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Serious question: enshittification seems to be plaguing all parts of our consumer economy at the moment. How can we actually address this? Are there economic or

Serious question: enshittification seems to be plaguing all parts of our consumer economy at the moment. How can we actually address this? Are there economic or regulatory steps that we can make to ensure that we aren't forced into an eternal race to the bottom where product quality just trends to zero permanently?

supportengineer 3y ago
Buy used instead of new.
- noodlesUK 3y ago
  I get that buying used products might be a partial solution at a personal level, but that doesn't change the fact that we're producing ever more cheap, low-quality stuff. What the market is ideally supposed to do is optimise for the tuple (cheap, quality). It doesn't seem to be doing that, as it seems like things are being optimised for (cheap, perceived quality), and just straight up lying about their quality. When people are buying stuff online, it is even easier to just focus on the price. How do we fix this?
  - nescioquid 3y ago
    The first time I heard the old-money put-down about someone who had "bought their own furniture" my American newer-is-better head spun (and I'm not much of a "consumer" by American standards). Not only are we socially conditioned to prefer new, as you point out, this is further reinforced by the necessity imposed by disposable-quality products.
  - xmprt 3y ago
    I think the parent commenter's answer was pretty valid. You have to vote with your wallet. Buying used will signal to the market that people don't want the crap that's being produced. Or, especially, given the generous return policies these days, buy new and then don't hesitate to return something if you don't like it.
- detourdog 3y ago
  Exactly, I buy more used furniture and clothing because of the “old world quality” of consumer goods.
- abeppu 3y ago
  That's a temporary and limited response. I've heard from people that sell vintage clothes that this will basically die as an industry because the more recent garments just don't have the lifespan.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    Wouldn't be surprised. Good furniture can be had second-hand now, but if everyone starts doing this demand will outstrip supply by far. My first sofa was a turquoise leather 2½ seater bought for €100 from a municipal charity shop. Impossible to resell it turned out, but still in excellent condition we had the municipal charity shop in our new town pick it up (they sold it pretty fast; this is one of those sofas you have to see in a store to say “hey, this could work for me”). Our present sofa is an ox-blood 2 seater Chesterfield-type one bought for €400 from a piercing shop which had it for waiting customers for only a brief while. Excellent condition and likely to last us another decade at least (if I didn't have a child I would be more sure about it lasting my lifetime).
redcobra762 3y ago
Counterpoint: This might be what increasing access to luxury goods looks like. A lower quality sells for a low(er) price point, which enables more people to buy what was once a luxury good. Perhaps this is what people give up for society to move to a more equitable place. Forcing a level of quality would force a higher price point, which would price people out of access to the good. And no, "but the prices are still high" doesn't get you out of this jam. For as high as they are now, they would be even higher with quality guarantees. So, if you want the "high quality" you're used to, that may mean spending more because you can afford to. And if you can't, then take solace in knowing that the product that's shitty to you is a new luxury to someone else.
- noodlesUK 3y ago
  That is a fair counterpoint. I think then the issue is potentially misleading marketing, where a good is being marketed as robust and high-quality when it is not in fact either of those things.
  - milesvp 3y ago
    Oh yeah. Marketing drives a lot of shit. Also I think the trend towards “marketplaces” makes things worse. Used to be if it was in a store, it meant there was a buyer whose job was to vet products the store sells. Cheap products would get returned, then pulled from shelves. Now if you buy online? store tanks. new store with same product with new random 6-8 character name. It’s one if the reasons I still like buying at costco, you can be pretty sure the product will be good for its price point.
  - redcobra762 3y ago
    Is that “in fact”? I would argue that quality is relative, and when your comparison point is, “no access” you may consider access in any form to be of “superior” quality. Overall I reject the negative attitude towards brands who have seemingly “gotten worse” over time in the same way I accept newcomers to the gym. Goods becoming more available (people using the gym) is a good thing, even if my personal experience gets marginally worse (access to equipment decreases).
Detrytus 3y ago
Get rid of stock markets. Make raising money by issuing stocks illegal. Seriously, this type of short term thinking is a direct result of focusing on quarterly profits reports. Making shitty product that falls apart after a year boosts your sales next year
tekla 3y ago
People should pay what the actual cost of a thing is. This will never happen because everyone who isn't a rich Tech person would revolt. Thus we tend toward cheapness.
jamboca 3y ago
