Originally Published 5 months ago — by Hacker News
The article discusses the phenomenon of declining product quality over time, attributing it to profit-driven strategies like cost-cutting and market saturation, which lead companies to produce cheaper, lower-quality goods while prices increase. It explores how innovation diminishes in mature sectors, the influence of capitalism's focus on growth, and the challenges consumers face in discerning quality amidst marketing and market manipulation.
A report from German data recovery company CBL reveals a decline in the quality of USB sticks and microSD cards, with reduced capacity and the removal of manufacturers' logos. The use of NAND chips with decreased reliability and endurance, as well as questionable components, has contributed to this decline. The report warns against relying too much on the reliability of flash memory and advises caution when choosing storage devices, especially when encountering offers that seem too good to be true.
A study by researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence found that Google search results for product reviews are increasingly filled with low-quality, affiliate marketing-driven content. The study revealed that the highest-ranked pages feature more affiliate links and lower-quality text, indicating a decline in search result quality. While Google has made efforts to address these issues, experts and the SEO community believe that the overall quality of Google search results has deteriorated in recent years, with concerns about the impact on the internet economy and society as a whole.
