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Comment on Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Here’s how you make people aware of your products.

You sell a quality product for a reasonable price.

That’s it.

Instead, capitolism has become this game of cat and mouse where the consumers ALWAYS lose. Just a game of shrinking product sizes, reducing quality, and raising prices. Little by little.

It’s most obvious when you haven’t had a product in a while, maybe years, and you grab it again. Only to realize they’ve gone through several iterations of enshitification.

When I was a kid, Andy Capps Cheese Fries used to be about as long as my pinky, and they were thick. Now it’s like the length of my pinky until my second knockle, and it’s like the same thickness as a pretzle stick. Sure, it’s technically the same product, but everytime I buy them I realize why I was disappointed the last time I bought them. And I won’t buy them for another 5 years. Maybe by then they’ll be the length of my pinky nail and as thick as a sewing pin, but cost 8 dollars instead of the 25 cents it was when I was a kid.

They did a durability test on hammers. In one side was an old rusty hammer. It had a date of 1931 on it. In the other was a brand new hammer bought that same day from Home Depot.

The new hammer crumbled long before the 1931 hammer did. This test was done in 2017.

But I never buy products because they advertise. I buy them because I remember how good it was the last time.

Except now, you’re advertising BAD memories. Because when I go in expecting this much, with this quality, and instead I get a fraction of it, with only a fraction of the quality…congradulations. You saved money on production costs. You also pushed your customer away from being a repeat customer.

All this business schools, and all the data they have I’m sure shows that their way is better. So explain to me why it seems businesses these days struggle to make the line go up, but when I was a kid business was booming?

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muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A lot of this comes from pressures exerted by shareholders. Get rid of the shareholders and you get rid of the pressures. Then you have people who chose to do the opposite noxious thing and people who chose not to. The market would then reward the less obnoxious people and the negative aspects would die out.

But we have shareholders so capitalism cannot possibly work the way we are promised it will.

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nickhammes@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.

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