godelski • yesterday at 8:40 PM

  > the "cost" of other people producing garbage is?

Sure can! It's a well known phenomena, won the researchers a Nobel, and explains a lot of the American economy and "lack of taste". The Market of Lemons[0].

Lemon Markets really require one important thing: at time of purchase, the average consumer is unable to differentiate the quality of the product.

Consumers are "rational"[1], so with "all other things being equal"[2], will make their purchases based on price. Therefore, the product that is cheaper but is also _in reality_ lower quality wins. This then pushes out any competition who is trying to differentiate their product through quality. Thus all products in that category decrease in quality and it becomes a race to the bottom, maximizing profits.

I want to stress that this doesn't require that the quality of products are distinguishable by experts, but only by the average consumer. You can probably look around at tech and notice this pretty quickly. The average consumer is not really tech literate[3]. They can't tell the difference. Hell, my parents don't even know the difference between the internet speeds from their ISP, even with the numbers displayed. The numbers mean nothing to them. Do they want 1GBps? 100 MBps? They don't know!

  > Prototypes are generally shop jigs

The problem is people are shipping prototypes. We may disagree what is a prototype and what is a shippable product, but that disagreement in itself is worth noting as part of the problem. I mean FFS we in the tech industry love selling things with the promise of future improvements. The last few iPhones shipped with the promise that they were going to get better with AI (did Apple intelligence really pan out? Did it pan out anywhere near what they promised? My Google Pixel phone still can't schedule a haircut for me or book a reservation at a restaurant, despite multiple promises).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[1] Economics uses this term differently than what we use colloquially. Read "consumers make decisions based on the information available to them" not "consumers are geniuses and making perfect decisions"

[2] i.e. the only distinguishing purchase criteria is price

[3] If you think I'm wrong, please go spend a month outside Silicon Valley. Hell, go try a different country, and not in the major metro areas. We're nerds here. Every single person on HN is above average in this respect.