> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform
I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.
There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.
There's an art to sifting through the "random letter" products on Amazon. While there is a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel garbage that gets churned out by grey market factories, bought in bulk on Alibaba and silkscreened with a random throwaway trademark, there are also smaller Chinese brands that have their own injection molds, engineers, etc. and are actually making quality products, but the easiest way to reach yet another global market is to slap together a random brand on Amazon. Even a Chinese company that's making good quality stuff isn't going to go through all the hassle of setting up a US office, hiring a US marketing team, etc, just to sell their coffee maker.
As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha".
Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.
I still can't believe that Anker has not completely dominated the market... I almost always see other inferior brands when people pull out their powerbanks.
Anecdotally I've had a lot of problems with Anker products over the years. On two separate occasions my power banks died while I was travelling. I had a few Ravpower products that were at least as good. And now Ugreen seems to be producing good stuff.
I don't think there is any stickiness here, and it's a cutthroat market. These things are all at a price point where there will never be a winner-takes-all.
Yes, but you can't know that the #1 brand is actually good, or just chance. Does every #1 brand that shows up actually offer the best product? Or is this one instance a happy accident?
It isn't ironic, that is the whole point of a Market for Lemons, the inability to distinguish a good product from bad before purchase due to asymmetric information. That is why I think the author makes a mistake saying that it has no relation to enshittification.
The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those other brands. That would be the same process as enshittification. The primary difference is that enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because information asymmetry.
MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that type of owner.
awesome - was looking ages for a good sleep mask! and i saw mzoo but had the same preassumption. the stuff in europe is so overpriced with 70-100 bucks lol
I haven't tried Manta, though it's hard to imagine anything that could be improved on MZOO. Probably my only complaint is after a year or two of use they tend to lose some of the elasticity, but at $10 you could get at least 4+ years of use for the same price as a single Manta :)
just a quibble, a lemon market is not a stage of a market, it's a market with information asymmetry which affects prices which affects market participation.
the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those products.
used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you discovered that you have been ripped off on a purchase, you have an incentive to unload what you bought, and you could call that a lifecycle stage of a product, but "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets.
also, the term lemon refers to the slang "lemon cars", cars with defects, and has nothing to do with a market for lemons where people seek the sour taste.
It's not the traditional economics framework but having read Akerlof's paper, I can read the title of this post and understand what they mean.
There's a very real phenomena where markets often start out functional and then descend into a market for lemons, and it has to do with game theory again. When the market is small and still growing, firms in it can count on repeat interactions. Even if your customers don't buy from you again, there are new customers, who often ask the existing customers what they should buy, and so you have an incentive to produce a good product. The information asymmetry that Akerlof describes doesn't exist, because actual experiences with the products quickly get conveyed to other market participants and incorporated into their purchase decisions.
But when the market matures, those repeat interactions (and prospect of future sales) decline. People who have repeated needs and vendors they can trust often exit the market and deal directly with their vendors. What's left are buyers who are not particularly well-connected and don't have a whole lot of information on past experiences with the product, but who trust the market as a whole. This is the kind of information asymmetry that breeds a market for lemons. Eventually all products start becoming crap, everyone who knows how to find non-crap exits the marketplace, and the market collapses.
Now I wonder did any unscrupulous company secretly perform supply chain attack against competition by inserting poorly made copies of the competitors products in Amazon's comingling... Potentially even a profitable or cost neutral venture...
Sure, I get it, but I think it's a pretty powerful observation that the internet has enabled a proliferation of markets for lemons by lowering the bar so much for distribution, and raising the bar so much for baseline marketing, that it has eroded previous signals for quality across innumerable domains and jobs-to-be-done.
> "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets
It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.
The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the preconditions have been in place for enough time could reasonably be described as a "descent".
Amazon ending commingling is going to be interesting. Instead of having 1-gallon Tide laundry detergent we'll have 20 listings for it? Or will these folks have price authority, no one else able to sell Tide 1-gallon except Tide themselves?
This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise prices significantly & flood users with way way way more results.
They can still say "more like this" and group the listings on the frontend, but the point would be have a clear chain of accountability between what you buy, who you buy it from, and what actually arrives.
Like, when I purchased an Apple laptop charger "ships from and sold by Amazon.ca" but what arrived was an obvious counterfeit, that was... bad.
The rise of graphic design tools and digital printing play an interesting role in this.
20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product to market.
With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they mean relatively little.
Can confirm. I went to school for this very purpose. It led me down a maze of software engineering jobs and eventually prof serv that I'm in now. (Yey?)
