SO. MUCH. THIS.

  • Papanca@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Consumers however are at the heart of an unhealthy culture of frequent device upgrades

    Yes, blame it on the consumer and not on the companies that spend an incredible amount of money to first hire marketeers that think all day long of the best way to push ‘new’ products, and then run costly campaigns to spread the word.

    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Gotta be honest. Yes blame us. It takes two to tango.

      At one point in my life there was this anti consumer movement culturally that got absolutely destroyed and buried. Maybe we’re all just sheep without any free will controlled by Steve jobs of the world. But I feel like we refused to keep certain fires lit and now we’re all freezing. That’s our fault.

      Most of it was super obvious too. When ads started invading, some people were pissed. But there was always way more people saying ‘who cares’. But things like ads fuel this consumerism to get people buying and idolizing the tech channels or kardashian lifestyle with all the bling and flash of new. Now we have a generation who probably think anti consumption lifestyle is just flat out crazy talk. Like how do we not have any counter culture anymore to the lavish consumerism culture. Almost every culture has an opposition but that one seems like it’s non existant in a world consumed by ads products

      • dependencyInjection@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I think what people are missing here is that although a new phone comes out every year, not every consumer is on the same upgrade schedule.

        If I keep my phone for five years then that’s four phones in not getting.

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          While I agree with you and work on the same timetable I think their point still very much stands.

          Look at cars, for example. A model is defined by it’s generation with each model year generally only having small upgrades, if any. With much of our lives if we were to wait that long we’d not miss one generation but instead feel five or more generations behind the curve.

          There’s so little of a need for a new phone every year that Apple now sells the iPhone 13, 14, and SE on top of whatever generation is current because they know that the newest tech is just not worth it anymore. Samsung does exactly the same thing and no amount of high-horse whining from Android users will change the fact that those companies are just as bad about it.

          We love to throw functional shit in the bin. We love to have overpowered stuff on the off-chance we might need it one day every couple years and we’re too pathetic to either just deal with it or to simply borrow/rent a better thing for that one instance(90% of truck and SUV drivers can absolutely go fuck themselves).

      • tacosplease@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How many people are actually getting a new phone every year? I don’t think I’m poor but maybe I am? Everyone I know keeps their phones for at least a few years and then replaces them when they are no longer functional.

        Still. Every 3 years feels like too often, but that’s around the time things stop working - likely due to planned obsolescence and updates designed to make older phones work worse.

        Should we really blame the consumer for replacing something the manufacturer designed to break after a short time? What’s something else you pay $1500+ for that is useless 3 years later?

      • Papanca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not saying consumers are not to blame, but i have objections against the phrasing; as if it’s primarily blaming consumers. I myself am not quite a minimalist, but do have strong tendencies in that direction. So, i never cared about fashion, or buying the newest gadgets. And i know there are people who are the complete opposite. However, i do feel that companies fuel the greed of consumers big time.

        While consumers need to educate themselves/be educated by their caretakers and schools, i feel the heart of the matter is the marketing culture and the tendency of companies of hiding shady practices, like profiting from child slaves who have to mine precious metals, or women slaving away in factories for long hours, while risking their lives and bodies due to unsafe machinery, buildings and being bullied by their employees employers, for a shamefully low salary. Edit to replace the word employees

      • TurtleJoe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think there were ever that many of us who read Adbusters every month, but it’s likely even fewer now.

        I think that reality TV and social media influencers have had as much to do with people embracing conspicuous consumption as a culture as much as advertisers have.

      • technojamin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think along this line of reasoning when it comes to evaluating myself. It’s how I keep myself in check and “sharpen” myself as a person. I like to remind myself of how often I fall short of it though. I also like to remind myself of the things that I have going for me that others might not have had.

        When I play the more charitable viewpoint of other people’s life experiences out in my head, it’s usually pretty easy to see them getting where they are. There’s a lot of suffering in this world, and large, effectively international companies are finding ways to exacerbate that in order to keep their businesses growing. It’s nice to sit down after a long day and veg out to short little videos, where each gives you a little chuckle or smile. It’s not that hard to get caught in the trap.