We’re doomed. How can i find any faith in humanity when a genocide is happening before our eyes. Not to mention the orientation of all efforts towards profit over all other ends; how could we be so stupid and short sighted? It’s not even individuals who choose such oppression, rather we are monetarily oppressed. I am about to graduate college and going to school, while fun, has showed me the terrible realities, that the world is cold, that ideas, knowledge, genuine connection, or anything else is worthless before profit. That i have significantly less faith in the world now than i did before college because i look at my peers, the world, and think we have no chance at changing this shit. I am directing the entirety of my existence to ending capitalist pursuit of money and the bucket of ways it oppresses people; every day it brings me closer to killing myself. Yet its not us people who can change anything, its the blind dinosaurs who are stuck in a dream world, living in the past, who rule us and dont realize how many lives are caught up in their dramatic dance.
panax 3y ago
Buy based on quality, but you have to be willing to pay for it.
milesvp 3y ago
I don’t know that we can. One aspect of enshitification I don’t see talked about is how the middle of markets are disappearing. Economic forces seem to push goods to both ends of the spectrum, either super cheap or super expensive, with no ability to navigate middle quality for very long. Most people seem to shop with price as their first concern, those who don’t are willing to pay more for certain qualities/features. But since everyone may be shopping for different features, now volume is low and price necessarily needs to be high. I suspect this is unavoidable.
- hollerith 3y ago
  The car market does not work like that, and it is an important market.
dopylitty 3y ago
It’s an artifact of the economic system that values profit above all else. Of course if short term profit is the goal then quality doesn’t matter, consumers don’t matter, employees don’t matter. The way to fix it is to get rid of the system where idle shareholders extract every drop of value from companies while demanding ever more and move to one where companies have a goal of sustainably producing quality goods/services while treating employees well. Co-ops can be one model of this. Also change the stock market to a simple way to get capital on a short term basis rather than an all consuming gambling machine. This means also having a way for folks to retire that doesn’t depend on them putting all their savings into a casino.
brokencode 3y ago
If enough people care about quality, then there will be a market opportunity for a premium product. Eventually, once this market opportunity gets big enough, one or more companies will try to make a better product at a higher price with higher margins. This might happen slowly, though you can count on the promise of high profit margins to make it happen sooner or later. Of course, there are areas where we do have regulation, particularly when it comes to safety of products. This is a good option in many cases, though in many cases it would also be very difficult to define and enforce standards. And there can be market problems such as oligopolies or monopolies that prevent robust competition from happening. In those cases, it can be up to antitrust regulators to correct the market.
nlh 3y ago
It's a great question. Unfortunately I think this is a factor of the free-market economy. Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them. And when better (and more expensive products) are produced, not enough people are actually willing to pay for higher quality even though we all complain about enshittification. Airfares are a perfect example. Airlines started offering garbage "Basic Economy" and still offered regular economy for a slightly higher price. What happened? Everyone still chose the cheapest no matter what, so Basic Economy rules the day.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them. More like consumers are unable to find anything that isn't shitty. The entire article is about people who spent good money on a product, bought from brands with good reputations, and their products still turned out to be trash. This is not a case of people being unwilling to pay for anything but cheapest options and getting shit-tier goods, it's about how an increasing number of companies are demanding high prices but giving nothing but cheap trash dressed up to look like quality in return. It turns out that it's a lot more profitable to sell people highly priced garbage than to give them quality goods. Every furniture company wants to make more profit, so now they all sell highly priced garbage and there is no one left making quality goods at a reasonable price to take customers away from the people who cheating us.
goda90 3y ago
Legally enforced minimum warranties.Prevent mergers and acquisitions. Break up big companies. Make purchase of cloud connected goods and services legally required to have an option to run independent should the vendor discontinue the cloud service, and that they have to refund or replace should an OTA update break a device despite warranty.
hindsightbias 3y ago
https://www.thosmoser.com https://www.thosmoser.com
overthemoon 3y ago
I swear I'm not being snarky here, but: isn't this supposed to be something the market can solve? Is there no eg furniture manufacturer looking at the state of things and resolving to make relatively affordable and durable furniture? I want durable shit. I want to buy stuff that's going to last. I know I'm not the only one. Is the only option for this to buy top dollar stuff? If you're buying crap every 2-10 years you may as well be renting, but with extra trash going into the landfill/on a boat to be burned and inhaled by children in a 3rd world dump. I would also like to know what policy knobs to fiddle with that could change this situation, but I think the answer is probably something like "mumble mumble global finance capital".
- afuchs 3y ago
  Information asymmetry exists in markets. Most people are not subject area experts in regards to infrequent purchases. From informal conversation it seems that a lot of consumers have experienced enshittification from brands and products that they previously held in high regard. This has resulted in them losing trust in the market and they now assume that anything they buy will be of poor quality regardless of other factors. As a result, they have given up on making purchasing decisions based on quality and now only purchase the cheapest product they can find. This seems to have created a situation where consumers are unable to differentiate between different products based on quality and do not trust marketing because they've been lied to before.
sparker72678 3y ago
It's not easy, if even possible. Mature markets that reach enormous scale transform into a barbell shape, typically, with all the revenue being at the very top end, and the very bottom end. Take furniture. In a new market you build a nice couch with decent materials that will last, and you charge a price that a middle-class income could afford. It will last, say, 15-20 years. You sell it, make money. Great. Now a competitor comes along and makes a couch that will last 12-15 years. It's 20% cheaper, and your sales drop off a cliff. Your option is to lower your quality so you can lower your prices and compete, or go up market and _raise_ your prices, so you can stay in business. Repeat this cycle many times, and you end up with nothing in the middle, because consumers will not buy (enough) things in the middle. You can try to address this through quality regulation (ban certain materials, or require others, for example), which will raise the floor of the quality (in theory) while raising the floor price along with it. That will price people out of the market entirely, though. You can place heavy import tariffs on products that are of lower quality coming from elsewhere in an attempt to create space for more locally produced mid-quality goods, but doing that prices out your poorer citizens from access to those goods entirely (and they won't like that, and will probably stop voting for you, eventually). The problem is that human beings, on average, do _not_ value quality enough to keep a middle market alive.
gavin_gee 3y ago
Keep items for more than 5 minutes. if you actually believe that you will use the sofa for 20 years because you won't move. Then it's worth the investment. most people don't. people are poorer than they realize and are choosing to push their dollars towards more instant gratification. new phones, costco, lifesystle, doordash, living close to entertainment and cities. This is the myth of the middle class. earn good or great money but spend it all. people worrying about what other people think. buying car, house, clothes
abeppu 3y ago
I think we should consider adding meaningful taxes to materials that are cheap and disproportionately contributing to short-lived products that end up in landfills or waste streams. The article names particle board and MDF. Are there any applications in which those _don't_ have a much shorter lifespan and are used as lower-cost alternatives for plywood? Similarly, a bunch of plastics, laminates for surfaces subject to meaningful wear. All these are known cheap, low-quality, garbage waiting to happen, and as a society, we should be actively discouraging them. If we artificially make MDF that lasts a few years cost the same as plywood that might last decades, producers would have less motivation to pick the cheaper enshittified option.
- phaedrus 3y ago
  As someone who has built a few hobby speaker cabinets, you absolutely CAN make durable and high quality objects for the home out of MDF. Or even particle board. So I think using taxes to try to discourage the use of certain materials in favor of others is misguided and only likely to lead to manufacturers doing different but worse underhanded cost cutting. The problem is not the material per se but using inappropriate fastening methods for the type of material and/or a design that stresses the material in a modality where it is weak rather than where it is strong. An example of an inappropriate fastening method would be a screw into the edge of a laminated panel and the joint not glued. For an example on the done-right side, if you look at any knockdown speaker cabinet kit from e.g. Parts Express, the MDF parts will have bracing and grooves where the user is meant to use wood glue, and screws mainly just to hold it together until the glue sets. https://www.parts-express.com/Knock-Down-MDF-4-ft-Subwoofer-Cabinet-for-Dayton-Audio-18-Ultimax-300-5030?quantity=1 https://www.parts-express.com/Knock-Down-MDF-4-ft-Subwoofer-... In furniture an example of using MDF in a way that almost has to be intentionally bad design: I have a tall chest of bedroom drawers where the drawer slides are suspended 2.5" off the internal walls by horizontal rectangular blocks of MDF. The blocks are oriented in a way that gravity and the torque on the block causes the layers of the MDF to de-laminate. (Picture riffle shuffling a deck of cards.) The resulting sag in turn makes the drawer slides no longer align. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#/media/File:Riffle_shuffle_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#/media/File:Riffle_s... Almost anything else could have been done to make this design better. They could have rotated the grain direction of the MDF blocks 90 degrees. They could have oriented the blocks vertically in the long direction. They could have used 2x3 lumber (vertical or horizontal) instead of MDF. They could have actually made the sides as thick as the facade pretends they are. (The sides are hollow.) They could have brought the sides in to where the drawer slides actually are. Etc. etc. Some of those things would have cost more or made the (lying) appearance of the furniture less substantial looking. But some of these solutions use the same (MDF) material and same or similar amounts, just different orientation. Either the person who designed it was an absolute dumbass, or it was deliberately made in a way that would fail after more than 90 days but less than 2 years. Mandating different materials doesn't protect against stupidity or malice.

