Back in the days before digital documents, one of the things we always wrestled with was the degeneration in the quality of copies... particularly when you started having to make "a copy of a copy" of some document.
And the more iterations you went through, the worse it became. You start to lose details, and if the original quality was very "light," parts of the copy become almost impossible to read.
Of course, I'm talking about simple photocopies, here... but the interesting thing is that you can often apply the same "degeneration problem" to many other facets of life.
Earlier today, Mrs. Denmarkguy was admiring a marvelous lamp on a web site, which she then showed me... and the first thing that struck me was that — for $79 — it was actually a copy of someone else's design.
A little digging around, and sure enough: The original design was created by an artist/lighting architect in the UK and those are actually hand made and typically sell for around $500.
Of course, not a lot of people can afford $500 for a sculptural lamp, so some enterprising soul figured out how to create a mass-market manufactured version that "looks somewhat like" the original, and uses plastic instead of anodized metal and multicolored dichroic glass.
But it doesn't stop there.
Since I started doing a little research on this lamp, I actually found some "like it" for as low as $16.95 and free shipping.
Of course, it pays to read the customer reviews, when they are available.
Pretty much all the reviews for the original $500 version were 5-stars and there were lots of gushing words of praise.
When we got to the $79 mass market version, the reviews were a little more mixed, with several people observing that it was "smaller than it looked in the pictures" and they were "disappointed in the quality."
The $16.95 version? Pretty much had all 1-star and 2-star reviews that it "looks like a child's toy" and was a "cheap piece of plastic crap" and "arrived broken and didn't work."
Perhaps an object lesson in the old truism that "you get what you pay for."
An unexpected place where this same "dilution" happens is in communities.
Don't know if anyone here remembers an old "breakway" group from Steemit who created a site called WEKU? It was essentially a Steemit clone, made by people who thought they could "do it better." And would have "different rules."
But there's more: In time, some people got annoyed with WEKU because they weren't free to do the sort of abusive things that had originally gotten them blackballed on Steemit, so yet another "sub-clone" named BearShares came to life...
Like with the lamps, and the photocopies, each iteration that was supposed to be "a solution" actually got a little worse.
What's the lesson here?
It's extremely rare that copies of something — anything — turn out to be better than or even equal to the original versions. In fact, most turn out to be abysmal failures. I know this from personal experience as a co-admin in several large online communities where disgruntled members broke away and tried to "make a better version" and promptly failed miserably.
It's better to just work on improving the original...
Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!
How about YOU? Do you think copies lose something as a result of.. BEING copies? Have you ever purchased a copy of some original product... and been disappointed, in spite of the lower price? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20220501 23:43 PDT
x414
True words!
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