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I think this is a very big systemic problem. And it's all in the way things are presented. Think of smartphones and the rate at which "new" phones come out. The industry is based on a year by year renewal rate which is completely environmentally unsustainable and in order to sustain this speed they need big, bold advertisement. It's not at all about telling people how to differentiate between products and which products are better than the competition which in many cases it's their own smartphone from the previous year. I mean, how long has it been since we've really required our phones to be "2 times as fast as the year before", I had a pixel 5 and a pixel 7 and there's honestly very little difference whatsoever between them. But of course, there were a lot of bells and whistles for the new AI and so on that I really barely get any use out of. Not only that, but a lot of modern improvements are software improvements that come packaged in "new" hardware. That's a ridiculous thing, I'm not saying software is not important but we don't need new hardware to benefit from it in most cases. But hey, it's much more lucrative to sell a brand new 1000 dollar phone with a 30% margin than try to get people to pay 300 dollars for new software. We value hardware but hardware is not progressing as substantially as software is, at least in areas that truly have an impact on our lives. So they need to make things a bit prettier and that's where advertisement comes in. But is this a healthy cycle for us, is it environmentally sustainable to produce at this rate? I think the answer is no, and so you need to wonder: "then what should we do about it?". The power of advertisement that uses all the techniques of political propaganda that can get people to do insane things is a very powerful tool that we need to use more carefully, if at all. You do ask a good question though, how do people find out about new businesses? And I believe the answer is much more systemically complex, it's something we ought to figure out and try and so on, but the first thing is to always acknowledge that there is a problem to begin with. We need a way for high quality products and new products to reach people, how do we do this in a way that's fair? Advertisement, by the way, is not really doing that. Because big companies have much more money to spend on advertisement than new companies they are much more capable of pushing inferior products to the market and still retain and gain customers based solely on their advertisement. Imo, now a days, innovative products and high value proposition products pretty much sell themselves, as word of mouth has unparalleled power. But big companies are hijacking this process, sending free products to reviewers, flying people all over the world to "show their new innovations" and so on so that it looks like their products are the hottest stuff. Social media could be used to get genuine reviews out there but most of the time, it's flooded with paid (in one way or another) advertisement, in my experience, the best reviews out there tend to not be as visible as big names pushing big tech products. And in any case, innovation has become so expensive that it's pretty much only accessible by big tech so I think this issue of also touches on other topics like: how should we be doing innovation? This are nation-state level problems. |