An inequality by Samorodnitsky states that if $f : \mathbb{F}_2^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a nonnegative boolean function, and $S \subseteq [n]$ is chosen by randomly including each coordinate with probability a certain $λ= λ(q,ρ) < 1$, then \begin{equation} \log \|T_ρf\|_q \leq \mathbb{E}_{S} \log \|\mathbb{E}(f|S)\|_q\;. \end{equation} Samorodnitsky's inequality has several applications to the theory of error-correcting codes. Perhaps most notably, it can be used to show that \emph{any} binary linear code (with minimum distance $ω(\log n)$) that has vanishing decoding error probability on the BEC$(λ)$ (binary erasure channel) also has vanishing decoding error on \emph{all} memoryless symmetric channels with capacity above some $C = C(λ)$. Samorodnitsky determined the optimal $λ= λ(q,ρ)$ for his inequality in the case that $q \geq 2$ is an integer. In this work, we generalize the inequality to $f : Ω^n \to \mathbb{R}$ under any product probability distribution $μ^{\otimes n}$ on $Ω^n$; moreover, we determine the optimal value of $λ= λ(q,μ,ρ)$ for any real $q \in [2,\infty]$, $ρ\in [0,1]$, and distribution~$μ$. As one consequence, we obtain the aforementioned coding theory result for linear codes over \emph{any} finite alphabet.