If stating strong preferences is costly, people will be incentivized to undrestate their preferences, and you’ll end up with Guess culture.
Tell culture with a preference weight cost certainly does devolve. It doesn’t devolve into guess culture (as described in the post), but into something different and arguably (but not strictly) worse. Guess culture works passably well when the asker/guesser is able to reliably model the response of the listener. This ‘stating preferences is costly’ system doesn’t handle that situation correctly.
Tell culture with a preference weight cost certainly does devolve. It doesn’t devolve into guess culture (as described in the post), but into something different and arguably (but not strictly) worse. Guess culture works passably well when the asker/guesser is able to reliably model the response of the listener. This ‘stating preferences is costly’ system doesn’t handle that situation correctly.