[hnbad]

Zoe Bee did a video essay[0] on her experience as a ghostwriter producing essentially the kind of junk that is now being automated with LLMs. In her case she was (somewhat unknowingly) paid to write unlicensed Minecraft stories. I think the video is worth a watch if you're not aware of the state of ebooks (especially on Amazon) prior to LLMs.

It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various "passive income" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.

[rightbyte]

> e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?

Ye this one is annoying. I often look for automotive tools and before I realized this I thought I was turning insane. Different store fronts pretend they are making some tool or like has sourced a factory to do their design.

But they like order the tool with a sticker and paint job from the same supplier.

Sometimes nuts and bolts or like cover plates vary but it is the same base.

I was browsing for tool hooks for the garage the other day and it felt like there are two factories in China that make hooks and two factories that put rubber on them for 4 combinations and that is it. But 20 flavours of branding.

Edit: It would be really neat if the factory had to mark everything they made.

[hnbad]

I recently came across the tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory that consumerism has reached its endstate in that companies now intentionally design only good-enough-but-unsatisfying products because those make you more likely to continue shop around for something different-but-equally-unsatisfying, so just like planned obsolescence but more based on dissatisfaction.

I think there is some truth to this in that it's likely profitable to flood the market with mediocre products (especially if you do it through a white label network of "competing" brands) as long as you can avoid refunds (and on Amazon certain sellers make returns intentionally difficult by providing Chinese addresses without a prepaid label, making you pay more for the return shipping than you likely paid for the product to begin with). This also drives down the overall expectation of quality and reduces market pressures for quality while also completely swamping any competitor trying to sell a genuinely high quality product by making reviews completely unreliable.

I don't think this is a coordinated strategy as with whitelabel dropshipping being sold as a get-rich-quick-scheme for years there's no real need for it. Plus as you mention in many cases this is simply a consequence of a race to the bottom earlier in the supply chain resulting in nearly identical mediocre products even when some parts differ.

Personally I've run into this when picking out interior doors for our new house: despite being in the mid-tier price range, various aspects ranging from the veneer to the locks are extremely underwhelming but apparently on par with other doors in that price range. There's literally no reason the locks should feel like cheap plastic toys but it's something that's not visible and can't usually be tested even in a show room so apparently that's where they decide to cut corners. And because even standard sizes are considered custom, there's no way to return them, let alone once installed.

[rightbyte]

Ye. It is hard to give a number of significance of the effect, but it is interesting.

> I think there is some truth to this in that it's likely profitable to flood the market with mediocre products

I think a factor here could be that you don't want the customers to recognize bad products? Some appliance models rotate so fast there are hardly any (non fake) review consensus on them. It is not just no-name Alibaba, but "proper" brands to, that seem to do that.