supportengineer 3y ago

Buy used instead of new.

noodlesUK 3y ago
I get that buying used products might be a partial solution at a personal level, but that doesn't change the fact that we're producing ever more cheap, low-quality stuff. What the market is ideally supposed to do is optimise for the tuple (cheap, quality). It doesn't seem to be doing that, as it seems like things are being optimised for (cheap, perceived quality), and just straight up lying about their quality. When people are buying stuff online, it is even easier to just focus on the price. How do we fix this?
- nescioquid 3y ago
  The first time I heard the old-money put-down about someone who had "bought their own furniture" my American newer-is-better head spun (and I'm not much of a "consumer" by American standards). Not only are we socially conditioned to prefer new, as you point out, this is further reinforced by the necessity imposed by disposable-quality products.
- xmprt 3y ago
  I think the parent commenter's answer was pretty valid. You have to vote with your wallet. Buying used will signal to the market that people don't want the crap that's being produced. Or, especially, given the generous return policies these days, buy new and then don't hesitate to return something if you don't like it.
detourdog 3y ago
Exactly, I buy more used furniture and clothing because of the “old world quality” of consumer goods.
abeppu 3y ago
That's a temporary and limited response. I've heard from people that sell vintage clothes that this will basically die as an industry because the more recent garments just don't have the lifespan.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  Wouldn't be surprised. Good furniture can be had second-hand now, but if everyone starts doing this demand will outstrip supply by far. My first sofa was a turquoise leather 2½ seater bought for €100 from a municipal charity shop. Impossible to resell it turned out, but still in excellent condition we had the municipal charity shop in our new town pick it up (they sold it pretty fast; this is one of those sofas you have to see in a store to say “hey, this could work for me”). Our present sofa is an ox-blood 2 seater Chesterfield-type one bought for €400 from a piercing shop which had it for waiting customers for only a brief while. Excellent condition and likely to last us another decade at least (if I didn't have a child I would be more sure about it lasting my lifetime).

