Thread

1. lordleft · 1789987740 · focus · HN ↗

   Something I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.

   1. happytoexplain · 1789988853 · focus · HN ↗

      I think this is the single biggest change making everything worse. Lots of businesses used to care about their own products, since quality and brand image seemed like obviously important things. As the machine ran, and we got better and better at collecting and analyzing data, it became clear that the customer's view of you and your product didn't matter as much as we thought, and in fact it matters less and less the more businesses converge on that idea. But businesses still mostly cared about their own products, because they are run by humans, who tend to care about what they make naturally. However, eventually market forces pushed out normal humans.

      1. sarchertech · 1789990627 · focus · HN ↗

         I don’t know if that’s true. Look at the amount of lethal product defects over the last 100 years.

         And before the FDA existed, companies were perfectly willing to put formaldehyde in milk, mercury in candy, and arsenic in vegetables.

         1. happytoexplain · 1789992493 · focus · HN ↗

            Those cases are high-profile, and much more common than they should have been, but not common in the context of all products. They are examples of the type of decision-making that I am claiming has increased across the board. Also, those cases are mostly enormous-harm-vs-enormous-profit, whereas now that the same attitude is everywhere, most of the cases are just "make the thing worse", which is way less dramatic but ten thousand times more common.

            1. sarchertech · 1789994586 · focus · HN ↗

               There was much more than just the high profile egregious cases though.

               Most food adulteration is a quality issue more than a safety problem.

               Buy old peas but put a little green coloring in is almost the exact same thinking as let’s replace the metal gears with plastic ones to save a dollar per item. The vast majority of companies doing that didn’t kill or seriously injure anyone.

               Companies have always been doing this.

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