[HN Gopher] Advertising without signal: The rise of the grifter ...
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Advertising without signal: The rise of the grifter equilibrium
Author : neehao
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-07-19 02:25 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gojiberries.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gojiberries.io)
| soared wrote:
| Those formulas have to be comedy but it seems like it's trying to
| be serious.
| neehao wrote:
| agree. they seem hasty but didn't notice anything obviously
| wrong but may be i missed something ...
| neehao wrote:
| appears the math was updated
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Yes. Comedy is suboptimally optimal
| esperent wrote:
| Regarding the Oatly ad at the top ( _Another ad for our oat drink
| providing no reason at all why you should try it_ ), this ad does
| have a signal. It's a humblebrag. It's saying, our product is so
| well known, and the reasons for using it so obvious, that we
| don't need to say anything. It's cementing Oatly brand in the
| minds of anyone who already _thinks_ that they should be
| switching to non-dairy milk for any reason (health, environment,
| etc).
| neehao wrote:
| agree..
| xnx wrote:
| Also that it is the drink of nonconformists and creatives. Many
| of their other ads cross way over into tryhard cringe for how
| "random" they are.
| cnity wrote:
| Tryhard cringe for us, but likely very funny and edgy to,
| say, 5-10 year olds. It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't
| an attempt to center Oatly for coming generations as an
| investment.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's funny and edgy for adult segments as well,
| unfortunately. Advertising works.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| I wish someone did an analysis of their marketing. I really
| hope it was a huge flop because it's just awful.
|
| I despise their horrible advertising and marketing copy in
| general and I sometimes just have to tell myself, "it's just
| oat milk no need to boycott it because some edgy marketing
| consultant forces you to read their nonsense".
| mattlondon wrote:
| It's in your head. Someone did something right.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| hmm after some research I'm inclined to believe that 1)
| oatly is the best tasting product on the market, 2) it's
| the distribution channels that was the success, not the
| marketing copy, and 3) spending massive amounts of capital
| into growth of a good product will always yield growth.
|
| So no... I stand by what I said, I think they did a lot of
| things wrong in the marketing department, in spite of
| having a really solid product.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It's I think what we used to call "brand advertising".
|
| Just like random "coca-cola" billboards at the side of a road
| or a sports stadium
| efitz wrote:
| I once read an article that said basically that some ads were
| targeted at people who had already bought the product, to
| prevent regret for paying a premium price. The example given
| was TV commercials for BMW cars but I can see that applying
| with the oat milk drink.
| esafak wrote:
| So the regret increases the premium! Funny when you think
| about it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The version I head was they're placed to remind you that
| you made a good choice, and for your _next_ car, you should
| make the same good choice.
| amelius wrote:
| The ad is basically saying "You consumers don't know how to use
| your brains and will buy our brand just because we showed a
| picture of it". Terrible.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Not really, it's more of a brag about how oatly has fully
| solidified itself as _the_ choice for so many, basically like
| Nutella
| 9dev wrote:
| Nope. It builds on prior exposure to Oatly marketing in other
| channels, which they famously are good at.
|
| The market for oat milk consumers mostly consists of people
| that had actively made a choice about drinking oat milk
| already.
| ses1984 wrote:
| To me it looks like a parody of advertising in general which
| rarely provides reasons.
| abetol wrote:
| Gen-X doesn't want to be manipulated.
|
| Millennial advertising doesn't adhere to 20th century
| advertising norms.
|
| Gen-X is getting older and needs fiber and to lose weight, so
| they respond to "oats".
|
| Millennials and Gen-Z want healthy-looking drinks that are
| trendy and fun, because they'll never be able to pay off
| their college loans and grew up during a time where politics
| were divided and assume we may all die from global warming
| and WW3 so they just want to be healthy and happy.
|
| This ad is trying to say, "We're not going to say this is
| healthy, or will make you feel free, or is a fast meal
| substitute. It's just oat milk."
|
| That pretty much appeals to all of them.
| card_zero wrote:
| It looks like it's in Vienna ("gewista"), but is delivering its
| huge vacuous message in English.
| mrala wrote:
| Since the article doesn't mention it, CPA stands for cost per
| action.
| closewith wrote:
| Cost Per Acquisition (of a new customer).
| amelius wrote:
| How do they know if the customer is new or not?
| HEGalloway wrote:
| tracking via cookies (that expire after X days) or some
| kind of identifier in the CRM
| closewith wrote:
| Normally in e-commerce, it's based on email or phone
| number. In physical retail, they use all sorts of tactics,
| from loyalty cards to facial recognition (where legal,
| which it shouldn't be).
