I post frequently here with an anti-advertising stance. Briefly: advertising is often just unambiguously lying, and when it's not, it's still a one-sided collec

I post frequently here with an anti-advertising stance. Briefly: advertising is often just unambiguously lying, and when it's not, it's still a one-sided collection of facts. Advertising breaks one of the core ideas of capitalism: that the best products or best prices will win, because a better-advertised product can beat a cheaper, higher-quality product. If one company spends money on advertising, all their competitors have to start spending money on advertising, which means that the entire market has to take money away from researching and manufacturing quality, or pass that cost on to the consumer. A common response I get is, "But how will we find out about products?" My stance is that professional review sites supported by users (examples: Consumer Reports, OutdoorGearLab, LabDoor) are the solution. So why not consumer reviews? 1. The obvious thing is that it doesn't solve the problem with advertising. Advertisers can pose as consumers and post reviews. Sophisticated methods of detecting this (i.e. ignore all 1- and 5-star reviews) just fall prey to more sophisticated advertisers (i.e. computer generate 30 5-star ratings to keep your star rating up, and then post one carefully-crafted 4-star rating written by a human). 2. Even if you do manage to filter advertisers, you still tend to hear from the extremes. Irrational positivity isn't better than irrational negativity: a person who posts all 5-star reviews because they want to be nice isn't better than the furious customer with a grudge. 3. Consumer reviews encourage what I'll call second-level advertising: if you can't advertise directly, then you try to get your consumers to advertise for you. For example: spamming your users with "If you like our product please leave a review on iTunes/GooglePlay/Amazon" or the YouTube classic, "Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!" 4. Consumers generally aren't experts, which means that consumer reviews are more susceptible to Parkinson's Law of Triviality[1]. A good example of this are the reviews on products that say things like "The parts feel cheap and flimsy." Well, did they break? Probably not, or you would have said that. Titanium parts are thinner and lighter than steel, which sometimes gives them the impression of being cheap and flimsy, when they are in fact more expensive and stronger. But in a more general sense, consumer reviews tend to focus on the look or price of something rather than harder-to-understand things like performance and durability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality