify how terrible and dreadful this is for creativity.
For everything TFA mentions there is a (possibly small) niche that does care about it.
Do you want to cancerously grow until you have the market monopoly? Then go for the lowest common denominator, Netflix and Disney style.
Do you want to do <random item or item set from TFA>? See what production budget your chosen niche will sustain and stay within it.
Most people don't agree about which qualities are worth caring about. "Quality" as a generic term, is mostly meaningless. It's a word for people who can't shake the habit of thinking in terms of values and quantities to mean "a measure of approval from whoever matters right now".
Yes, but the inverse is also true. You can count on some people to really care about quality. If you find yourself disappointed by low quality, you're not looking in the right places (or the right price bracket).
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Amazing how this comment section turned into a discussion about phones and or the mona lisa.
The article itself left undigested gristle stuck in my teeth and bear fat stuck to the roof of my mouth.
It reeked of excusing the cocktail of mentalities steering us towards civilizational collapse, IMO.
It verily encouraged not caring about any values beyond beer and football, and proposed that this was a healthy diet.
No? Lets see some quotes and rebuttals, but this phone purchase decision is boring
I kind of agree but still not caring about quality as a creator is deadly in the long run.
It kind of breeds a culture of half-assedness that seep into pretty much anything you do or create.
And when it really counts, someone important will notice that.
But the ones that do did drive producers decisions . Then they learned they can defeat the free market by dividing and conquering the cattle. So now, if you do not haggle and look you horribly overpay. Used to be that you moved in the protective shadow of others.
Define quality.
Most people don’t care about the quality of things they consider disposable. Someone watching Netflix shows may care about the quality of their food. Someone who likes pizza hut pizza may still enjoy a Kubrick movie.
The rise of craft foods--e.g craft beer and cheese--seems to prove this essay wrong.
The continual popularity of Kraft cheese may bolster the argument.
I feel like this is effectively the opposite of the long tail argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
What is quality https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAfUOfSY-S0&t=685s&pp=2AGtBZAC...
Please learn
The ending really missed an opportunity, as "Casual Eating" is a silly term to coin when the rise of the "fast casual" restaurant has already happened
If everyone cares about quality in their specific domain it just adds up to a society being higher quality in general.
Otherwise pointless pedantry, but in line with the "nobody cares about quality" ...
"the hoi polloi" grates every time I read it. "hoi polloi" literally means "the many", so this is an awkward pleonasm, "the the many", amounting to a lack of quality in a piece of writing.
The misunderstanding is economic.
People care about quality. Few can afford it.
Correction. Most people don't care about quality where that quality does not matter. And if it does not matter then the original statement is plainly false
IMO the good-enough has won. (as in "90% of everything is crap".. good-enough crap). At least within ~~capitalistic something-for-money setup.
if one pulls the money from the equation, some thing may change. But don't hold your breath.
This is another reason for the wide front of enshittification, there's so much of everything, nobody has to care about quality because they don't care if you come back, as long as you consumed one, there's enough other people that also has to try once for you to make a living.. and everyone is trying a lot, because everything is shit, so they're trying new stuff all the time to see if any of it is better.
Actually people care about perception, both to themselves and showing off to others.
They don't care about edge cases or innards.
Steve Jobs famously still focused on them anyway.
Would not care about quality until something "does not work"
People care about quality, but it’s about perceived value. Is it worth the time or money investment?
Perhaps related?
Working in offshoring projects has taught me this as well, as long as the solution kind of works, it is good enough.
>But, much like designers fretting about getting things Pixel Perfect or photographers complaining about background composition or musicians ranting about the loudness wars - the hoi polloi just don't care.(...) Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” So? Not everything should be hard work. After a long day, most people don't want to work for their leisure.
The problem is the total lack of concern for the consequences of such a passive and indiscerning audience - and of fueling and rewarding this passivity.
Like how "After a long day, most people don't want to work for their leisure". True, but it doesn't just go one way. People are treated like helots and given more work, among other reasons, precisely because they "don't want to work for their leisure".
Cattle are given cattle work, and whiped into it. If they worked harder on their leisure - meaning used their leisure to raise about the petty partisan politics, passivity, stupidity, isolation, etc., used to keep them down, they'd fare better.
This article is hard to consume, though it’s a shame that many websites are broken, mobile unfriendly.
Seems like the author doesn't care about quality.
Also true in the programming world where JS, Python and Java dominate.
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Obviously not a universal statement. Clearly an American doesn't care about the difference between Domino's and better pizza, but Italians or Europeans do. Just because your standards are low doesn't mean everyone's is.