The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to create a website, create a game, create anything, content or otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with their best intentions and run into motivation issues and it just slips downhill from there - eventually being released because they have no choice. Maybe they think some of those downhill slides are good things. The issue still remains. Quality products get drowned out by inferior ones due to letting everyone participate.
There should be some sort of quality control / gate / barrier of entry to some of these things. The ultimate issue is "quality" is subjective.
Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or is it disappearing? From my experience looking at bootcamp students, grasping programming is still nothing short of a mind switch that some are unable to do (regardless of if they have an LLM to assist, that tends to make it worse)
> Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or is it disappearing?
Not OP, but if you wanna get an idea for how much of a barrier there was 30 years ago... Just look through a few shareware CDs. So much crap was hastily thrown together by someone who read a beginner book on Hypercard or Visual Basic - and you'd have to mail $10 to an address, hope they hadn't moved, and that your floppy wouldn't get lost in the mail.
The general shittiness of most software back in the 90s is still a bit nostalgic IMO. It felt like software that was written by actual people instead of a faceless corporation
Reviews are the filter. They can be gamed, and that's a real issue, but it's combatable. And in any case even if you get the market down to just 'thing with good reviews' and 'thing with good [fake] reviews' that's much more manageable.
So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not especially difficult if you have something half decent.
While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.
Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.
Speaking as an independent gamedev: review-based storefronts (e.g. steam, egs, etc) select for the 1% of hits, but offers no pathway for the midrange -- everyone else gets lumped in with the slop.
Yep. And no entity or group seems really interested in moving the needle on this. Instead it just devolves into stupid meta-gaming like the article discusses.
I think you'd have to go back further than 20 years. That's only 2005, and you absolutely could buy generic design assets on CDs, or get a local signage company to do it for cheap back then. If you were cheap enough, you could get a whole website made through an overseas agency for maybe $300.
The brands we do have have declined - while their stocks have gone up drastically over this time. Consider the Amazon, Google, or Facebook of 20 years ago vs now. The reason is that they have made their moats and moved to rent extraction.
I now throw public festivals and it happens in meatspace too if you don’t actively prevent it. One minute that brand new themed festival is all vendors making cool clocks out of old vinyl, local glassblowers, local apiarists.
Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu.
I see the same thing from "handmade trinkets" in tourist areas when I travel. All drop-shipped crap that you see multiple times, especially if you go to multiple cities.
Now I just find a fridge magnet and not care where it's made.
Isn't that just the nature of capitalism? When a need is identified people rush to fill it as cheaply as possible.
It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand.
On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands 20+ years ago.
... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products.
I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.
What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.
With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?
The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)
Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.
The reason this phenomenon exists is because Amazon tried to block generic products from their site by saying the product must feature the seller's brand name.
Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product.
It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.
There is slightly more nuance than that, the brand had to be trademarked, and the fastest way to get trademark approval is to use an unambiguously bad/random name.
It also means that people have no brand recognition, and junk brands just blend in, or if you have to discharge your brand for some reason, nothing is lost.
This could be resolved by having a human person with decent judgment evaluate and approve all products before they can be listed. That's how normal retail outfits operate. Everything you find on a Safeway shelf has been authorized by someone at Safeway corporate. That doesn't mean it's good, but it at least means they consciously intend to sell it.
But that scales poorly. This person has to have some sort of skin in the game, so you can't just contract it out or automate it. Amazon leadership is making a conscious decision to allow their store to be flooded with shit in order to reduce their costs of curating it. Given how successful they are, I have a hard time arguing they made the wrong choice, but I certainly don't like it.
It's the same reason it's hard to impossible to reach customer service at many of these places. Google would much rather lose you as a "customer" than spend the money it takes to have a person available who can get your gmail account unfucked.
Why don't they just make more plausible sounding brand names, especially with the advent of LLMs which can just barf out reasonable sounding ones that you can trust even if you don't speak English, and is almost as easy to do as smashing MIZOUW on the keyboard?
Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital letters.
Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover, Stillpoint, Aetheria
I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, but the points you brought up had the effect of making me view Amazon’s private labels in a more positive light, as in theory, it can be a good differentiator for quality.
Australia Kmart got a good round of applause recently on HN and I think it was because of this reason. MZOO prices but with Kmart brand curation (they use their own brand name Anko alot but under the hood must be different suppliers etc.). Not sure how they do it and pay all that staff and rent, but they do!
The difference between meta and outputs reminds me of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Similar to the metricization of research and science, for example.
