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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Its also gotten harder to trust them to maintain that quality, too.

A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners, or even start selling a slightly different product with the same model number.

Or you find a decent brand that makes good products, they get popular and grow and in come the MBAs with ideas on how to increase profits. Or they get bought by Private Equity and carry on only by brand momentum.

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> A product gets good reviews in Consumer Reports or the Wire Cutter or reddit, and the company making it knows they're gonna sell a ton of them, so they start cutting corners

I think this is true, but for far less malicious reasons. Favourable reviews lead to popularity, which increases production pressures, which makes it harder to source quality materials and maintain a quality process while satisfying demand.

I have heard of several indie makers who, faced with sudden popularity, have to make the tough choice of speeding up the process at reduced quality (and thus dissatisfy customers) or be unable to fill orders (and thus dissatisfy customers). Everyone handles it differently but it's not pleasant for anyone.

Maybe they should just cap the number of orders at the number of items they can make and ask anybody else to sign up on a list? Anybody who chooses option 1 is obviously evil?

100% this. If you can't deliver the product i want, then fine. Don't lie to me and deliver a product inferior to what i ordered for the same price without warning. That's straight up malice.

Naturally the kind of thing that would be defended on HN nonetheless

Maintain quality but raise prices to throttle demand to a sustainable rate? Hard to do instantaneously of course; easier said than done etc

Throttling demand means the sales figures go down which share holders don't like to see.

Even if they don't go down! If sales figures rise less than they did last quarter, shareholders get unhappy. Part of the paradox of unsustainable infinite growth is that the stock market demands not flat profits, but growth and increasing growth.

Even for products without CR/WC-levels of traffic being thrown at them do this.

My parents had silverware they liked, 10-ish years later we had lost or chipped a handful of them and they bought replacements. They look identical and feel identical…. Except the new ones clearly used lighter (read: cheaper) materials and then put a weight inside the handle to make them feel the same. The problem is that the weight is not attached well and can become detached and start sliding around making the handle rattle when you turn/invert it.

Just so irritating to know that effectively every product/brand will do this in the end.

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