Comment by pif
1 day ago
Quality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.
The only time I ever see ads are at the cinema. I see people talking about them but I have been out of the loop for well over a decade.
No adverts on Netflix, bbc, Disney, YouTube, paramount, Spotify. I cancelled Amazon because they added adverts.
Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution.
I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.
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There's also a lot of absurd product placement in many of the supposedly ad-free streams.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
I wish they would price the service commensurate to what they earn with ads.
My ad watching gives them a few cents, and yet they want $8.99 for a month or some gems.
“My ad watching gives them a few cents”
I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.
For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.
Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.
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The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.
But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.
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Individual memberships are priced 1000x higher than individual ad revenue because only 1 in 1000 users will pay for membership.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
My gas pump has ads, despite me paying for the gas. My airplane has ads, despite me paying for the ticket. My phone has ads, despite me paying for the service. My doctor's office has ads, despite me paying for healthcare. My car has ads, despite me paying for the car.
I can pay for a service to watch sports, and I get ads during the event, ads painted on the field, ads superimposed on the field, normal ads embedded in the commentary, obtuse ads shoved into things like "and he's the Lite Beer Co.® Player of Match", ads in the name of the building, ads in the name of the match itself, ads on the player's jerseys. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
Corporations have decided "why make ${service_cost}, when we could make ${service_cost} + ${ad_revenue}?"
> Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if attending the game required receiving a free tattoo of a sponsor's logo.
You don't have your BIM mark?
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/49069-the-apple (I apologize in advance to anyone who watches this as a result of my comment)
I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.
This is entirely untrue. Almost anywhere you live in the U.S. you can find local brands with local production.
Where can I find an oven made with entirely US parts (or even ~85-90%+)?
I'll tell you in advance that I haven't been able to locate one in a few years of looking. Most major appliances are, at best, 60-80% american with no accurate accounting, even if they're "assembled in the USA". Cars are the only thing with accurate sourcing labels due to legislation.
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And the local production is an assembly of something really made in china.
It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
For what it's worth, Apple chargers are, or used to be, pretty high quality. There's this infamous teardown video of a cheap clone showing 0.5mm of air is all that's between you and a potentially fatal electric shock.
Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.
I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.
I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months - great if you need a cable NOW though. Or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.
The thing is the stuff retail stores sell locally is just the same stuff I can buy from China. Except they need to make a profit, the local distributor needs to make a profit, and the regional distributor needs to make a profit. So you end up paying 10x more for the same thing and/or they sell lower quality (= cheaper for them) items. I see zero value in them still existing other than convenience, it's not like the workers can tell you anything that you can't just ask Google yourself.
Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.
Really?!
Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.
Is there any way we can take back control of the economy from paperclip maximisers?
Appeals were made time after time to "Buy American!" as each manufacturing sector was offshored, first to Japan, then to China and the rest of Asia, but they were ignored by workers in other sectors. So, yes, you'd better believe the working class do not escape blame.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
Because paying a penny won't prevent ads or tracking.
Paying for an ad-free service will prevent ads.
Example: YouTube Premium.
Great example! YouTube is currently being sued because people with Premium still get ads.
Granted they're the ones creators put in their own videos, which is kind of a technicality. Premium does block the overt ads that YouTube itself pushes. (There's no telling if it blocks submarine ads that are videos) However, it was promised to block all ads, and that's what the lawsuit is about.
If ads is embedded in video(like product placement, sponsor etc). You still see the ads.
Amazon prime added the ads back no?