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| CPA pricing removes the burn
|
| Not true. There is limited ad space which all advertisers compete
| for. No matter which model, CPC or CPA, the advertiser who pays
| most gets the ad placement.
|
| Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO
| is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still
| a zero sum game.
| ajb wrote:
| He's not saying advertisers don't compete. He's saying it
| changes from advertising being a massive _risk_ as well as a
| cost, to just a cost. So the auction is won by the company with
| the biggest instantaneous profit margin on a SKU, instead of
| the one with the biggest war chest that can afford to risk on
| that massive prime time slot. This change in incentive favours
| shitty products.
| maartenscholl wrote:
| This has little to do with equilibrium analysis, it is just the
| market for lemons story but for the ad space. You need to
| investigate the buyers and what they believe about brand quality.
| cornholio wrote:
| One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the
| manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing
| to implement.
|
| Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely
| because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set
| their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of
| the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for
| example, selling at different prices through certain local
| distributors.
|
| Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors
| of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer
| the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that
| capture most of the surplus.
|
| This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve,
| manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when
| sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this
| means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme
| either.
| acdha wrote:
| > This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve
|
| Has chosen not to solve. They could trivially improve the
| situation by ending the practice of commingled inventory so a
| seller could be held accountable for counterfeit or stolen
| items but that would cost more so they don't.
| luckylion wrote:
| How do they handle it when you get your inventory sent back?
| I.e. you send them 100 pieces of X and after three months you
| tell them to send them back to you. Do they just take 100
| pieces of X out of their general inventory, or do they know
| which ones were yours? Because otherwise it seems like an
| obvious scam where you could send in trash and get real items
| back.
| acdha wrote:
| I don't know but based on the number of people I know
| who've gotten clearly counterfeit or repackaged items from
| official storefronts on Amazon, I would assume they just
| take 100 units out of that bin.
| fhkatari wrote:
| RFID is a possible solution. Tags are now about five cents,
| and likely to drop further in price with volume. Newer tag
| designs can be sewn in the seams of garments and shoes.
| cornholio wrote:
| Commingling is optional to Amazon vendors, all they have
| to do is track each item with a plain individual sticker
| / QR tag. They opt not to do it and track using the
| generic product barcode since it's cheaper and simpler.
|
| So if they can't be bothered to attach a zero cents
| sticker on the item, a 5cents rfid tag is out of the
| question.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Commingling only happens at the frontend. For each item the
| vendor is tracked. Physically they are in different bins
| and more likely in different warehouses. So if you buy a
| product and it turns out fake, Amazon can trace back the
| vendor for the particular item you received.
|
| It helps with inventory availability with the cost of risk
| of bad customer experience in case of fraud.
| somat wrote:
| Ehhh, My experience is the opposite(perhaps it is what you buy)
| manufacturers hate dealing with the end customer directly,
| customer-service is huge pain and not part of their core
| competence. So the manufacturer always goes through resellers,
| distributors, middle-men.
|
| Personally I hate it, I would love to buy directly from the
| manufacturer instead of playing roulette with the distributor.
| seydor wrote:
| That explains the success of platforms like Temu: every search
| generates many identical products that are all dirt cheap, which
| makes my search much easier. I find myself buying a lot faster
| because there is not a lot of variety and relatively little
| trickery/ads
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Are we talking about the same Temu that pops up a spinning
| roulette wheel telling you have 100% off and to install the app
| to get the offer? (Catch is... it isn't 100% off and it's BS)
| phatfish wrote:
| Yup no idea, Temu is peak gamified shopping. The parent could
| just be fully on board with being conned though.
| nottorp wrote:
| Maybe the parent just runs with all kinds of ad blockers /
| privacy options on, because I haven't seen that roulette
| thing on Temu.
|
| Or perhaps, if it's infrequent, I just ignored it as
| obvious bullshit. I only did one order off them
| experimentally last year.
| dazc wrote:
| I have heard Temu being described as a store where no sane
| person would buy anything. This suggests marketing purely to
| sane people isn't the best route to success?
| mattlondon wrote:
| The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of
| quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
|
| My gut suspects not?
|
| Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality
| products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced
| where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to
| find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is
| selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust
| that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to
| be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30%
| of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If
| it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then
| you may as well get the cheapest one
|
| Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually
| get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even
| then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take
| multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc.
| it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a
| physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
|
| I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often
| secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has
| totally won there.