I can relate. Buy a lot from Amazon, and play the "crazy-Chinese-brand-name" routlette a lot. Most are low value purchases which makes the risk not too bad. Most purchases have me saying, "Damn that's good quality (e.g. drill bit sets)." So the China brands do a pretty good job overall. Note: One needs to spend a good amount of time sorting thru reviews to avoid the obviously bad stuff.
So now I want to spend several hundred dollars on a magnetic-resistance stationary bike. This is a whole new level of exposure vs. my "small-dollar, small-risk" previous purchases. Main brands (Peleton etc.) are just way out of my price range. So I have spent several days now researching these products. Am confident I am going to make a good purchase... Why you say ??
I was looking at a very niche "vote your favorite mansion" competition on a football fan forum (chiefsplanet) thread. Some very expensive mansion had a photo of the exercise room, and there was my current contender for first choice. What a strange way to get positive feedback.
Amazon excels in this area - pay more but you have a good refund policy. The low value purchases are better done from aliexpress. You'll get the same items but pay less for them.
I’ve bought several of the WAOAW sleep masks as well. They’re great for the price point - I have a nasty habit of forgetting them in hotel beds though. I tend to go through one every few years or so. My wife enjoys hers as well.
Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?
I have the MZOO sleep mask as well and it’s the best I’ve found after trying a bunch of different brands. I bought a second as a backup and would rebuy in the future if needed.
This thread of comments seems like very nice example of "The exception that proves the rule".
Both are satisfied to have found good products, and somewhat surprised, at least tacitly acknowledging by even finding it worth commenting, that the productscape overall is basically a sea of lemons.
Yeah that is nice, but ironically we can only have this discussion because Hacker News itself is not full of lemons
I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"
Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".
So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"
(Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think, although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)
Call me crazy, but it is possible to distinguish good from bad in most of these "lemon markets" the author lists.
When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones. Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain, learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews, of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of doing the above.
Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and taste. But still, it's possible.
Etc.
But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market. We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just have exceptionally bad taste.
It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons. This will usually be true. The important thing is the experience of real consumers participating in the market as it actually exists. A better framing would be "of all products in category X sold last month on amazon, what fraction were lemons?"
> It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons.
It does though, since the entire premise of the "lemon market" idea is that buyers can't differentiate between good and bad products. What matters is where the bar is to be a good differentiator, and how many people can cross it.
It also doesn't necessarily matter how many lemons are for sale, if the good ones are easy to find. Imagine that there are 1 million trashy sleep masks on Amazon and only 3 good ones, but the 3 good ones are right at the top, with superior ratings and reviews.
The better question is: what % of buyers are buying lemons?
>> The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it—what customers see, buy, and use.
I dont understand how this overcomes the problem. How do you then stand out as a candidate in a saturated lemon market of candidates for instance?
How you then stand out as an authoritiative website if the search results are lemon?
I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low enough that you can clear it.
It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.
People who want the Good Stuff in life acquire taste and expertise or rely on the opinion of trusted people who have taste and expertise. It's always been like this. Otherwise acquiring the Good Stuff is a matter of random chance.
There’s definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market. So hard to get one that’s “nice” y’know what I mean. There are some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct. In the high street, it’s lemons all the way down. Even reputable brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple’s whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon. The only time they came close, incidentally was in the 90s when they started licensing their product to other manufacturers. This is what solid branding does. Helps you not be perceived as a lemon.
I'm a bit unclear - are you talking about off-the-shelf prebuilds like the sort Dell or HP would sell? Or are you talking more gaming-oriented ones? Or are you talking just parts?
If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.
Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand. They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not well tested, etc.
Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons:
The first 2006 Intel MacBook Pros had a bad batch somewhere. I knew a bunch of guys who bought one as soon as they came out, and within a week every single one of those MBPs was in the shop. I bought a $900 Compaq Athlon64 laptop. It still works today and never needed repairs.
> Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform.
Who here remembers those old 1000+ pages thick mail-order shopping catalogues? This was a (more or less) carefully curated collection of items because the catalogs could only have a finite number of pages. When Amazon started to accept virtually unvetted product listings from third parties, they opened the floodgates for lemons.
It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering from them.
The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race to the bottom.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've observed this too.
Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid. There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge profit.
Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing people.
I remember flipping through the Sear's Wish Book as child, coveting all the toys. You can still find old copies online: https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric toothbrush costs $80 ( https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S... ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise of inexpensive and abundant goods...
When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or European made product. So even the brand names decided to move their production to China. But then gradually people learn there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product is four times the durability at twice the price.
Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100 its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high quality products in that price range.
With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing for boots. But you have to do your research to know which brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands are selling out.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I couldn't use them anymore.