redcobra762 3y ago

Counterpoint: This might be what increasing access to luxury goods looks like. A lower quality sells for a low(er) price point, which enables more people to buy what was once a luxury good. Perhaps this is what people give up for society to move to a more equitable place. Forcing a level of quality would force a higher price point, which would price people out of access to the good. And no, "but the prices are still high" doesn't get you out of this jam. For as high as they are now, they would be even higher with quality guarantees. So, if you want the "high quality" you're used to, that may mean spending more because you can afford to. And if you can't, then take solace in knowing that the product that's shitty to you is a new luxury to someone else.

noodlesUK 3y ago
That is a fair counterpoint. I think then the issue is potentially misleading marketing, where a good is being marketed as robust and high-quality when it is not in fact either of those things.
- milesvp 3y ago
  Oh yeah. Marketing drives a lot of shit. Also I think the trend towards “marketplaces” makes things worse. Used to be if it was in a store, it meant there was a buyer whose job was to vet products the store sells. Cheap products would get returned, then pulled from shelves. Now if you buy online? store tanks. new store with same product with new random 6-8 character name. It’s one if the reasons I still like buying at costco, you can be pretty sure the product will be good for its price point.
- redcobra762 3y ago
  Is that “in fact”? I would argue that quality is relative, and when your comparison point is, “no access” you may consider access in any form to be of “superior” quality. Overall I reject the negative attitude towards brands who have seemingly “gotten worse” over time in the same way I accept newcomers to the gym. Goods becoming more available (people using the gym) is a good thing, even if my personal experience gets marginally worse (access to equipment decreases).

Detrytus 3y ago

Get rid of stock markets. Make raising money by issuing stocks illegal. Seriously, this type of short term thinking is a direct result of focusing on quarterly profits reports. Making shitty product that falls apart after a year boosts your sales next year

tekla 3y ago

People should pay what the actual cost of a thing is. This will never happen because everyone who isn't a rich Tech person would revolt. Thus we tend toward cheapness.

jamboca 3y ago

We’re doomed. How can i find any faith in humanity when a genocide is happening before our eyes. Not to mention the orientation of all efforts towards profit over all other ends; how could we be so stupid and short sighted? It’s not even individuals who choose such oppression, rather we are monetarily oppressed. I am about to graduate college and going to school, while fun, has showed me the terrible realities, that the world is cold, that ideas, knowledge, genuine connection, or anything else is worthless before profit. That i have significantly less faith in the world now than i did before college because i look at my peers, the world, and think we have no chance at changing this shit. I am directing the entirety of my existence to ending capitalist pursuit of money and the bucket of ways it oppresses people; every day it brings me closer to killing myself. Yet its not us people who can change anything, its the blind dinosaurs who are stuck in a dream world, living in the past, who rule us and dont realize how many lives are caught up in their dramatic dance.

panax 3y ago

Buy based on quality, but you have to be willing to pay for it.

milesvp 3y ago

I don’t know that we can. One aspect of enshitification I don’t see talked about is how the middle of markets are disappearing. Economic forces seem to push goods to both ends of the spectrum, either super cheap or super expensive, with no ability to navigate middle quality for very long. Most people seem to shop with price as their first concern, those who don’t are willing to pay more for certain qualities/features. But since everyone may be shopping for different features, now volume is low and price necessarily needs to be high. I suspect this is unavoidable.

hollerith 3y ago
The car market does not work like that, and it is an important market.

dopylitty 3y ago

It’s an artifact of the economic system that values profit above all else. Of course if short term profit is the goal then quality doesn’t matter, consumers don’t matter, employees don’t matter. The way to fix it is to get rid of the system where idle shareholders extract every drop of value from companies while demanding ever more and move to one where companies have a goal of sustainably producing quality goods/services while treating employees well. Co-ops can be one model of this. Also change the stock market to a simple way to get capital on a short term basis rather than an all consuming gambling machine. This means also having a way for folks to retire that doesn’t depend on them putting all their savings into a casino.

