• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

help-circle


  • I got a chef’s knife as a gift. I was a bit put out that came from Wilko (a very budget brand) and it turned out to be absolutely excellent. I think it won’t have cost any more than £20. I am astounded that anyone apart from professionals pays more than £100 for a knife, never mind the even more insane prices you can pay




  • Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

    I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.



  • There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.

    The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.