alt Hacker NewsQuality was never the norm: cheap always beat quality with a hand tied behind his back!
Western working class has spent decades complaining about cheap imports from China... while feeding that market with their own money.
Western frequent fliers keep reminiscing about the grandiose pre-deregulation era or air travel, but cry a river when their low-cost carrier of choice actually enforces the limit on cabin baggage.
Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
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I don't think it is true, that no one wants to pay a penny for services they use. I know at least one counter example, because I pay for search (Kagi), LLM usage (Kagi assistant), VPN, and support various good causes and content creators.
But I think your point is the vast majority, and that point probably stands, and indeed is a huge problem.
For product quality and ads, 90% of the time you don't really have options. For the former, it's so hard to figure out which product is 15% more expensive because it reinforces the weak points and lasts 3x as long. For the latter, YouTube premium is great but I can't get anything like it for banner ads. Most sites have mandatory ads and almost all the rest want dollars to turn off pennies worth of ads.
It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.
Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.
Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.
> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.
I wish they would price the service commensurate to what they earn with ads.
My ad watching gives them a few cents, and yet they want $8.99 for a month or some gems.