Nothing like some “what the hoi polloi thinks” slop to finish off the year.
Wouldn't Apple be already bankrupt if that was true?
Great article in how it enrages the reader. Im not even kidding. Not caring is irrelevant, not noticing the difference is irrelevant too. You notice how their photos are stunning then argue your crappy shots are some how equal. lol
A big test in the 90s showed that if pages load instantly visitors click around. For each tiny fraction of delay beyond the limit the clicking very gradually declines. Non of the visitors has a concious experience where they click only 3 in stead of 4 over 75ms extra delay.
The article describes what is wrong with capitalism most poetically. The only measure of success is consuming. I wish we could think of a hotswapable replacement but it wouldnt be as proffitable so it cant work.
Grasshopper pizza it is then
Amazing. Someone actually wrote the apology for enshittification and the race to the bottom.
I don't feel like catering to such base instincts and boring excuses for a waste of a lifetime.
Being popular and mainstream is not a goal of mine.
This is absolutely false. Everyone expects quality, but most have given up hope and accept shit instead; if it's going to break, you might as well not spend a lot.
The fallacy many people fall for is that low quality impression and cheaper and good value do not necessarily all correlate positively. Instead, can we not strive for excellence in all things as a matter of pride?
> Instead, can we not strive for excellence in all things as a matter of pride?
well spoken.
I was not able to finish reading this text. Webdesign is such a mess.
Apple exists.
Since when Apple is "quality"?
They are a _perception_ of quality.
Since 2001.
Although the iMac was pretty good too. But let's go with 2001.
People get offended because they like to think of themselves as moral, protestant beings divinely motivated to strive for perfection in their work. It isn't that some people don't care, it's just that unmotivated "caring" is arbitrarily distributed. This shop may be filled with passionate people trying to channel the Universe's principle, and the shop next door may be filled with people who actively hate what they do, and who they do it for, even though they're not going anywhere. This decade your industry may be full of passionate people, and the next decade you can't find a single person who cares. That sort of stuff is wildly dependent on propaganda and people making myths about themselves and what they do. And on how much everybody is making.
What's important are people's lifestyles, what they really want to enjoy, and how that will be impeded or aided by the product. The product is not a goal in itself except to fetishists (and they're enjoying their fetish.) People want to be happy. The system surrounding them determines their relationship to the product, because it determines how the product can improve their odds/ability to enjoy themselves, at least over a different product, or a different process.
This is the countervailing force to "premature optimization is the root of all evil." Most people have no reason to care very much about polishing what they're doing, because they're doing it for is to draw a salary, not to create a perfect thing. If you're not going to need it for long, if it's likely to fail, if it has no competition and people will have to use it even if it's bad, if it's the third in a very successful, hyped series and looks enough like the last two but came in a lot cheaper, if you personally already have your next four jobs lined up, if your manager just needs to deliver quickly and will be able to hand maintenance off to someone else, if what you're replacing is garbage, if the thing is already sold.
Most people aren't literally interested (as in owning an interest, not some speculation about people's internal states) in caring at all, because something is an improvement over nothing. The people who care are the people who have to pay to maintain something, sometimes, and only when it costs them money. If they're just writing the checks on behalf of someone else, they may even be perversely motivated to want bigger checks, because when that check gets small, the job of the person who writes it is getting endangered.
All the way down the the shifting mass (the people who have no standards in music are a different though maybe overlapping set than the people who have no standards in cars) of the majority consumer with very few standards, often enforced by a market that has connived to offer them very few options. Even worse, all marketing is designed to attach an image to the actual product: it is often having to try and convince you that something that is mediocre, and that you've already experienced, is luxury. If you've invested in mediocre luxury, you have to pretend that it was worth it, at least not to feel dumb like you've made a bad investment, or to grab some worth out of the thing as a Veblen good.
Why I said it's the countervailing force to the premature optimization cliché is not an original thought, but if you don't prematurely optimize, you're probably never going to get a chance to optimize, because too many people will find it useful enough half-broken. So if you're the one that's going to be stuck with it, or take the (financial) blame for problems with it, push back and prematurely optimize as much as you have time to do (but watch that time, if it's software I always double my guess of how long something's going to take.)
Otherwise, you should really also not be caring about quality. It's a means, not an end.
By this article’s own standards, I can’t really fault it for jumping to half-assed conclusions, as long as a casual reader might not notice or care. I’m not being glib. Devaluing quality is a choice, and if it’s fashionable to say it’s fine that everything’s being enshittified (because then we can feel smart, rather than disappointed), I’d rather it wasn’t.