        I guess what I’m trying to say is that I agree completely that the path we’re going down is concerning and scary, and individuals can absolutely put the work in to make their lives better and elevate above the mainstream, but for any given person, that can be very difficult for any multitude of reasons, and we can’t forget compassion for them.

    • Robin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      While these sorts of practices are legal, consumers need to be educated.

          • danielbln@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater just yet. Capitalism is an incredible engine, but it needs guard rails.

            • LennethAegis@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              The whole infinite growth mentality caused by companies being public on the stock market is the real poison I think. So lets just axe the whole thing. No more stock market, every company is private again.

              Which means no more stock speculators, or stock buybacks, or market manipulation schemes. Just companies selling their products to consumers based on their own metrics.

              • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Well, for starters, this obliterates most people’s retirement plans, so that’s a bit of a hurdle.

                That aside, what would happen is private equity firms and investment banks simply buying up most public companies, so I don’t really see the grand improvement here.

                • msage@programming.dev
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                  1 year ago

                  I hate so much this talking point:

                  the system has captured the retirements, so we can’t abolish it.

                  Like if we need this load of bull to support retirement, we should rethink everything from the ground up.

                  • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    The point is that, whether you like it or not, abolishing something that most people are very strongly relying on for the last third of their life is something that’s going to be incredibly complicated and met with a lot of opposition.

                    By all means, re-think away as you like, but don’t be surprised when a lot of people aren’t exactly a fan of what you come up with.

            • deleted@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              To be honest, you cannot achieve capitalism with guard rails.

              Rich individuals will accumulate money then bribe or donate to politicians to earn more money thus more bribes then more influence and so on.

              Take USA as an example, big corporations have monopoly on almost everything and you as a citizen cannot do anything about it. Sure you can vote but either way, donations to politicians always win.

              EU is better but not much. After GDPR, every website would interrupt you to say how they will sell your data and tell you to leave if don’t like it.

            • Jay@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              I agree, I don’t think any one system is the answer, they all have their strengths and weaknesses… a combination of them would be a better idea.

            • LazyBane@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              That’s a vague platitude.

              Capitalism works becuase we live in a transactional reality. Food could not grow on trees of the tree didn’t take capital (I.e. resources such as nutrients from the soil, light and heat from the sun) to grow that apple. If farmers did not account for the resources the tree needs the tree would simply die.

              The issue with capitalism today is that we over apply it and forget to help people who truly need help, and thanks lobbying by sociopathic business owners, we have created a system where we much engage with learned sociopathy to survive and function. We look down at the homeless sick and needy and invent backstories to justify their suffering. They must be drug abuses, violent, lazy, etc cetra.

            • Drbreen@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              That is not an answer. You’d have credibility if you said, “I’m actually not sure.”

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Why am I suddenly seeing so much discussion about capitalism these days? This is way above the usual background level of how often this topic gets brought up in various circumstances.

          • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            It’s a convenient abstract entity that can be used as a general boogeyman and blamed for all things.

            For sure, some things are indeed a direct consequence of capitalism, but lots of other problems come from the simple existence of things having costs, scarcity existing, and humans not being completely selfless. No amount of economic re-arrangement is going to get you away from those things, but it’s nice to imagine so.

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I don’t really like this trend of absolving consumers of literally all agency in how they spend their money. Outside of practices that intentionally try to make older products obsolete like purposeful throttling - which should absolutely be shamed and made illegal - no one is holding a gun to your head and telling you to buy the new phone or else. If someone decides that a product is a worthy use of their money and decides to purchase it, then so be it. People aren’t children and can decide how they’d like to spend their money, and I really don’t see what’s wrong with a company trying to convince you to do so. People can make their own choices, and that includes financially poor ones. They can also choose to prioritize different things than you or I might.

      Ultimately, if you don’t want to buy a new phone, don’t. They’re really quite good nowadays and tend to last a while. There will of course continue to be shiny new things, and if having the newest thing is truly important to you, you can decide to spend your money on it. Or, you can also not. But to say that consumers have essentially no choice and are simply the poor victims of marketing with no real agency at all is reductive to the point of being almost patronizing.

      • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Consumers have very little choice when it comes to things like cars, electricity company, cable company, etc. In that case it is appropriate to put blame on the companies who have a captive customer base. But with other products like phones, there is nothing compelling consumers to buy the latest except FOMO and greed.

        • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely, and for products and markets that are essentially necessary to life, there’s a much stronger case to be made for strong regulation since the potential for exploitation is much higher (the nightmare that is the entire healthcare industry exemplifies this perfectly, since market forces don’t work well when you’re unconscious or will otherwise die).

          But for luxury items, which high-end smartphones undoubtedly are? Yeah, consumers can take a little bit of accountability.

      • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Ultimately, if you don’t want to buy a new phone, don’t.

        Could you have made a more vacuous comment? Obviously people shouldn’t buy every new toy that comes out, that doesn’t change the fact that 90% of the blame—and 90% is a hard floor—belongs to the people who waste the Earth’s resources pinching it off in the first place and then waste even more in protectionism and generally making sure there are as few viable alternatives as possible.

        • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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          1 year ago

          Whelp, your point can still be made without the first sentence. The fediverse has this reputation of being unfriendly which push newcomers away, so we’ll have to do something about it ourselves. Something as simple as not being snarky unless it’s absolutely necessary would help the fediverse community a lot. Cool template btw, I’m going to save for later.

          • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Imagine how shocked I was to discover that our friend pimento64 also casually revealed themselves to be a homophobe.

                • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  Imagine how shocked I was to discover that our friend BraveSirZaphod casually revealed themselves to be a maniac who butchers teenage runaways in his basement. No, I don’t care to explain it.

                  Edit: oh of course you’re the same fucking dude. Get a real hobby.

          • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            the fediverse has this reputation of being unfriendly which push (sic) newcomers away

            What I was doing was being generous. I’m not going to shed any tears if people who spend all day on Facebook and Instagram think the fediverse is too hard to figure out and too unfriendly. Barriers to entry are a good thing when you have barbarians at the gate. That mostly means the drooling masses from corporate social media who ruin everything they touch, but it also means le epic wholesome keanu chungus morons from reddit and beard-stroking corporatist pontificators from slashdot and hacker news. The dweeb I was responding to is from the latter camp, and I really don’t feel any obligation to help make the fediverse into a place where people like him can expect a positive reception for pinching off loafs like his opinion.

        • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          The fundamental truth is that companies would not make a bunch of new phones if there were not people that wanted to buy them, for one reason or another.

          And it’s not as if the smartphone market isn’t littered with failed products and ideas. Marketing can do a lot, but it’s not able to generate demand for a product that consumers simply do not want. You might remember the pushes for 3D displays, WiMAX, modular phones, styluses, the recent push for foldable devices, etc etc. These failed because consumers simply did not want them. Motorola, HTC, LG, etc failed because consumer did not want their products and they were generally inferior.

          Again, you do not need to buy a new phone every year. There are people who do voluntarily want to do that though, and so companies will provide products to meet that desire. I simply do not understand this compulsion to insert yourself into a blatantly voluntary transaction, with the customer wanting a new phone, the company providing one, and you stating “Actually, you’re being exploited.”

          This meme comes to mind.

          • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            “One reason or another”

            Given that one big reason is “Planned obsolescence”, you’re still pointing the finger entirely in the wrong direction.

            You can’t scroll Facebook for five minutes without seeing people complain that “They don’t build stuff like they used to anymore” or “All this Chinese junk just falls apart in 5 minutes.”

            Consumers want reliable, long lasting products that they don’t have to replace all the time. They just have no way of reasonably obtaining them.

            If consumers were actually as hungry for constant upgrades as you claim, phone manufacturers wouldn’t put so much effort into making their products impossible to repair.

            • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Consumers want reliable, long lasting products that they don’t have to replace all the time.

