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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Yes, I in fact have downloaded and played several of the games Epic gave away.

The storefront they have is simply not a serious enough draw where, given the choice to buy a game on Steam vs. Epic, to really go for Epic instead.

And Steam has not taken a single action that has made me feel mistreated or punished for loyalty. Its their game to lose, as the user numbers tend to show.

But that's my entire point.

I'm mostly focused on products where they've managed to achieve the 'efficient frontier' on exactly how little quality they can produce such that the average consumer no longer notices or cares, whilst maintaining a similar price point as they've had all along.

Its been done with movies, with cars

Using cars as an example of decline in quality is quite insane. Do you know what sort of advancements in technology cars have made and how little it would cost to make a car from 1990 with modern techniques? I mean, you can kind of seeing it in Russia or China where they sell cars that aren't fit for foreign markets for 10k or so (albeit their production techniques aren't modern, so it's not quite equivalent) but...jeeze...this is a really bad example. I'm really not going to go into detail on all the automotive progress made in just the past 15 years, but it's been massive. You can argue that cars are too expensive because of regulation and have a very good point, but that's not the same thing at all.

(although there are of course luxury brands if you DEMAND quality!), with food, and its ubiquitous with tech.

You're making cost savings sound like some nefarious act. Companies want to lower costs to compete in markets. This is not nefarious.

Who was the primary owner of Amazon shares for the duration of that unprofitable period?

Do yah think the fact that the original founder maintained centralized control for the majority of the company's lifespan might have helped its overall approach to long-term investment? Is that possible?

This is precisely and exactly my argument.

You're changing your argument. Before you said privately owned corporations have an advantage in that they don't have to be profit maximizing (to which I noted, neither do publicly traded corporations) and now you're saying because Bezos owned a large portion (not sure if he was the majority owner or not, but I actually don't think he was) it doesn't count.

Amazon is, however, an example of an enshittified corporation by now. At least their website is. Lots of knockoff products with relatively poor quality control, and the search is less functional, the return policies are less friendly. The review system is manipulated, both by the site and by scammers. I accept this may be due to customer abuse, of course.

Again, if it's shit you can just go to another platform, like you apparently did. I frankly haven't noticed any drop off. In fact, their Amazon knockoff brand is a huge upgrade over a lot of the stuff they sold 15+ years ago when I started using the site.

But again, what's your point? If a corporation does a bad job there are literally a million other options. You're acting like people are getting screwed when they willingly go to Amazon and buy things over their competitors (because Amazon has a massively better product tbh) and furthermore your google point just seems like bullshit to me. Have you tried to use a non-google search Engine? Duckduckgo is absolute trash. So is Bing. Google is the best without question excluding maybe using a good AI to aggregate information for you.

Do you have any examples offhand of a company that was becoming horribly mismanaged and driven into the ground that managed to make a massive turnaround WITHOUT it being taken private by interested parties?

I can't say there are many companies that return from being driven into the ground at all tbh. Most companies do one thing well, reap the reward, can't change when that thing is no longer as profitable as it once was, and then die. That's kind of how the system is supposed to work. I'm really not sure how that's relevant to the idea that companies are just manipulating people into buying shitty products.

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