Quality 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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Dylan16807 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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hdgvhicv 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The only time I ever see ads are at the cinema. I see people talking about them but I have been out of the loop for well over a decade.

No adverts on Netflix, bbc, Disney, YouTube, paramount, Spotify. I cancelled Amazon because they added adverts.

	▲	Dylan16807 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sure, streaming services usually don't have ads. But you're paying a lot of money for specific content there. I'm talking about normal web page stuff. And if you're not seeing ads there, then either you go to very few normal web pages or you're using an ad blocker. Ad blocking is useful but it's not a solution. I want a way to distribute a reasonable amount of money across the sites I visit in exchange for no ads, but that's not an option. Google almost went into that category once, but they implemented it badly and then shut down the entire thing.
	▲	saltcured 36 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's also a lot of absurd product placement in many of the supposedly ad-free streams.

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maerF0x0 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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r3trohack3r 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

“My ad watching gives them a few cents”

I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.

For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.

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maerF0x0 an hour ago | parent [-]

Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.

	▲	phyzome 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I recommend using a calculator rather than a chatbot. (Speaking of quality.)

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tene80i 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.

	▲	maerF0x0 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.

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narag 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if you don't buy from China directly, you can't prevent local brands outsourcing their production, because all of them do It.

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Maxatar 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is entirely untrue. Almost anywhere you live in the U.S. you can find local brands with local production.

	▲	LtWorf 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And the local production is an assembly of something really made in china.

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zelphirkalt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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asdff 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It isn't like this behavior is inherent to westerners. Everyone would prefer to save money and have better service.

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johnnypangs 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even this site on mobile has issues with unnecessary horizontal scroll.

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LtWorf 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

Because paying a penny won't prevent ads or tracking.

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themaninthedark 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really?!

Yes, let's blame the working class for spending money on Chinese goods after their jobs were offshored and their spending power was decreased.