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This is where guitars are right now.
Both Fender and Gibson are now owned by venture capitalists. Their quality of everything, from strings to picks to guitars, has plummeted across every brand they own in the last five years. It’s sad really.
You go on Reddit and people talk about the models and which one is great for this, or why they prefer it for that, but then you find some deeper dives into more recent spaces and people who know what they are talking about have moved away entirely from both brands.
If anyone is curious, you can buy a better guitar from Harley-Benton, Cort, or Jet than from Fender/Gibson and it will be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
I saw a headline on some guitar magazine “These are the most over priced guitars currently”. Says a lot and it’s true.
There’s not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It’s alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.
My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I’d need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I’m not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.
Did you like building your own? I have a used PRS SE 24, which I got for a steal due to paint scuffs, but thought about building my own.
Yes absolutely, I enjoyed it and might do it again sometime with a different kit.
I do have a lot of tools already so that wasn’t costly, only good practice, but it did take somewhat longer than I expected.
I wouldn’t attempt to make the neck and fretboard from scratch, so a kit with a good neck is a good starting point.
Did you find any useful guides online or on YouTube for getting started? I have a decent set of tools, but this would be a new endeavor for me.
Well aware this would be a “me” guitar and not something that would have much of a value to anyone else. Some people seem to think they are building their own K-Line guitar.
It was all pretty straight forward. The kit was made to be assembled with a bolt on neck all predrilled, so it was basically just shaping the body and headstock and then paint and varnish.
I did look up some painting techniques, but I really just wanted to stain the wood, so I did that with a brush and then 2 coats of varnish. I had to sand the wood first to make it more open for staining instead of paint. If you want to paint or spray paint you should probably keep or make a base coat to avoid the wood absorbing the paint.
It was a cheap stratocaster-like kit, so I wasn’t too concerned with making mistakes, but I’ll admit that putting the saw into a guitar was a little daunting at first.
I used a multi-cutter for most of it to make very precise cuts. And lots and lots of sandpaper by hand with different grit sizes.
It only took a few evenings to do, so it is not difficult at all, but I guess it depends on how much you want to customize it.
Do you know the brand? Sounds like my next winter project.
I want to make one with normal pickups - Out1 and add a piezo bridge with a three way switch for an Out2. Some of the sounds people are getting by blending the two are incredible.
The kit I used was a Harley Benton from Thomann.
The classic “Buy a reputable brand, cut costs and coast along on the reputation until you can sell off all your shares and move on to another company”. Bonus points for using
legalised embezzlementshare buyback.
Aka “larger sample size provides different results”
The hive mind / group think stuff on Reddit is strong. I had a friend doing a section of the PCT and he was saying literally everyone had the same setups from socks to water filters.
That kind of uniformity isn’t good for anyone.
Lemmy wouldn’t know anything about that 😏
Not in this case, I found a recent thread where people posted a side by side of an old product with the new one.
The cotton/polyester split used to be 75/25, now it’s 55/45…
I’ve noticed it with Darn Tough socks. Used to be mostly Merino wool, now it’s over 50% nylon. My last pair literally smelled like plastic for a week.
Damn, I’ve been singing their praises for years…but I haven’t actually bought a new pair in ages
I replaced my Red Wing Iron Rangers a couple months ago and quality took a shit. Maybe I just got a bad pair. Terrible to hear about the socks. I should have bought more years ago.
I finally find good socks…
Dammit, I kept forgetting to pick some up.
It’s a moving target these days though
In this case, it is likely the company was bought out by venture capital who cut costs and quality to suck the brand dry between the first and second thread.
That’s not really the case, everything is lower quality now on average.
It makes me want to make more of my own stuff. Sewing isn’t terribly hard for basic patterns and machines are relatively cheap
Absolutely, be the change you want to see in this world. Your clothes will last longer as well. Better quality fabric by the bolt and also you’ll know how to tailor them if your body shape changes.
Gerber Legend 800 Multitool
The one I got from a PX the year after it was released is epic. Have carried it for 23 years. It has seen everything and outside of scraping the knife sharpish again, has never been maintained. I misplaced it for a bit (under friends driver’s seat for about a year) and couldn’t find a replacement “upgrade”. Did the Leatherman wave2 for a bit. Couldn’t take it, hit up eBay, got 3 more Gerber L800s (later release, still in boxes)…so bad. They just felt cheaper. When we stumbled upon my old Gerber, I kept the new ones for parts. Replace my knife with a new one…it already has rust dots on it. My old one after decades of abuse and being sharpened to half it’s starting width, doesn’t have a spot of rust on it.
