[xnx]

This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.

Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.

[docjay]

That might be an outdated accusation. There was a time when a touch of research or “caring about quality” was enough to avoid the pitfalls of garbage products, but I don’t believe that to be a fair statement anymore. The website details the history of some examples, but the implication is between the lines: the only reason you used to know a product would last 20 years is because that specific product with those specific parts has already lasted 20 years. Don’t take advice about living to 100 from a 32 year old, don’t trust a warranty that’s longer than the company selling it has existed, and don’t trust that model XB5 is the same as your grandmas XB1.

How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.

[krackers]

>reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore

It's worse than that, the _same model_ from the same company can be quietly changed.

[DangitBobby]

Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.

[eventualcomp]

The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[brookst]

Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.

Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.

[xnx]

True. Maybe the hidden part of the equation is "effort". Modern marketing strategy is to "flood the zone" with misleading information and half-truths so as to make the very act of making a rational selection exhausting.

[pseudohadamard]

It's not just customers, many (most?) established reviewers have no idea what quality is. I don't know how many YT review videos I've seen... well, seen the first 30s of, where the reviewer lines up a dozen products and measures some pointless feature of each one of them purely because that's the only thing they can think of to measure and it then allows them to rank them on a scale, rather than saying anything about ease of use, build quality, availability of spare parts, accuracy/repeatability/clean finish of whatever it is the tool does, etc. Project Farm is a prime example of this.

[pandaman]

It's the third or fourth time I see it on HN, I have not read anything other than the first two, which were more of complaints about tiered products. E.g. one was about backpacks and how a $40 backpack from Walmart is not going to last 20 years of summiting Mt. Everest like the $400 backpack of the same brand sold elsewhere...

[kevincox]

> and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly

The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).

The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.

I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.

[xnx]

> The only really good test is to use the product for many years

Agree. However, a good reviewer should be able to transfer knowledge from many years of use about a similar product to a new product and give an insightful evaluation. This type of reviewer is exceedingly rare.

[kevincox]

I think a very knowledgeable reviewer can make a decent guess. But to really know you would need to tear it apart and analyze all of the materials used (maybe the metal or plastic has been swapped to a slightly different material which is very hard to identify by just looking or touching). You need a team of engineers. Probably the best you can hope for is noticing a part is changed and make an educated guess why it was changed.