The flaw is in extrapolating from the fact that different situations require different levels of craftsmanship or attention to aesthetics, standards, etc—and something fancier or more meticulously or expertly made, like a meal from a Michelin star restaurant, might not even be more enjoyed by the particular person who experiences it—to make the point that the things only professionals and those versed in their field know to do, which a layperson might not even notice, don’t really matter.
The reality is, whether we enjoy the products and services and experiences that come our way or not is largely due to design decisions beyond what we can consciously attend to and appreciate. It’s all those little details.
There is a limit to how low-quality content can be, and it’s actively being explored with the help of AI.
One of the effects of capitalism in the US used to be that companies were trying to make higher-quality things for less, because of competition. The strategy now, by the big players, is to just sort of swallow everything up, and then as quality gets lower and prices get higher, consumers feel compelled to just roll with it, because the shift is happening everywhere all at once. In corporations’ ideal world, there is no social contract, no real market forces, the consumer has no leverage, the corporation puts in as little effort as possible, and the consumer pays as much as possible, and still buys the thing, because what else are they going to do.
You can put ice cream in front of someone and they’ll eat it, so let’s just all eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I'm from GenX. I've been skulking around the tech industry for way too long and this is just bad advice. If you're younger this is just wrong. I can definitively tell you from experience.
If you're a website designer, you're always noticing "jank" on other sites. Your skin crawls at the poor kerning, the FOUT, the lack of keyboard navigation, improper contrast ratio, and a dozen other flaws. 99% of users just don't care. It doesn't impact them in any meaningful way.
Your users do notice, they just don't know how to express it. Most users coming to your site probably won't know the proper term for it is 'kerning' but they do notice it, especially subconsciously. The user's impression and perception is important. Poor UI/UX results in poor customer perception.
This is like Ford Motor Co. saying customers don't notice chipped paint or gaps in the body panels so way bother with quality control. This doesn't apply in other situations, why would it be true in this one?
Bluntly, I don't think that's true. Look at the amount of movies Elvis was in. A couple of good ones, sure. But the majority are literally just "This demographic will pay a dollar to see Elvis on screen; so put him on screen". You only need to look at the various lists of highest grossing movies to see that the viewing public don't necessarily reward expertise and craft.
Cocaine is popular too. What's your point?
Duh.
I recently got me a second hand Garmin GPS, decade old. Oh, the software issues that detract from an utmost quality that is well within the reach of the hardware!
- Latest map from 2024 wants to send me the wrong way down a one way street, which has been that way for something like a decade now.
- When I delete the one-way street segment, giving a start and end point, in the disallowed direction, it deletes both directions of the segment. Like, have a checkbox for that: [ ] delete both directions? Or something.
- Only two voices available for English, only one of which says street names. A 2004 Magellan Roadmate I once had featured more voices.
- The pronunciations are horrible. It wants to say "Pinetree" as "PEE-nuh-tree", would you believe it. Just about every other street name of Anglo-Saxon origin is mispronounced, sometimes even when it is a single dictionary word.
- When it can't find satellites (e.g. inside concrete parkade) it puts up a pointless dialog box about whether to continue searching. If you stupidly take the bait and click "no", it disables satellite searching, switching to some GPS emulation mode for indoor use. You are not told about this until after saying "No", but at least you are told. What you're not told is how to enable it again. You have to go several levels into the right config menu to uncheck this. Jaw-droppingly moronic dark UI pattern.
- Search is bjorked, When you select a subcategory like shopping, there is a multi-second lag between the characters of your search term, though there is no progressive search going on; no results are being refined on the screen as you type: you will not see a result until you submit the search term. If you don't select a category and just search globally, there is no lag. They messed up the priority between the UI and background activity. The number one priority is appearing responsive to the user, even if it takes cycles away from the background activity---which it actually won't, or not significantly!
- Doesn't speak the acuteness of turns: like "slight right turn" or "hard left turn". The much older Magellan unit I had did this. And it had a dedicated button for repeating the last instruction.
- Volume control onscreen only, buried in menus, making it unsafe to just fiddle with the volume while driving. Old Magellan had buttons for this.
- I hate the tone-deaf CLAW-midder pronunciation of kilometer; why don't these things have an option to say KEE-low-meeder? You know, like kilogram, kilobyte, kilopascal, kilohertz, kilovolt ... which are never CLAW-grum, CLAW-bite, CLAW-pascull, CLAW-hurts and CLAW-vuhlt!!! You can escape from this grating assault on the ears by switching to Japanese.
