Is there data on enshittification? I suspect people are overstating this. In theory making a product simpler and cheaper and lighter and easier to manufacture is better. The downside is (if it’s even true) reliability and “feel”.
There is no data and that is intentional. This is lazy activism, meant to prey on people's feelings and biases rather than actually propose concrete improvements.
Planned obsolescence and "they don't make em like they used to" has been a thing long, long before anyone posting on HN was born.
Requiring data to prove that concepts are a thing is disingenuous -- what products? what timeframe? what metrics? what profit margins vs. outcomes?
I don't need a 2 million strong Postgres DB to tell me that Ikea furniture is more prone to breaking than the heavy Amish furniture they sell a county over.
It’s obviously not disingenuous to try to figure out if something is true. Otherwise, you can just believe whatever makes you feel good about yourself or angry at the right other people.
Cheap goods that break and need to be replaced not only end up costing more through replacement and repair but also harm the environment through greater pollution and energy use due to more items being manufactured
Almost right. Manufacturing a greater number of items does not necessarily use more energy. For example, manufacturing 1,000,000 paperclips probably uses less energy and material than 1 car.
Let's say you have a sturdy product with a 1% defect and replacement rate. You make 1000 of them. You have to replace 10 of them, so you've manufactured 1,010 of them in total. Let's say they each use 100 grams of material. You've used 101,000g of material.
Now you redesign it to save 1 gram of weight, but it doubles the defect rate. Again, you make 1000 of them. You have to replace 20 of them, so you manufacture 1,020 of them. But because of the 1g material reduction per unit, you've used less material overall – 100,980g.
These are just easy numbers to work with, but it's not hard to imagine many products might work like this. And the same calculation can be done for either energy or materials.
