Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life.
And if you were poor you got used furniture. Still much more expensive than Ikea furniture, but your “new” furniture would have scratches and dings from the previous owner. If you were really poor you got used furniture that had been damaged in a fire.
Now, you can get something that’s built from cheap parts and doesn’t last that long, but you can get it brand new.
There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality.
These days people talk even more, compare even more notes, there’s pages and pages of information about the quality of things available on the Internet. The problem is that it’s much less authentic.
In Ye Olde days, the people you talked to about a new fridge would be friends, cow-orkers, acquaintances from church, the guy in your bowling league, etc. These people didn’t have any reason to lie to you, so you’d mostly get honest feedback. These days there’s way more “information” available online about everything you might want to buy, including thousands of amateur reviews, and dozens of professional reviews. The problem is that the reviews are all from strangers, many of whom are probably shills for the company trying to sell something. The professional review sites frequently care much more about getting traffic than they do about factually reviewing things.
And then there’s Google. In the ancient past it used to use a system called Page Rank (named after Larry Page, not webpages) that was, for a time, a foolproof way to get high quality results. But, for a long time Google fought a war against Search Engine Optimization operators who wanted their sites to rank highly despite being of dubious quality. Eventually Google realized that rather than fighting SEO, they could actually make more money by letting the SEO spammers win, because the SEO spammers just wanted to show ads, and Google had a monopoly on website ads, and a monopoly on search, so what were its users going to do – switch to an alternative?
There’s a very good summary of the enshittification of product reviews here:
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
For me it’s more that I have to move all the time to keep the rent down and moving solid wood furniture is a nightmare.