brokencode 3y ago

If enough people care about quality, then there will be a market opportunity for a premium product. Eventually, once this market opportunity gets big enough, one or more companies will try to make a better product at a higher price with higher margins. This might happen slowly, though you can count on the promise of high profit margins to make it happen sooner or later. Of course, there are areas where we do have regulation, particularly when it comes to safety of products. This is a good option in many cases, though in many cases it would also be very difficult to define and enforce standards. And there can be market problems such as oligopolies or monopolies that prevent robust competition from happening. In those cases, it can be up to antitrust regulators to correct the market.

nlh 3y ago

It's a great question. Unfortunately I think this is a factor of the free-market economy. Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them. And when better (and more expensive products) are produced, not enough people are actually willing to pay for higher quality even though we all complain about enshittification. Airfares are a perfect example. Airlines started offering garbage "Basic Economy" and still offered regular economy for a slightly higher price. What happened? Everyone still chose the cheapest no matter what, so Basic Economy rules the day.

autoexec 3y ago
> Products are getting shittier because ultimately consumers accept them. More like consumers are unable to find anything that isn't shitty. The entire article is about people who spent good money on a product, bought from brands with good reputations, and their products still turned out to be trash. This is not a case of people being unwilling to pay for anything but cheapest options and getting shit-tier goods, it's about how an increasing number of companies are demanding high prices but giving nothing but cheap trash dressed up to look like quality in return. It turns out that it's a lot more profitable to sell people highly priced garbage than to give them quality goods. Every furniture company wants to make more profit, so now they all sell highly priced garbage and there is no one left making quality goods at a reasonable price to take customers away from the people who cheating us.

goda90 3y ago

Legally enforced minimum warranties.Prevent mergers and acquisitions. Break up big companies. Make purchase of cloud connected goods and services legally required to have an option to run independent should the vendor discontinue the cloud service, and that they have to refund or replace should an OTA update break a device despite warranty.

hindsightbias 3y ago

https://www.thosmoser.com https://www.thosmoser.com

overthemoon 3y ago

I swear I'm not being snarky here, but: isn't this supposed to be something the market can solve? Is there no eg furniture manufacturer looking at the state of things and resolving to make relatively affordable and durable furniture? I want durable shit. I want to buy stuff that's going to last. I know I'm not the only one. Is the only option for this to buy top dollar stuff? If you're buying crap every 2-10 years you may as well be renting, but with extra trash going into the landfill/on a boat to be burned and inhaled by children in a 3rd world dump. I would also like to know what policy knobs to fiddle with that could change this situation, but I think the answer is probably something like "mumble mumble global finance capital".

afuchs 3y ago
Information asymmetry exists in markets. Most people are not subject area experts in regards to infrequent purchases. From informal conversation it seems that a lot of consumers have experienced enshittification from brands and products that they previously held in high regard. This has resulted in them losing trust in the market and they now assume that anything they buy will be of poor quality regardless of other factors. As a result, they have given up on making purchasing decisions based on quality and now only purchase the cheapest product they can find. This seems to have created a situation where consumers are unable to differentiate between different products based on quality and do not trust marketing because they've been lied to before.

