well put
Comment on The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?
j4k3@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It is simply an entry level thing. You will find this in every market.
In a bike shop retail market I can sell you a serviceable bike for $500 that will last, or an $800 road bike you’ll actually ride. Still the majority of bikes sold come from places like Walmart where they are made of unserviceable junk and are mostly nonfunctional. These are rarely ever ridden and often thrown away. In the shop I’ll sell 20:1 on the cheapest model to the next options up the ladder.
It is strange to adapt to this kind of understanding at first, like just how skewed the real market is. I can target selling to clubs and teams but I can’t touch the the garbage bike market where most people reside.
I think we are at a point where the influx of people into 3d printing are not real Makers or have any aspirations to be.
The reality is that people are often simply stupid. They seem to think that saving a few bucks here or there is smart but are not bright enough to see that everyone doing the same thing are buying the junk product over and over. There is nothing more expensive than being a cheap miser.
Ultimately, the only person that can fix stupid is ourselves. One can only inspire others to learn but can never force them. You cannot fix stupid in others. In the USA, stupidity is political currency and we have a long tradition of poor education and standardized exploitation. It is the American dream.
I think LDO and Voron are the only super relevant open source torchbearers.
Lutra@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
John@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
Is it a price thing?
In my opinion Bambu Lab is a high-end consumer 3D-Printer and still modding, servicing etc. is bad. On the other side of the price-spectrum Anycubic copy-pasted all the bad stuff from Bambu.
XTL@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
It’s not. It’s the “premium” products that have this proprietary bs and branded parts trying to justify the inflated prices. The cheapest printers are all just generic clones with no lock in and mostly generic parts. Practically DIY kits only without the DIY unless something fails.
Auli@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
The “problem” is people just want to do stuff, they don’t want to spend hours and hours trouble shooting. And Bambu brought that to the market.
j4k3@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It is more complicated than just price. It is ultimately an intuitive self awareness and scope thing. People lack depth to understand the details or ask others that do understand before they make a purchase. The majority of people are more oriented towards interpersonal interactions and experiential aspects of life in their fundamental functional thought. They struggle to see detail and nuances or question fixation and biases.
We still live in the early era of human tribal primitivism when it is quite easy to exploit tribal stupidity on multiple fronts. For some it is fixation from initial exposure or emotional brand perception, others it is impulsive availability, for others they are masochistic misers. Abstractive thinking and understanding is rare in humans, and the majority do not understand it or value it in others.
Walmart bikes are targeting misers first, but spontaneous availability and access, along with controlling the perception of what the low bar of the market is are major factors as well. Each of these three factors exploits a specific niche. Walmart is a rogue wholesale distributor selling directly to consumers using massive capital. They are privateers (legal pirates) in the retail market as are most big box stores. Piracy has always been a nice short term business model for gains. It just happens to be true that people of today like being raided raped and pillaged so long as it is done slowly enough without violence, the ship looks pretty and the pirates wear a suit. Even worse is when pirates become entrenched as monarchs and feudal lords. This is the next step in the evolution when piracy is normalized. Welcome to neo feudalism.