I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in their stores.
Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been counterfeit products commingled with real ones.
what makes you think 1000 pages of catalog 2x per year is carefully curated? my experience is that it was also filled with random junk
I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free returns, the risk is even lower.
No, they wouldn’t — that’s the point of this entire thread. A catalog with 100x the pages and items would be useless, impossible to organize, and expensive to stock. The creators of those catalogs, who lest we forget, were at the forefront of their own tech revolution, were keenly aware of the limitations and possibilities of their tools.
I think this is less of a market inefficiency and more a downside of “democratization” and the eternal September.
In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.
But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.
Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.
I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.
The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.
I'm torn about online dating. It figures the real market value, the real league of possible partners, as we established that real life pick up is unwanted and creepy. Our value and league are not what we'd want and expect, no surprise.
Honestly tinder shows me profiles of all potential partners with comparable wealth, age, and status within my area which I recognize from closer and wider circle of acquaintances. Even short appearances or breakdowns the apparently have by installing and setting up the app for a day or two. Sometimes even have moments like "wow, this match would be a romantic comedy plot with reunion after a decade". Then... they just swipe me left and continue complaining that there's nothing there.
The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.
There are many countries where on attempt to small talk they will death stare and squash you into the ground, or laugh off. Actually... most of countries in Europe.
> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform
I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.
There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.
There's an art to sifting through the "random letter" products on Amazon. While there is a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel garbage that gets churned out by grey market factories, bought in bulk on Alibaba and silkscreened with a random throwaway trademark, there are also smaller Chinese brands that have their own injection molds, engineers, etc. and are actually making quality products, but the easiest way to reach yet another global market is to slap together a random brand on Amazon. Even a Chinese company that's making good quality stuff isn't going to go through all the hassle of setting up a US office, hiring a US marketing team, etc, just to sell their coffee maker.
As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha".
Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.
I don't think it detracts from his point - there are so many almost identical brands that you can't tell what's good and what's bad anymore.
Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.
I still can't believe that Anker has not completely dominated the market... I almost always see other inferior brands when people pull out their powerbanks.
Anker's gone a little pricier compared to other Chinese brands. Ugreen and Essager were good value several years ago, and Vention more recently.
Anecdotally I've had a lot of problems with Anker products over the years. On two separate occasions my power banks died while I was travelling. I had a few Ravpower products that were at least as good. And now Ugreen seems to be producing good stuff.
I don't think there is any stickiness here, and it's a cutthroat market. These things are all at a price point where there will never be a winner-takes-all.
MZOO is the #1 brand that comes up when you search sleep mask on Amazon.
Yes, but you can't know that the #1 brand is actually good, or just chance. Does every #1 brand that shows up actually offer the best product? Or is this one instance a happy accident?
Yeah but what does that mean? Does that imply the item is better quality?
It isn't ironic, that is the whole point of a Market for Lemons, the inability to distinguish a good product from bad before purchase due to asymmetric information. That is why I think the author makes a mistake saying that it has no relation to enshittification.
The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those other brands. That would be the same process as enshittification. The primary difference is that enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because information asymmetry.
MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that type of owner.
awesome - was looking ages for a good sleep mask! and i saw mzoo but had the same preassumption. the stuff in europe is so overpriced with 70-100 bucks lol
Literally, anecdata
they really could try and stand out more as a brand name?
do you know how they compare to manta btw
I haven't tried Manta, though it's hard to imagine anything that could be improved on MZOO. Probably my only complaint is after a year or two of use they tend to lose some of the elasticity, but at $10 you could get at least 4+ years of use for the same price as a single Manta :)
just a quibble, a lemon market is not a stage of a market, it's a market with information asymmetry which affects prices which affects market participation.
the Amazon mixing of products from separately sourced vendor inventories or luxury goods with counterfeiting competitors, or buying jewelry from a jeweler creates lemon markets for those products.
used markets do have the nature of lemon markets, and once you discovered that you have been ripped off on a purchase, you have an incentive to unload what you bought, and you could call that a lifecycle stage of a product, but "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets.
also, the term lemon refers to the slang "lemon cars", cars with defects, and has nothing to do with a market for lemons where people seek the sour taste.
It's not the traditional economics framework but having read Akerlof's paper, I can read the title of this post and understand what they mean.
There's a very real phenomena where markets often start out functional and then descend into a market for lemons, and it has to do with game theory again. When the market is small and still growing, firms in it can count on repeat interactions. Even if your customers don't buy from you again, there are new customers, who often ask the existing customers what they should buy, and so you have an incentive to produce a good product. The information asymmetry that Akerlof describes doesn't exist, because actual experiences with the products quickly get conveyed to other market participants and incorporated into their purchase decisions.