ANYWAY…yeah…what OP said.
Yeah, Gerber fell the fuck off. They became just sloppy.
I feel Leatherman has stayed the course.Yeah, Leatherman seems to have come out ahead. I used the Wave2 for a while, and most folks I know have Leatherman multi-tools. The lack of spring on the pliers took a long time to get used to. The Gerber pliers and scissors springs are still going strong, so I never bought the “it is just going to fail” argument for not having them. The Gerber also had external access tools decades before people were praising the wave for its originality in having external tools lol. Honestly those are two selling points that kept me from ever getting a new multitool…well, now there is sentimental value for a tool that has been through hell with me and is still strong…but I probably won’t be recommending Gerber any time soon.
I ran into this when I was thinking about buying some Doc Martens recently. I know there have been other examples, that’s just the most recent I can remember.
When I started fishing as a hobby, I couldn’t believe that it was the only hobby I’ve ever taken up that pretty much had unanimous recommendations for beginners. Everyone seemed to suggest the Ugly Stik GX2 on every website or forum. And there were no threads about how I should buy a more expensive rod/reel, other than a few that mentioned that I might want to upgrade the reel on the GX2 after a year or so.
Even the salesperson at the Bass Pro Shops store recommended the GX2 even though I could have afforded a bit more.
It was a completely new experience for me. I am used to having to spend at least $300-400 on initial investments for new hobbies. Fishing was only CAD$120 for everything!
My hobby (speedcubing) is like that as well. If you ask any semi competent speedcuber you will hear something along the lines of “Get the newest RS3M (9$) and maybe some lube (4$)”. I love it for that.
(Of course it s all a foot-in-the-door scam to get you hooked so you buy other events but shhh)
When you Google for “best whatever” and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.
You’ll find many cases where the only post they’ve ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.
A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.
Good suggestion.
I think the savviest of the savvy out there are both properly seeding comment histories and continuing to post other comments after they astroturf which makes it all but impossible to identify.
Big bummer and no perfect solution I’ve ever heard of but we do what we can and can always hope.
The perfect solution is to research which to buy for 9 months and then end up buying none.
So what your saying is, the quality (of reddit) has nosedived
We all used to agree that it was the best option to go for.
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And it’s only going to get WAY WORSE with LLM and Gen AI…
If you really are looking for a hoodie: 1620.
Prices are high, they’re very proud of their products. Their work pants aren’t worth it, garbage*. Both pairs I bought don’t come close to my Wrangler for durability.
However, their hoodie is pretty dope. It’s long, and the hood is huge. A proper functioning hood, I can pull it down to my nose. Buttons instead of string. It’s thick & warm. Only downside is it’s long, and I’m 6’1", it falls below my ass. The waist is also wide, or my waist is just more narrow than the average tradesman they’re targeting.Sounds like you bought a size too large? If its too long and wide
Nah, fits my shoulders and arms great. I’ve just got a narrow waist. Everything for me weird.
My exact experience finding out Audacity has adware
That’s why Tenacity is here to save the day!
After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.
In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, leading to the creation of a new fork with virtually the same intentions. Unsurpringly, this fork was named Sneedacity.
Sneedacity lmao
Did they learn nothing from the Boaty McBoatface disaster?
>Formerly Chuck’s.
You can vote as long as you vote for my favourite option.
though not 100% audio software, i recommend davinci resolve! it’s free, and no ads
And it does a pretty damn good job as audio software, tbh. Fairlight kicks ass.
No it doesn’t?
I just googled it to be sure, but i already assumed you meant ‘spyware’ (which is something completely different), referring to the telemetry (which i can get is a sensitive thing, but anonymous usage statistics to know where to focus their development sounds like a decent idea, and afaik they implemented it with respect for the user)
I remember the concern years ago was: since the application was bought (acquired?) and the tool was still publically free, that the new owners had added the spyware to try and monetize the data coming from said spyware/telemetry.
After reading your comment I went back and did some cursory searches, and it looks like the general concensus is that its less of a concern than it was originally - although, there is still uncertainty around how the tool is being monetized, which is enough for some to stop using it.