              This is the thing that I’m genuinely not entirely convinced of. More than anything, I think a lot people want shiny new stuff as cheaply as they can get it, and that most consumers will generally opt for that over a more expensive but more durable alternative, even if that’s not what they’ll actually tell themselves. “Chinese junk” succeeded because masses of people preferred a cheaper product over a more expensive domestic one. Plenty of people raged against removing headphone jacks, for instance, but ultimately, those phones still sold very well. If there was really a huge demand for phones with headphone jacks, why would Samsung etc. not plop one in there and capture that demand? I would speculate it’s because it doesn’t actually exist to a super significant degree. Plenty of Android phones had removable batteries for long while, but as they started to go away, you didn’t see a huge group of people flock to the phones that kept them. Ultimately, consumers generally showed that they would opt for better waterproofing and slimmer design with a more annoying battery replacement procedure than a bulkier phone with easily removable batteries (though I am intrigued to see if the EU will actually be able to successfully mandate them).

              So, while I do agree that consumers do want reliable and long-lasting products, they also want maximally cheap products, and products that feel new and sleek and luxurious. These are contradictory aims, and it seems to me that consumers’ revealed preferences are towards novelty and price, not durability, though I’d also say that I think this is shifting somewhat. Each new generation of phones is offering fewer genuine innovations and improvements, and at least in my experience, consumers are noticing more and more that even mid-range phones are perfectly adequate and that any phone can last several years. As I understand, this has been reflected in declining sales over the last several years.

          • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            What, like there’s some kind of ethical standard of consumerism that people are failing to live up to? Take the corporate dick out of your throat and take your L with dignity instead of grasping at straws to be Right and “win” an online argument. Why even try? You really think you’re gonna be the guy who changes people’s hearts and minds and has them say “yes, it’s actually the changing whims of the market that drive corporations to produce waste, they definitely don’t forcibly create their own market through manipulation and abuse”? Are you really trying to be the Rosa Parks of convincing people that there is ever even one case where a corporation isn’t automatically to blame for the existence of their own fucking product? You think consumers should just “not buy”, yet you don’t say that companies should just ignore the market and release new products less frequently? “Oh well that’s not realistic because they’re just not gonna do that” you’re going to say, willfully uncomprehending that you’re reinforcing my point and pretending you just got a gotcha. Get real.

            • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              It’s comically bold to talk about dignified discourse while casually throwing out homophobic phrases like “take the dick out of your throat”.

              At any rate, your true colors are showing brightly enough that I, empowered consumer that I am, will see myself out of this conversation. Enjoy your iPhone 15 Pro Max that you just had to buy. Truly, it must be hard.

              • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                “Oh shit that was embarrassing, better pretend to be smugly aloof and then ‘abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past’.”

                Literally every time. Do you people get a phrasebook or something?

    • Cheers@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I always say this. You’re one person. Facebook was once a trillion dollar company that hired teams of engineers, phds, and marketers to device the most abusive ways to keep your attention. There are literal studies showing how insta promotes depression in young girls and yet they’re still allowed to operate.

      Social media’s marketing schemes are the new generations tobacco industry.

      • Papanca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Though i agree with you, i never feel like ‘i’m only one person’. For instance, if someone turns off the lights and recycles their trash, they often say; how does it help, i’m only one person after all. But there are so many people thinking the exact same thing and together we can help change the world.

        So, yes, companies should be changed and i think this is also about politics and economics, which are usually conservative and greedy. But i never feel like the things i do are in vain; i’m standing with perhaps millions of invisible people who care about the environment and try to do their best and who all might be thinking; i’m only one person. Many people do want to change and try their best, but it’s time that all these conglomerates are being forced to change for real, instead of getting subsidized, and just greenwash their products.

    • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      blame it on the consumer

      Yeah. Blame it on the consumers indeed. Are you a adult or not? Put the tendies down and put your big boy pants on and realize that you need to take responsibility for at least some of your actions.

      Same goes for all those dopes that pre-order every game that gets released and then we all wonder why the industry releases so many unfinished games that need patches and updates. That’s because consumers are rewarding these game developers for releasing shitty software.

    • PrinzMegahertz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Why not both? For example: one of the advantages if Iphones is the long software support. Why then are people buying a new one every year? I‘m still rocking an IPhone XR and while the batterie is down to 80%, I haven‘t encountered an app that brings it to it‘s knees.