But when the market matures, those repeat interactions (and prospect of future sales) decline. People who have repeated needs and vendors they can trust often exit the market and deal directly with their vendors. What's left are buyers who are not particularly well-connected and don't have a whole lot of information on past experiences with the product, but who trust the market as a whole. This is the kind of information asymmetry that breeds a market for lemons. Eventually all products start becoming crap, everyone who knows how to find non-crap exits the marketplace, and the market collapses.
Now I wonder did any unscrupulous company secretly perform supply chain attack against competition by inserting poorly made copies of the competitors products in Amazon's comingling... Potentially even a profitable or cost neutral venture...
Sure, I get it, but I think it's a pretty powerful observation that the internet has enabled a proliferation of markets for lemons by lowering the bar so much for distribution, and raising the bar so much for baseline marketing, that it has eroded previous signals for quality across innumerable domains and jobs-to-be-done.
> "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets
It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.
The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the preconditions have been in place for enough time could reasonably be described as a "descent".
markets can fail ("descend") for many reasons that are not lemon information asymmetry
lemon markets never stop descending till all honesty is gone
i see a point in maintaining the distinctions.
Amazon ending commingling is going to be interesting. Instead of having 1-gallon Tide laundry detergent we'll have 20 listings for it? Or will these folks have price authority, no one else able to sell Tide 1-gallon except Tide themselves?
This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise prices significantly & flood users with way way way more results.
They can still say "more like this" and group the listings on the frontend, but the point would be have a clear chain of accountability between what you buy, who you buy it from, and what actually arrives.
Like, when I purchased an Apple laptop charger "ships from and sold by Amazon.ca" but what arrived was an obvious counterfeit, that was... bad.
The best one I had was when I bought a VR headset, and inside of the package was a brick.
No questions asked and they took my return, but man, I was sweating that I'd get accused of something.
The rise of graphic design tools and digital printing play an interesting role in this.
20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product to market.
With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they mean relatively little.
Can confirm. I went to school for this very purpose. It led me down a maze of software engineering jobs and eventually prof serv that I'm in now. (Yey?)
The ability for anyone to learn Photoshop or learn how to create a website, create a game, create anything, content or otherwise, and sell it on the marketplace for a quick cash grab has never been easier. I think most people set out to try with their best intentions and run into motivation issues and it just slips downhill from there - eventually being released because they have no choice. Maybe they think some of those downhill slides are good things. The issue still remains. Quality products get drowned out by inferior ones due to letting everyone participate.
There should be some sort of quality control / gate / barrier of entry to some of these things. The ultimate issue is "quality" is subjective.
Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or is it disappearing? From my experience looking at bootcamp students, grasping programming is still nothing short of a mind switch that some are unable to do (regardless of if they have an LLM to assist, that tends to make it worse)
> Would you say software still has this gate / barrier or is it disappearing?
Not OP, but if you wanna get an idea for how much of a barrier there was 30 years ago... Just look through a few shareware CDs. So much crap was hastily thrown together by someone who read a beginner book on Hypercard or Visual Basic - and you'd have to mail $10 to an address, hope they hadn't moved, and that your floppy wouldn't get lost in the mail.
The general shittiness of most software back in the 90s is still a bit nostalgic IMO. It felt like software that was written by actual people instead of a faceless corporation
Reviews are the filter. They can be gamed, and that's a real issue, but it's combatable. And in any case even if you get the market down to just 'thing with good reviews' and 'thing with good [fake] reviews' that's much more manageable.
So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not especially difficult if you have something half decent.
> Reviews are the filter.
While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.
Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.
Historically, this gatekeeper role was held by editors. In most domains, though, we have got rid of them, for the better and the worse.
Speaking as an independent gamedev: review-based storefronts (e.g. steam, egs, etc) select for the 1% of hits, but offers no pathway for the midrange -- everyone else gets lumped in with the slop.
Yep. And no entity or group seems really interested in moving the needle on this. Instead it just devolves into stupid meta-gaming like the article discusses.
I think you'd have to go back further than 20 years. That's only 2005, and you absolutely could buy generic design assets on CDs, or get a local signage company to do it for cheap back then. If you were cheap enough, you could get a whole website made through an overseas agency for maybe $300.
The brands we do have have declined - while their stocks have gone up drastically over this time. Consider the Amazon, Google, or Facebook of 20 years ago vs now. The reason is that they have made their moats and moved to rent extraction.