It just joined the musescore project, great open source music notation software. For funding the only commercial thing they offer is a site where you can upload & download scores, with the paying part also paying licensining fees for copyrighted music. Imo all looks very legit. I was already familiar with musescore before this drama, and watched some of tantacrul (head of the musescore project, and now also audacity i guess). He’s a very down to earth guy that has quite some insightful videos on the musescore development and figuring out what to keep/remove when going for new versions. But also great videos regarding other topics.
So far i’ve seen nothing that rings any alarm bells. The open source community can sometimes be a bit too sensitive regarding paid services linked to open source software. But in this case as long as the actual software remains open source, and the paid part actually adds value (a nice place to exchange sheet music, without any copyright issues as that’s covered by your payment, so a very legit reason to ask money), why not?
Reading your comment is how I found out. That makes me sad.
“You click on a reddit link but their certificate expired and the page isn’t opening”
depending on reddit for any kind of real world advice is a crapshoot at best
Even a crapshoot is better than the straight advertisements on Google.
I feel like here is not much better unless the advice is about technology
Every FOSS project I’ve ever looked into lol
there needs to be a crowd sourced product review and maintenance website that can see trends of enshittification.
The trick is designing the thing in such a way as to resist infiltration by astroturfing marketers.
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Let’s say everyone used an identity verification service to signup, like had to send photos of their ID and their SSN (national identity number) to be vetted by a third party.
How long after the service got popular would it take for the most aggressive marketers to pay rings of fraudsters to lend their identities and/or make fake reviews?
I think it would definitely start out great until it got big enough to be super useful and then the fraud would ramp up. I think an organization like Consumer Reports has a chance at successfully maintaining a low-bias product database, but the paywall is a big obstacle, as is the fact they’ll only review the largest product catalogs.
These are the pitfalls with the “amazon reviews/yelp” model.
A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.
That’s not to say these systems haven’t been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can’t be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).
I mean it more or less follows a line. It getting ever steeper lately but it’s pretty predictable.
I think it would need to be a subscriber service paid for by consumers who are willing to pay for good reviews. Otherwise the consumers become the product and eventually marketers take over.
Also crowd-sourced reviews are what we’re supposed to have already, both on Reddit and Amazon (and anywhere else).
What I envision would be a publication that funds a set of reviewers (maybe a mix of full time and part time, since some products are appropriate for testing as a job while others are more appropriate to just use for a while).
Each product would either be bought by the org directly, or if manufacturers provide review samples, a layer of indirection is used to avoid the reviewer feeling like they need to give a good review to keep the free shit coming (with clear communication to the supplier that free or not well have no effect on the review).
Any issues get included in the review fairly, along with any kind of resolution (which should ideally go through both consumer channels as well as reviewer back channels, the former to show what average customers should expect, the latter to hopefully resolve design flaws).
The reviewer will then keep the product and give updates, either in the form of “still using it and it is like x after y months/years”, “doesn’t get much use because I’m using this other thing instead because of x, y, z”, or “doesn’t get much use because I’m not really part of the target audience”.
My complete vision includes brick and mortar locations where products are available to try out, and maybe sales handled there, where any product available has a “we vouch for the quality of this product” where flaws are highlighted as much as features are.
Though I think the idea is self-defeating because if it gains momentum, it could halt or reverse enshitification and make it redundant, fail, then enshitification returns. Ideally, enshitification is stopped with legislation about quality and enforcement that questions why a bad design is used when a better one is obvious.
From Wikishittia, the free enshittepedia
(it does not exist, sadly)
I wonder if they’d mind someone mirroring their content, but with the one difference that anyone can edit, any time with no restrictions, spam blocking, vetting etc
See what chaos ensues
How dare you get my hopes up.
Same with playing cards
You buy it anyway, and it’s a great purchase. Very happy. Dog eats it a few days later and the product is discontinued. Or Is it just me?
For something like a hoodie, I recommend you go to a thrift store. Anything you find there will be durable and quality enough to survive, and you can feel it or try it on. It’s very easy to find high quality stuff while thrifting. 8 dollars for what might cost 80 new.
Try to focus on non-synthetic fibers or semi synthetic. Plastics in clothing are bad for the environment.
Plastic in clothes is bad for you, not just the environment
Microplastics apparently do infiltrate through the skin
We have… done bad things with our world.
I snagged the world’s comfiest leather jacket for $8 at a local thrift shop. All it needed was some stitching in a couple pockets, but it’s bloody perfect otherwise. Eight friggen bucks.