sparker72678 3y ago

It's not easy, if even possible. Mature markets that reach enormous scale transform into a barbell shape, typically, with all the revenue being at the very top end, and the very bottom end. Take furniture. In a new market you build a nice couch with decent materials that will last, and you charge a price that a middle-class income could afford. It will last, say, 15-20 years. You sell it, make money. Great. Now a competitor comes along and makes a couch that will last 12-15 years. It's 20% cheaper, and your sales drop off a cliff. Your option is to lower your quality so you can lower your prices and compete, or go up market and _raise_ your prices, so you can stay in business. Repeat this cycle many times, and you end up with nothing in the middle, because consumers will not buy (enough) things in the middle. You can try to address this through quality regulation (ban certain materials, or require others, for example), which will raise the floor of the quality (in theory) while raising the floor price along with it. That will price people out of the market entirely, though. You can place heavy import tariffs on products that are of lower quality coming from elsewhere in an attempt to create space for more locally produced mid-quality goods, but doing that prices out your poorer citizens from access to those goods entirely (and they won't like that, and will probably stop voting for you, eventually). The problem is that human beings, on average, do _not_ value quality enough to keep a middle market alive.

gavin_gee 3y ago

Keep items for more than 5 minutes. if you actually believe that you will use the sofa for 20 years because you won't move. Then it's worth the investment. most people don't. people are poorer than they realize and are choosing to push their dollars towards more instant gratification. new phones, costco, lifesystle, doordash, living close to entertainment and cities. This is the myth of the middle class. earn good or great money but spend it all. people worrying about what other people think. buying car, house, clothes

abeppu 3y ago

I think we should consider adding meaningful taxes to materials that are cheap and disproportionately contributing to short-lived products that end up in landfills or waste streams. The article names particle board and MDF. Are there any applications in which those _don't_ have a much shorter lifespan and are used as lower-cost alternatives for plywood? Similarly, a bunch of plastics, laminates for surfaces subject to meaningful wear. All these are known cheap, low-quality, garbage waiting to happen, and as a society, we should be actively discouraging them. If we artificially make MDF that lasts a few years cost the same as plywood that might last decades, producers would have less motivation to pick the cheaper enshittified option.

phaedrus 3y ago
As someone who has built a few hobby speaker cabinets, you absolutely CAN make durable and high quality objects for the home out of MDF. Or even particle board. So I think using taxes to try to discourage the use of certain materials in favor of others is misguided and only likely to lead to manufacturers doing different but worse underhanded cost cutting. The problem is not the material per se but using inappropriate fastening methods for the type of material and/or a design that stresses the material in a modality where it is weak rather than where it is strong. An example of an inappropriate fastening method would be a screw into the edge of a laminated panel and the joint not glued. For an example on the done-right side, if you look at any knockdown speaker cabinet kit from e.g. Parts Express, the MDF parts will have bracing and grooves where the user is meant to use wood glue, and screws mainly just to hold it together until the glue sets. https://www.parts-express.com/Knock-Down-MDF-4-ft-Subwoofer-Cabinet-for-Dayton-Audio-18-Ultimax-300-5030?quantity=1 https://www.parts-express.com/Knock-Down-MDF-4-ft-Subwoofer-... In furniture an example of using MDF in a way that almost has to be intentionally bad design: I have a tall chest of bedroom drawers where the drawer slides are suspended 2.5" off the internal walls by horizontal rectangular blocks of MDF. The blocks are oriented in a way that gravity and the torque on the block causes the layers of the MDF to de-laminate. (Picture riffle shuffling a deck of cards.) The resulting sag in turn makes the drawer slides no longer align. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#/media/File:Riffle_shuffle_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#/media/File:Riffle_s... Almost anything else could have been done to make this design better. They could have rotated the grain direction of the MDF blocks 90 degrees. They could have oriented the blocks vertically in the long direction. They could have used 2x3 lumber (vertical or horizontal) instead of MDF. They could have actually made the sides as thick as the facade pretends they are. (The sides are hollow.) They could have brought the sides in to where the drawer slides actually are. Etc. etc. Some of those things would have cost more or made the (lying) appearance of the furniture less substantial looking. But some of these solutions use the same (MDF) material and same or similar amounts, just different orientation. Either the person who designed it was an absolute dumbass, or it was deliberately made in a way that would fail after more than 90 days but less than 2 years. Mandating different materials doesn't protect against stupidity or malice.