Not just The Internet. All of tech, and likely, other industries, as well.
I was told that this was what happened to Etsy.
When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real, handmade goods, at fairly high prices.
Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-lo.
The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale.
I see this happening everywhere.
I now throw public festivals and it happens in meatspace too if you don’t actively prevent it. One minute that brand new themed festival is all vendors making cool clocks out of old vinyl, local glassblowers, local apiarists.
Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu.
Curation is the answer.
I see the same thing from "handmade trinkets" in tourist areas when I travel. All drop-shipped crap that you see multiple times, especially if you go to multiple cities.
Now I just find a fridge magnet and not care where it's made.
Isn't that just the nature of capitalism? When a need is identified people rush to fill it as cheaply as possible.
It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand.
On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and maybe thousands 20+ years ago.
... [W]hile shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, .... The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products.
I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.
What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.
With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?
The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)
Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.
The reason this phenomenon exists is because Amazon tried to block generic products from their site by saying the product must feature the seller's brand name.
Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product.
It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.
There is slightly more nuance than that, the brand had to be trademarked, and the fastest way to get trademark approval is to use an unambiguously bad/random name.
It also means that people have no brand recognition, and junk brands just blend in, or if you have to discharge your brand for some reason, nothing is lost.
The root cause is the unending quest for scale.
This could be resolved by having a human person with decent judgment evaluate and approve all products before they can be listed. That's how normal retail outfits operate. Everything you find on a Safeway shelf has been authorized by someone at Safeway corporate. That doesn't mean it's good, but it at least means they consciously intend to sell it.
But that scales poorly. This person has to have some sort of skin in the game, so you can't just contract it out or automate it. Amazon leadership is making a conscious decision to allow their store to be flooded with shit in order to reduce their costs of curating it. Given how successful they are, I have a hard time arguing they made the wrong choice, but I certainly don't like it.
It's the same reason it's hard to impossible to reach customer service at many of these places. Google would much rather lose you as a "customer" than spend the money it takes to have a person available who can get your gmail account unfucked.
Why don't they just make more plausible sounding brand names, especially with the advent of LLMs which can just barf out reasonable sounding ones that you can trust even if you don't speak English, and is almost as easy to do as smashing MIZOUW on the keyboard?
Gemini just gave me these as novel brand names for a sleep mask - some are not bad, all are better than random capital letters.
Umbra, Somnia, Driftdown, Ocula, Night Plume, Hushcover, Stillpoint, Aetheria
Yep, that makes a lot of sense then.
But yeah I call the site Scamazon. Even if you think you buy legit, theres a good chance of counterfeit due to SKU mixing.
And weirdly enough, in quite a few areas, Scamazon is like 20% more expensive than other retailers.
These days, I ask in discord groups who they recommend. At least I can avoid the AI shitfest and get real humans' expertise.
I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, but the points you brought up had the effect of making me view Amazon’s private labels in a more positive light, as in theory, it can be a good differentiator for quality.
Even more frustrating is when you get a GREAT product from an anti-brand, but there’s no way to buy more from them once they’re gone.
Australia Kmart got a good round of applause recently on HN and I think it was because of this reason. MZOO prices but with Kmart brand curation (they use their own brand name Anko alot but under the hood must be different suppliers etc.). Not sure how they do it and pay all that staff and rent, but they do!
The difference between meta and outputs reminds me of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Similar to the metricization of research and science, for example.
I can relate. Buy a lot from Amazon, and play the "crazy-Chinese-brand-name" routlette a lot. Most are low value purchases which makes the risk not too bad. Most purchases have me saying, "Damn that's good quality (e.g. drill bit sets)." So the China brands do a pretty good job overall. Note: One needs to spend a good amount of time sorting thru reviews to avoid the obviously bad stuff.
So now I want to spend several hundred dollars on a magnetic-resistance stationary bike. This is a whole new level of exposure vs. my "small-dollar, small-risk" previous purchases. Main brands (Peleton etc.) are just way out of my price range. So I have spent several days now researching these products. Am confident I am going to make a good purchase... Why you say ??
I was looking at a very niche "vote your favorite mansion" competition on a football fan forum (chiefsplanet) thread. Some very expensive mansion had a photo of the exercise room, and there was my current contender for first choice. What a strange way to get positive feedback.
Amazon excels in this area - pay more but you have a good refund policy. The low value purchases are better done from aliexpress. You'll get the same items but pay less for them.
I actually have the Mzoo sleep mask he mentioned and I quite like it.
Wirecutter recommends it and Reddit seems to agree.
