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Comment by quirkot | Hacker News Reader

Great Homogenization is a good term for it. A classic example is to look at houses built before construction materials were popularly standardized in the 2nd half of 20th century. Every house had something different or unique. The laborer carving the handrail was in the mood for something different this time and it is beautiful. Now... it's all IKEA copy-pasta.

It would be the same principle, but moved into code, documentation, audio, and other areas

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2nd half of the 20th century? Sears houses were in the 1st half, and with houses built before that you have some serious survivorship bias going on...

There is survivorship bias but we also know as an objective, verifiable fact that building techniques/components/materials have become more standardized.

I.e. yes sometimes craftspeople executed their whimsy and it came out very badly and was later destroyed, but yes also there was more variance across the board.

I think the geographical scale of the homogenity is growing

Cookie cutter bland housing is considerably older than the mid 20th century, we don't see much in the way of old examples because this sort of housing is not meant to last, it is meant to meet a need. Most of the mid century stuff is considerably nicer than what came before, like the tenements of New York and various housing projects built around the country including large developments of single family homes with spartan interiors and all. We needed houses and we needed them fast, a single model with few frills was the only way to meet the need at that time.

If homogenenation comes with generally lower costs and higher quality goods that increases the standard of living for the masses, I’m all for that.

People who appreciate and can afford custom craftsmanship will still be patrons.

> It would be the same principle, but moved into code, documentation, audio, and other areas

I think this is already the case though. Between the amalgamation of markets around the world and commodification of most things in life we are at a point where everything gets optimized into crabs. AI will just give us more crabs.

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