This viral post about enshittification is fake

[u/dannylopuz]

Why do people keep falling for this?

[u/TalkersCZ]

It could be very well true. (EDIT: I know this specific one is not true, but the point is different)

And I am pretty sure you can find on Alibaba or some similar chinese site tons of products, which are terrible quality.

The thing is, that today you have options in different price ranges.

You can buy a pan for 10USD. You can buy pan for 100s USD.

But you cant expect 10USD pan to be same quality as a pan, that costed 10USD 50 years ago.

Same thing with these soldiers. If you buy 3D printed plastic knockoffs from cheap plastic from China, you cant expect it to be same quality as those before.

[u/Minmax-the-Barbarian → u/TalkersCZ]

I feel like 3D printed solid plastic toys would be much more expensive than traditional molded ones, regardless of quality.

Sorry, that's not to detract from your comment. Very "um actually" of me ☝️🤓

[u/edingerc → u/Minmax-the-Barbarian]

Yep, injection molding on small items is the same way they make plastic forks and such. 3d printing is a much more expensive process.

[u/nothing_in_my_mind → u/Minmax-the-Barbarian]

Yeah, I guess you can't expect everyone to know about production processes.

3D printing is a very expensive method per unit. It makes sense if you are going to be producing a few units.

Those cheapo toys are injection molded. But hold up, expensive toys (like those Warhammer figures, or Lego) are also injection molded. The difference is poorer quality molds, poorer quality plastic, poor design choices, using molds after they have gone through wear and tear, poor quality control after production.

[u/fruitybix → u/nothing_in_my_mind]

In the case of those army men its either getting their hands on ancient worn out moulds, or taking a selection of existing plastic army men and using them to make new moulds as cheaply as possible.

Making injection moulds is a very big up front cost.

[u/Alternative-Cup-8102 → u/nothing_in_my_mind]

Injection molders are also much more expensive than high

[u/TalkersCZ → u/Minmax-the-Barbarian]

No idea how they were produced, s thanks for correction there. 😄

But simply put - you will have cheap mold in China producing it with cheap plastic and with underpaid workforce.

Thats kind of the point. 😄

[u/Shienvien → u/TalkersCZ]

The bigger problem is trying to find out if the $100 pan is $100 because it's better, or because the markup is 19x higher than on the $10 pan.

[u/Albae87 → u/TalkersCZ]

I feel like a modern problem is, that you where able to decide if you buy a 10$ or 100$ pan years ago and had a quality that fits the price. Now you decide if you want to buy a 1$ pan, a 10$ pan or the same 10$ pan for 100$

[u/0b0011 → u/TalkersCZ]

I remember watching a video a while back with this same conclusion. They were testing tools from the 70s and tools today. They looked at a crescent wrench from back then and 2 from today. I cant remember the exact numbers but essentially they had one back in the day and it was $20. Now they have 2 options the $20 one and the $100 wrench. The $20 one was obviously shitty and had a big margin of error as well as slippage where as the $100 one was actually better than the old one. It was the same story for all of the tools they tested. The thing is tools used to be way more expensive back in the day because that old $20 wrench would cost the equivalent of $160 in today's money. It is absolutely true that quality is dropping for many things but for many other things they've just added in a bare minimum cheap option and people compare that to the old thing rather than comparing the expensive one.

[u/TalkersCZ → u/0b0011]

In mind of the people something that costed 30 years ago 20 bucks should still cost 20 bucks.

They find 20 bucks cheap version and they complain about quality.

I went for a hike. Nothing crazy. Forgot my tent. Got one for 30 bucks, was perfectly fine. Probably will detiorate very fast, but that is kinda expected.

[u/RankedFarting → u/TalkersCZ]

The presses used to make these figurines are still the same and the constant wear and tear has lead to a loss in detail.

Its possible that the chinese producers bought old presses from other countries that have been worn down.

[u/EveningAnt3949 → u/TalkersCZ]

I think this is misleading.

Making a decent mono-colored toy that's solid plastic is really easy and cheap. There is no reason for bad plastic toys to exist. And back in the day it made no sense to sell cheap knock-off because the originals were inexpensive.

To be fair, making a mold for a detailed figure costs money, I can see a high price for niche collector items. But a big part of the high costs is that factories have moved to overkill solutions for making plastic toys, That's because many factories have removed human designers and operators.

(3D printing for large volumes is fat more expensive by the way.)