This stuff happens because a product is good enough. People accept it, it sells, and so it's BGAF: beyond giving a F.
On the positive: the build quality of the thing is good: it's a solid piece of hardware. The suction cup is tenacious, and arm assembly is solid. The thing doesn't shake whatsoever, even if hovering off the dashboard, yet the ball joint is easy to detach. Screen is large, decently bright and sharp with good resolution. Using a USB-based cable is a boon. Instead of the car adapter cable provided with the unit, I use its alternative USB cable used for upgrades, plugged into the Type A jack of generic USB charger. That charger has two more Type C ports for charging phones. Yay! The unit's built-in battery means it never reboots for engine starts. It has a 15 second auto shut-down for when the power is cut to the USB port. All good.
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Sigh Rhetorically: What's the point of pride or doing anything in life if you're not going to try to make something (eventually, objectively) excellent?
"Quality" is what we call the difference between what we like and what's objectively successful, not a property of any object. It's the name we give to one of many ways we confuse "is" and "ought."
There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.
In other words, it's purely an opinion. If most people don't have strong opinions on most products, which seems true, then quality is null for most pairs of person and product—so "most people don't care about quality."
> There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.
In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Of course, you can argue that all those experts have no priority over anyone else's opinion -- nevertheless, the usage distinction remains. In addition, I think that point of view is either trivially true (because sure, no we can't ask God to tell us who's right) or meaningless (because there are many differences between experts and non-experts, even if you have contempt for expertise).
Absolutely, "quality" can often be descriptive shorthand for a set of traits. It's also, independently, always a normative judgement. I think mixing them is where the disagreement up and down this thread is coming from.
Someone says, "Good cars are fast" and someone says, "Good cars have heated seats," and then the second person says "That car you like must not be fast because it isn't good because the seats aren't heated."
Mixing "is" and "ought" like that can be convenient, and separating them is usually pedantic, but the shorthand only makes a mess as soon as anybody starts debating.
> In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?
At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.
It's true as I noted there is no final god-like arbiter. But that is not really an interesting observation imo. Taking that perspective to its logical conclusion we end up in a world where values are utterly flat and relativist, and the only thing we can say is that we can't say anything about anything.
It's also true the selection-bias you described exists, in some cases to the point of collective delusion. But note how I can say that and you can immediately think of cases that fit and cases that don't...
On balance there is something real and (despite my first sentence) I want to say "objective" in most cases of expertise. In practice everyone lives as if that were true, even if they are arguing otherwise.
Regardless, even if you want to make the most contrarian, relativist case possible, the phenomenon of expertise (simply viewed as a social pattern) does exist and governs nearly every domain where people talk about "quality".
Nah. Borrow your grandfather's 50 year old screwdriver after having been afflicted by a set from <insert big box hardware store here> and tell me more about how quality isn't an intrinsic property.
"Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.
The only thing I'd add by saying "quality" is that I think a screwdriver that "doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" is good, which only tells you something about me. If I'd be happy with a different one that breaks and won't turn screws, I simply wouldn't call the old one "quality" and nothing about either one would change.
You might think it's weird if I don't care about a basic thing like whether it turns screws, but maybe I just want a cheap, simple prop for a movie. Maybe it's about a guy whose tools don't work. Maybe I just want the crappy plastic part because it's perfect for some art I'm making. Maybe I bet someone I could break it with a hammer.
All that information about me could change what's fit for me to buy, but none of it would change what's true about the product.
> "Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.
When talking about the "quality" of an items intrinsic properties, it's not about what the person feels, some may wrongly use it in that way, but when using "quality" to describe a screwdriver, then that conveys that it is a device that "Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws". That is not my opinion, it is a fact; it continues to do the exact thing it is suppose to do without issue. I shouldn't have to specify that this device drives screws and doesn't break after one use to someone who knows what a screwdriver is. And who would probably find it condescending or patronizing. Saying it's "quality" is a short hand for all the things. If you had no idea what this device is for, then the extra explanation would probably be welcomed and saying "quality" would mean next to nothing to that person. Same for other tangible items; but for things like "quality" of life that is very much opinionated. If you want to avoid the short hand that's fine too, but that doesn't mean everyone who says something is "quality" is coming from a place of emotion.
And if you only want a prop, then you are not buying a driver of screws, you are specifically buying a prop--that's a different item, even if it is the same device.
Try what I told you, I get the impression you'll learn something in the process.
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