6 ms·

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 pivo

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.

levocardia 2y ago
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.
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  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?
- kube-system 2y ago
  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.
- what 2y ago
  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.
  - naniwaduni 2y ago
    The average cheap household product on Amazon is, in fact, Fine.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  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.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    > 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.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - d0mine 2y ago
    Seems a bit self-critical of you to believe that ;)
    - emptiestplace 2y ago
      Excellent joke explanation!
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  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.
  - prmph 2y ago
    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.
    - snakeyjake 2y ago
      >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.)
      - compiler-guy 2y ago
        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.
Spivak 2y ago
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.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  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.
- furyofantares 2y ago
  > 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.
- palata 2y ago
  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.
Freedom2 2y ago
> most people aren't pedants They should come visit HackerNews once in a while :D
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Ooof. Also god I miss n-gate.
exceptione 2y ago
>> 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.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  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.
  - exceptione 2y ago
    Any suit does, not just the 90s ones. A t-shirt is very unforgiving compared to a suit.
registeredcorn 2y ago
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.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  The effing Article (TFA)
  - registeredcorn 2y ago
    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.
    - pockmarked19 2y ago
      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.
- zmj 2y ago
  "the fucking article"

levocardia 2y ago

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.

MattGaiser 2y ago
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?
kube-system 2y ago
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.
what 2y ago
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.
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  The average cheap household product on Amazon is, in fact, Fine.
forgetfreeman 2y ago
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.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > 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.
buildsjets 2y ago
Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- d0mine 2y ago
  Seems a bit self-critical of you to believe that ;)
  - emptiestplace 2y ago
    Excellent joke explanation!
snakeyjake 2y ago
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.
- prmph 2y ago
  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.
  - snakeyjake 2y ago
    >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.)
    - compiler-guy 2y ago
      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.

Spivak 2y ago

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.

bee_rider 2y ago
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.
furyofantares 2y ago
> 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.
palata 2y ago
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.

Freedom2 2y ago

> most people aren't pedants They should come visit HackerNews once in a while :D

forgetfreeman 2y ago
Ooof. Also god I miss n-gate.

exceptione 2y ago

>> 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.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
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.
- exceptione 2y ago
  Any suit does, not just the 90s ones. A t-shirt is very unforgiving compared to a suit.

registeredcorn 2y ago

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.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
The effing Article (TFA)
- registeredcorn 2y ago
  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.
  - pockmarked19 2y ago
    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.
zmj 2y ago
"the fucking article"