| fragmede wrote:
| If I buy a $100 projector vs a $1,000 one, or a $20 curling
| iron vs a $200 one, the order of magnitude difference does make
| for a better product, I find.
| 9dev wrote:
| Maybe. But what about the Audi vs. Volkswagen? A Ninja
| blender vs. a KitchenAid? A memory card from SanDisk vs. a
| no-name brand? A shirt from Fred Perry vs. H&M? And these
| were brands you probably know. What about the products in
| niches, where you don't have experience, or products are
| sufficiently similar? Do you always know whether a product is
| more expensive because of the brand, or because it's
| objectively better?
| ekianjo wrote:
| because car brands belong to very few auto makers, a lot of
| cars with different names use the same chassis across
| brands, the same engine, and probably the same electronics
| as well. so you end up with most of the difference being
| esthetics these days, at least for cars within roughly the
| same price range.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| I don't think it's the price giving information there though.
| I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range that
| do not compare to the best in the 100 range.
|
| Yes I agree that there are better products for more money,
| it's just that I have to filter by something else because I
| can't trust that the price corresponds to performance for any
| given listing.
| fragmede wrote:
| > I can find many projectors being sold in the 1000 range
| that do not compare to the best in the 100 range.
|
| I don't believe you. Link? That extra $900 gets a iot more
| lumens and portability and CPU and ports and such that the
| $100 ones I've seen just don't have.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| FYI Consumer Reports' "Best Buy" ratings _used_ to reliably
| indicate very good quality and low price. The seem to have
| changed it to "Recommended" and enshittified it.
| neom wrote:
| Anchoring still exists and is something people use, price for
| sure impacts how people view things, if you make 3 price points
| for your product, say... $20/mth, $200mth and $25000/mth, you
| can often push people into the middle package more easily, it's
| called the Goldilocks effect. Pricing and positioning well is a
| lot of work simply because people for sure still use price as a
| strange yardstick, and as someone who figures out how to price
| things and position them for a living, it can be
| very...frustrating.
| dqv wrote:
| > The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of
| quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
|
| > My gut suspects not?
|
| You are correct that price is no longer an indicator of
| quality.
|
| Look at this stick vacuum review, for example:
| https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1
|
| A $374 vacuum ranks at #4 while a $1049 vacuum ranks at #8.
| That is a HUGE price gap for items that are supposed to be of
| similar quality. The _reason_ for the gap is irrelevant to this
| discussion too, because we are talking about the relation
| between price and quality.
|
| And people try to blame the consumer for both sides of the
| issue.
|
| People shrug and say it is the consumer who demands cheaper
| products and that is why they are of such low quality (despite
| what you say, which is that price and quality are much less
| connected than what people selling you things want you to
| believe), but then when those same consumers initiate returns,
| people cry foul like the consumer is somehow maliciously buying
| shit quality products and returning them to spite honest
| companies who just want to do right by their customers.
|
| Look at how this article is written:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-bill...
|
| Notice anything in that "Why returns are a big problem"
| section? A neat rhetorical trick which attempts to get
| inattentive readers to believe that the bulk of all returns are
| just people trying on clothes and returning the ones they don't
| like. Now, if it really were the bulk of all returns, they
| would have _surely_ mentioned this, because it would buttress
| their point.
|
| They did not, because they can not, because, I have a suspicion
| that _the $890 billion worth of returns is primarily due to
| reverse /negative demand for shit products_. I suspect those
| return numbers creeping up year over year are consumers getting
| annoyed with retailers for not curating products in a way that
| considers quality and longevity.
|
| As the featured article mentions, Amazon does mark products as
| frequently returned, but I am not sure it really helps that
| much.
|
| > Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to
| actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not,
| and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to
| take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels
| etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go
| to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
|
| And even then, they miss important details, because most
| reviews only talk about the product in terms of the out-of-box
| experience. But how good is the product after two years? After
| four? Even the vacuum review I linked does not really comment
| on longevity.
|
| > I would argue that the article is correct that quality is
| often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though.
| Amazon has totally won there.
|
| I think it is starting to change where people are getting
| really tired of shit quality and that is going to continue to
| be reflected in the returns data. Returns do not make customers
| whole - they do not get a refund for the time they had to spend
| researching, procuring, and ultimately returning the product. I
| imagine companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when
| they have to reverse course and not only _increase quality_ but
| also _decrease the price_ because no one wants to spend hard-
| earned money on expensive junk during a recession.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > _the bulk [...] trying on clothes and returning the ones
| they don 't like_
|
| If this was really the case then Amazon would not have a
| "frequently returned" concept as this would penalize sellers
| doing nothing wrong.
