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131 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 26 May \ on: What if enshittification doesn't happen just because of greed? econ
Of course consumer sovereignty is the ultimate answer. Producers reduce quality in ways that save money and that aren't heavily missed by consumers. Then, niche producers serve the alienated customers, at much higher prices, with reduced scale economies.
People are constantly decrying the low quality of goods and services they consume, while eschewing the opportunity to buy quality at a higher price point.
I was arguing with someone about this the other day, but those of us who will pay for quality are weird.
There's a weird local minimum where high quality becomes uneconomical bc low quality is so ubiquitous that scale precludes it. I would pay $100 for a toaster that would last 20 years but I can't, it cannot be had.
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I'm holding out for a toaster that mines bitcoin.
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I think it's more than an unwillingness to pay for quality, it's also a lack of information. You don't just have to pay a higher price, but you have to pay the cost of finding the higher quality products, which usually aren't as well advertised.
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People know they're buying the cheapest options. Implicitly, that means they don't care enough about higher quality to pay the search cost for it.
The other element to this is that people aren't really consuming the lowest possible quality products. Presumably, there are possible products of even lower quality that most people won't consume either.
There are just a bunch of quality traits that most people don't care as strongly about as some do.
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I do often find that there are "hidden gems" of products that have a great quality-to-price ratio, that many savvy consumers swear by, but aren't that well known to the public. Good restaurants are like that, as are good podcasts/educational materials for personal finance as we recently discussed. I'm sure there are more examples too, like for clothing brands, but I don't know as much about that.
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I imagine those products tend to expand in their market share, unless they're catering to an unusual preference.
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True, and I suppose that's when enshittification starts happening unless the owner is really committed to maintaining its previous price/quality ratio.
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