Doesn't negate the article, but just clarifying for anyone in the market who thinks it's a lemon.
Amazing how fast I just went from “yeah Amazon does kind of suck these days” to ordering something there.
I’ve bought several of the WAOAW sleep masks as well. They’re great for the price point - I have a nasty habit of forgetting them in hotel beds though. I tend to go through one every few years or so. My wife enjoys hers as well.
Has anyone bought the third brand to round out the discussion?
In one of my niche hobbies I run a product recommendations website based on buying stuff with our own money to separate crap from good stuff.
One of our recommended products is made by a brand called DIWANGUS, which always gets a giggle. But they're good!
There's a "brand" that makes auto seat covers called DIKSOAKR.
I have the MZOO sleep mask as well and it’s the best I’ve found after trying a bunch of different brands. I bought a second as a backup and would rebuy in the future if needed.
Turns out this entire article is thinly veiled marketing for the MZOO sleep mask :D
This thread of comments seems like very nice example of "The exception that proves the rule".
Both are satisfied to have found good products, and somewhat surprised, at least tacitly acknowledging by even finding it worth commenting, that the productscape overall is basically a sea of lemons.
Cool
Yeah that is nice, but ironically we can only have this discussion because Hacker News itself is not full of lemons
I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"
Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".
So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"
(Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think, although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)
Call me crazy, but it is possible to distinguish good from bad in most of these "lemon markets" the author lists.
When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones. Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain, learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews, of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of doing the above.
Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and taste. But still, it's possible.
Etc.
But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market. We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just have exceptionally bad taste.
It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons. This will usually be true. The important thing is the experience of real consumers participating in the market as it actually exists. A better framing would be "of all products in category X sold last month on amazon, what fraction were lemons?"
> It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons.
It does though, since the entire premise of the "lemon market" idea is that buyers can't differentiate between good and bad products. What matters is where the bar is to be a good differentiator, and how many people can cross it.
It also doesn't necessarily matter how many lemons are for sale, if the good ones are easy to find. Imagine that there are 1 million trashy sleep masks on Amazon and only 3 good ones, but the 3 good ones are right at the top, with superior ratings and reviews.
The better question is: what % of buyers are buying lemons?
>> The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it—what customers see, buy, and use.
I dont understand how this overcomes the problem. How do you then stand out as a candidate in a saturated lemon market of candidates for instance?
How you then stand out as an authoritiative website if the search results are lemon?
I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low enough that you can clear it.
It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.
People who want the Good Stuff in life acquire taste and expertise or rely on the opinion of trusted people who have taste and expertise. It's always been like this. Otherwise acquiring the Good Stuff is a matter of random chance.
For what it's worth, the last sleep mask you'll ever buy is Nitehood.
https://www.nitehood.com/
There’s definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market. So hard to get one that’s “nice” y’know what I mean. There are some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct. In the high street, it’s lemons all the way down. Even reputable brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple’s whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon. The only time they came close, incidentally was in the 90s when they started licensing their product to other manufacturers. This is what solid branding does. Helps you not be perceived as a lemon.
I'm a bit unclear - are you talking about off-the-shelf prebuilds like the sort Dell or HP would sell? Or are you talking more gaming-oriented ones? Or are you talking just parts?
If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.
Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand. They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not well tested, etc.
Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons:
https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-...
Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone a lemon because of it.
I’d also consider large phones a usability failure. My work phone is a Iphone 13 Mini.
Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you’re willing to eat the propaganda.
The first 2006 Intel MacBook Pros had a bad batch somewhere. I knew a bunch of guys who bought one as soon as they came out, and within a week every single one of those MBPs was in the shop. I bought a $900 Compaq Athlon64 laptop. It still works today and never needed repairs.
> Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform.
Obligatory Ryan George video: https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?t=4
Who here remembers those old 1000+ pages thick mail-order shopping catalogues? This was a (more or less) carefully curated collection of items because the catalogs could only have a finite number of pages. When Amazon started to accept virtually unvetted product listings from third parties, they opened the floodgates for lemons.
It's kind of a real world ACME equivalent now. I'm surprised that I don't make that duped coyote face more often after ordering from them.
The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods. I'm not sure whether this is adaptation to a lemon market, but it does reinforce the information asymmetry. Infindnlywlf thinking, "this used to be a good brand once, but can I still rely on them?"
Some of the bad incentives have always been there because they are fundamental to capitalism. But I feel that the Internet and global trade together have turbocharged a particularly nasty race to the bottom.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've observed this too.