|
| "frequently returned" warning makes only sense when the
| majority of returns are due to lack of quality control.
| sgt101 wrote:
| How can consumers respond to get useful information and enable
| themselves to make better decisions when exchanging their
| resources for goods?
|
| - use other information channels like review media (fashion
| sites)?
|
| - trust secondary sites like brand retailers (IE. John Lewis in
| the UK?)
|
| ????
| dazc wrote:
| I used to buy from John Lewis since they tended to have a
| curated selection of products and the reviews (where they
| exist) haven't been gamed. I don't recall a purchase that I
| have regretted.
|
| Not so sure now they are becoming just another drop-shipper but
| there are few alternatives in the UK.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| As a consumer, my reaction to all this is simply to stop looking
| and stop buying. Unless it's something urgent, I put it on a list
| and wait. Many times the need goes away. Better than dealing with
| all this crap.
| zkmon wrote:
| I'm recently seeing some ads on TV, that make me avoid ads by any
| means. There simply weirdness and harmfulness to eyes mixed and
| served. I think this is being done to attract viewer attention,
| which became 99% of the goal, rather than being informative or
| signaling. Sometimes there is hardly any indication what the
| actual product is, and how it is relevant to whatever weirdness
| that took up most of the ad time. Things like putting a mouth on
| the forehead of people, fast flickering scenes, and I can't even
| dare to speak about other weirdness. Oh god, the ad designers are
| a desperate bunch for attention. I'm really fearful of touching
| TV remote. And if these ads really liked by people, then I'm
| fearful of the future of the world in the hands of these people.
| sheiyei wrote:
| I'm pretty quick to never-again a company which advertises in a
| way that makes me sick. A certain electronics store chain that
| operates here in the Nordics, which someone is bound to
| recognise, is on my ban list for psychedelic surrealist shock
| advertising.
|
| Not that I see much ads any more anyway, what with Ublock
| Origin, Blokada 5 and Youtube ReVanced.
| joules77 wrote:
| "media time" or the amount of time Americans consume media is
| not rising (6-7 hours a day). So no great new user growth + no
| great screen time growth. But the Ad industry revenues are
| growing at 15-20%.
|
| With a population of ~300 Million the US ad industry generates
| 400 Billion in revenue. Avg Bounty of >1000 bucks a year per
| person.
|
| The only way to pull that off is to keep injecting more and
| more ads everywhere and make everything more tempting to watch.
|
| The biggest threat to these companies is if time spent
| consuming media drops.
| benjiro wrote:
| Here is my question. Who is paying for it all to get to a
| 1000 bucks bounty per person / year?
|
| The same question, who is paying for all the data collection
| they do on customers?
|
| You keep hearing about xxx billion dollar industries but
| where is that money coming from? The add and data collection
| industry in the US is probably a trillion dollar market or
| more, but ... does it really work? Sure, focused ads on some
| youtube channel about product that may be of interest, but
| all the rest is such a mess.
|
| I do not buy more stuff because some ads showed up. Sure,
| they can be informative that there is a new car released, or
| something like that. But there is no desire to buy XXX
| cleaning product because they spammed it on TV.
|
| Same argument with "what use is getting all my personal data,
| down to the things we do in bed". Sell it to specific
| companies? But what do they really gain from it. It does not
| feel like we are getting better products as a result of all
| that user data. O, people are not happy about Y product. You
| do not need invasive data collection for that, you see it in
| your revenue numbers.
|
| It often feels like a lot of industries are just there to
| self sustain themselves. Nobody ever got fired for buying
| advertisement or personalized data. So companies keep
| spending on it, people keep pouring over the data, analyzing
| it, but its like nobody has common sense and its all a scam
| that inner feed itself.
|
| I am not saying that advertisement does not work to grow a
| product, but especially unknow one's but the moment product
| reach a specific mass...
| joules77 wrote:
| When you look at the $$$ on hourly basis rather than yearly
| it all drops to cents. Basically its become very cheap to
| flood everyone with ads. And since Attention is a scarce
| resource we get everyone who wants to capture attention
| trapped in an arms race for it.
|
| The big threat to the whole system is when the amount of
| time per day people spend consuming media starts to drop
| thanks to fatigue and finding better things to do.
| majormajor wrote:
| You don't need more advertising to get the revenue to keep
| rising.
|
| All you need is two things:
|
| 1) a zero-sum game where the amount spent by companies on
| advertising is less than their profit margin
|
| 2) advertising channels that perform in a way that can be
| correlated with short-term outcomes
|
| "We can afford to up our ad spend by 0.5% to try to gain an
| edge."
