alt Hacker NewsWhen it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up?
When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just better of reallocating your resources from the production quality towards the the shouting match of marketing and try to win by finding ways to be more visible than the others. (SEO hacking etc shenanigans)
When you drive down the cost of doing something to zero you you also effectively destroy the economy based around that thing. Like online print, basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles but alternative revenue streams (ads) are needed. Same for games too.
Replies
I agree with you, however:
One of the qualia of a product is cost. Another is contemporaneity.
If we put these together, we see a wide array of products which, rather than just being trash, hit a sweet spot for "up-to-date yet didn't break the wallet" and you end up with https://shein.com/
These are not thought of as the same people that subscribe to the Buy It For Life subreddit, but some may use Shein for a club shirt and BIFL for an espresso machine. They make a choice.
What's more, a “Technivorm Moccamaster” costs 10x a “Mr. Coffee” because of the build and repairability, not because of the coffee. (Amazon Basics cost ½ that again.)
Maybe Fashion was the original SEO hack. Whoever came up with the phrase "gone out of style" wrought much of this.
When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.
When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living.
The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity.
> When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up?
Obviously, yes? Maybe not the median or even mean, but peak quality for sure. If you know where to look there are more high-quality takes available now than ever before. (And perhaps more meaningfully, peak quality within your niche subgenre is better than ever).
> When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
Yes? The quality and variety of indie games is amazing these days.
> When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
This is the case where I don’t see a win, and I think it bears further thought; I don’t have a clear explanation. But I note this is the one case where production is not actually democratized. So it kinda doesn’t fit with the digital goods we are discussing.
> basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles
Is this actually true? Substack enables more independent career bloggers than ever before. I would love to see the numbers on professional indie devs. I agree these are very competitive fields, and an individual’s chances of winning are slim, but I suspect there are more professional indie creators than ever before.
>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up? ...yes?
It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality.
It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time.
I think for 'technical' writing, there is going to be some end-state crash.
What happens when all the engineers left can't figure out something, and they start opening up manuals, and they are also all wrong and trash. And the whole world grinds to a halt because nobody knows anything.
> When it became cheaper to … did the quality go up?
No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism).
Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.