Somewhere, some marketing genius realized that brand reception is sticky, but changes to manufacturing processes can be rapid. There is thus an arbitrage opportunity. You start with a high-quality product with a beloved brand. You quickly change the factory to cheaply produce garbage instead. For some window of time, you can get people to buy these shitty products at a price commensurate with their brand perception and take a huge profit.
Of course, brand perception is sticky but not infinitely so and eventually information catches up with reality. Then you've permanently destroyed a brand's reputation. But for a brief moment in time, you can create a lot of shareholder value at the minor expense of making crappy products and disappointing people.
I remember flipping through the Sear's Wish Book as child, coveting all the toys. You can still find old copies online: https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
What's actually happening is that China's manufacturing revolution has given us incredible access to cheap manufactured goods. So for instance, in the 1991 Sear's catalog an electric toothbrush costs $80 ( https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1991%20S... ). There are only brand name options. In terms of prevailing wages, that is about $200 in today's dollar. Now on Amazon you can get that same brand name toothbrush for $50, one quarter the price, or a nonsense-brand-name one for $10, 1/20th the price! One man's race-to-the-bottom is another's man paradise of inexpensive and abundant goods...
When China started making stuff so cheap, nobody wanted to buy a much more expensive brand-name Japanese or American or European made product. So even the brand names decided to move their production to China. But then gradually people learn there is no longer any brand name quality boost, and the Chinese manufacturers learn to sell direct to consumers, and so then you get the all the weird brand names, and consumers just buy those for cheaper since the brand names don't mean anything anymore anyways. And even if you wanted to introduce a higher quality version, there simply is no way to reliably educate the consumer and credibly prove to the consumer that your product is four times the durability at twice the price.
Thus the equilibrium is that for most products less than $100 its all going to be Chinese made, the product will be good enough that the consumer won't immediately return it, but other than that the quality is going to be mediocre, because there is no incentive to develop a brand name that stands for high quality products in that price range.
With more expensive goods, there are still are brands that pride themselves on high quality, durable products, eg, Toyota for cars, Bosch for appliances, Milwaukee for tools, Redwing for boots. But you have to do your research to know which brands are working to keep their reputation, and which brands are selling out.
> The other part of the story is that a lot of formerly respectable quality brands now sell much poorer quality goods.
I've felt this. A few years ago I bought Eddie Bauer sheets online and they pilled up so badly after one washing that I couldn't use them anymore.
I can see how they'd be willing to ship off cheap crap to Amazon whereas they'd be more protective of what they sell in their stores.
Amazon didn't even let me leave a negative review, some AI model must have decided I'm fraudulent. That would be especially ironic if the reason for my bad experience had been counterfeit products commingled with real ones.
The sears catalog was all selling sears stuff, there were no third party sales. Branding as assurance of quality can actually work pretty well.
what makes you think 1000 pages of catalog 2x per year is carefully curated? my experience is that it was also filled with random junk
I'd rather rely on online reviews. I'm pretty good at buying quality products sight unseen at this point. And with free returns, the risk is even lower.
The people making those catalogs would've wet their pants with excitement if they could stuff 100x more crap in there. Lol
No, they wouldn’t — that’s the point of this entire thread. A catalog with 100x the pages and items would be useless, impossible to organize, and expensive to stock. The creators of those catalogs, who lest we forget, were at the forefront of their own tech revolution, were keenly aware of the limitations and possibilities of their tools.
> (and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification
Missing a close paren here. My mental Lisp parser gave me a syntax error here and I panicked hahah :)
(truth be told I got stuck for an instant in there)
I think this is less of a market inefficiency and more a downside of “democratization” and the eternal September.
In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.
But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.
Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.
I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.
The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.
the lemon is rotten
no lemonade
the lemon is so bitter, you lose concern about the gas station tequila.
the rotten lemon can still feed your garden
Because the internet is all about buying stuff. Got it.
It applies to anywhere you consume content too (search engines, youtube, social media)
I'm torn about online dating. It figures the real market value, the real league of possible partners, as we established that real life pick up is unwanted and creepy. Our value and league are not what we'd want and expect, no surprise.
Honestly tinder shows me profiles of all potential partners with comparable wealth, age, and status within my area which I recognize from closer and wider circle of acquaintances. Even short appearances or breakdowns the apparently have by installing and setting up the app for a day or two. Sometimes even have moments like "wow, this match would be a romantic comedy plot with reunion after a decade". Then... they just swipe me left and continue complaining that there's nothing there.
> real life pick up is unwanted and creepy
The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.
There are many countries where on attempt to small talk they will death stare and squash you into the ground, or laugh off. Actually... most of countries in Europe.