|
| You juice your market share or total sales numbers for a
| quarter, everyone is happy.
|
| Then your competitor does the same.
|
| Assuming your advertising is equally effective, you may have
| netted out to about where you started. But you've both
| ratcheted up your spend and likely won't reduce that short of
| a macro change or parent company health issues.
|
| And if certain advertising performs better than others, one
| company can very well make long-term gains here, if they have
| writers and producers and talent who are making more
| compelling pitches.
|
| But it still ramps up the total advertising industry spend
| even with a fixed supply of ad capacity, if it gets a bidding
| war going.
|
| As long as you don't have 100% market share with 0
| competitors, advertising will look like a very compelling
| short-term ROI option.
|
| Even if time spent watching media drops it may not squeeze a
| lot of parts of the advertising sector so hard - it'll just
| push demand into smaller buckets which will increase the
| prices for those buckets. Look at the crazy revenue sports
| television broadcast advertising has been doing as other
| forms of TV go away with commercial skipping or lower-ad-load
| streaming.
|
| Of course, at SOME point the increases can't be sustained.
| Even the most profitable products have a limit to how much
| money could be possibly directed towards advertising. But we
| don't appear to be particularly close to demand being
| satisfied.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I personally suspect in many industries there is a sort of
| informal agreement about what is reasonable spending on
| sales and marketing.
|
| If any single company spends more, and succeeds in gaining
| advantage purely by spending more, all their competitors
| will generally just be forced to follow.
|
| But, no one really wants to follow that to the logical
| conclusion of spending all possible dollars on marketing.
| majormajor wrote:
| > But, no one really wants to follow that to the logical
| conclusion of spending all possible dollars on marketing.
|
| Sure, just like nobody wants to spend all possible
| dollars on rent.
|
| But outside of "we just can't afford it anymore" external
| economic factors shocking the system, the natural
| incentives point to a slow and constant ratcheting up.
|
| IMO this would be a good reason to have further
| regulations on advertising - locations, frequency,
| accuracy - since we're gonna be saturated with it
| otherwise.
| whatever1 wrote:
| It would be nice if we could cut the middle men and let the
| companies send us directly checks. I would love to be getting
| a 1000$ advertising check per year.
|
| They pay the same, I will keep buying whatever my friends
| suggest me to buy. Win - Win
| ElisaChemy wrote:
| Totally agree,I think things got incrementally worse after
| TikTok's release though. It's like the content (including ads)
| is getting so chaotic and overstimulating that I walk away
| feeling mentally exhausted. All of it is just noise designed to
| hijack attention for a few seconds.
| jrm4 wrote:
| There may be something interesting here to think about, but I'd
| argue that the following statement is literally much more useful
| than that entire article.
|
| "When advertising, appealing to emotion is much more important
| than information or logic."
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I love that this reduces to math a "special theory of
| enshittification" because it describes how no-name vendors can
| profit from the "general theory of enshittification" put forth by
| Doctorow that describes the platform monopolies like Amazon under
| which the vendors operate.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Ratings compression Star ratings on major platforms increasingly
| cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to
| distinguish products.
|
| Last year I was skimming through IKEA furniture and majority of
| reviews are 4 or 5 stars. And that makes me think that people who
| don't like IKEA products are either so pissed that they do not
| want leave 1 star review or IKEA removes bad reviews.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I've definitely seen IKEA products with bad reviews.
| somat wrote:
| > "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between
| 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."
|
| The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of
| the rating system is unused.
|
| The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction
| exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet
| them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even
| throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of
| expression
| semitones wrote:
| and now all of your reviews will cluster around 0.7-0.9. And
| what will you have accomplished?
| asdff wrote:
| Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true.
| Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require
| handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that
| segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is
| pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the
| hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for
| their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic
| Gell-Mann amnesia
|
| Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment.
| One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it
| right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product
| customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and
| rated it 1/5.
|
| IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec
| sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this
| thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in
| this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset
| stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?
|
| You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the
| product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend
| agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos.
| And you'd end up better informed than most content producers,
| most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant
| subreddit.
|
| You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned
| in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the
| brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific
| advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since
| you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly
| and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter
| because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly.
| Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you
| don't include price in your analysis save for comparing
| capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product =
| better.
|
| And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit.
| Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most
| things in life this hardly also matters because the effective
| difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely
| good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the
| ability to determine the differences between perfect and good
| enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use
| case).
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