9 ms·

A False Economy Powered by Ads and Lies

117 points by midef 7y ago

blackdogie 7y ago
Until marketplaces are fined by the FTC directly for enabling I think this will continue to grow as an issue.
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
What should we/they do? Even in real-life, you're never sure, when someone recommends a product, be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store ("this one here is a lot better then that one there", even at the same price, could mean different profits). With platforms like youtube, you have atleast minimal trust in a few youtubers you follow regularly (and this literally means "a few"), but doing a random search means 80% chance the reviewer got sponsoder or atleast received the product for free in exchange for a good review. Star systems on sellers pages have their own sets of issues... usually people don't write reviews at all if the product is good, and complain only after it breaks (unless they're 'paid' for the review).
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > Even in real-life, you're never sure, when someone recommends a product, be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store... This is real-life too but the difference is the dis-honesty of the influencers is more damaging than the next-door salesman's whilst at the same time affording more convenience with proportionally limited accountability to the said influencers. > What should we/they do? Force on-demand transparency and information disclosure? I am not really sure, to be honest, but regulation might be one way to curb or limit the game to a few enterprising entities (which comes with its own down-sides)?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store Never believe what salespeople tell you when they're trying to make a sale.
  - buckminster 7y ago
    They are always trying to make a sale. Which was probably your point. Honestly, I have no idea why anyone ever engages with salespeople. There is no upside.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Because they're knowledgeable about their domain and want to make a sale, so want to push you towards a product that suits your needs? It's a positive-sum interaction.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        If most salespeople did that, then there wouldn't be a problem. But that's not what most salespeople do -- they're much more likely to push you towards products that will earn them the greatest commission, or will help them hit whatever sales targets they have.
- rchaud 7y ago
  They can do what legacy retailers have done for ages, which is to not stock goods from fly-by-night sellers. Offer customers choice among established brands, and eschew becoming the Western version of DealExtreme, AliExpress or Wish. I don't see fake reviews of TVs or headphones on Best Buy's site, and I've begun purchasing from brick and mortar establishments (buying online or doing instore pickup) more often now. Amazon's supply chain can't be trusted.
  - mml 7y ago
    having worked on a system that managed reviews for a certain giant electronics retailer, I have bad news for you.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      I'm less worried about possibly astroturfed reviews if the brand is something I've already bought from, like Samsung or Sennheiser, or a cheaper but otherwise reliable one like Anker.
- lubesGordi 7y ago
  Exactly. This problem is not new. The issue is that people feel like they should have easy access to truth and that is just not the case, ever. The best we can ask for is a good way to do research to try to discover what is true, which is what the internet is for and basically what we have now.
fyrefoxboy12 7y ago
This is a failure of lack of regulation, as human nature is to go too far in order to understand how far they can go. Therefore, some of us will always take it too far until we reach the wall. This wall cannot be built by ethics or morals or any "self-regulation". It needs to be externally built, and well-enforced.
amiune 7y ago
That's not a false economy, that's the only economy that started since it's inception. Information asymmetry and game theory talks a lot about it
- 101404 7y ago
  Yep. That's a 100 years of Edward Bernays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays That's the guy who started it all.
- three_seagrass 7y ago
  Yeah, the entire ads industry exists because of information asymmetry, but what is new is how bad actors are using technology in these imperfect markets to abuse it.
Legogris 7y ago
> When the reward of being dishonest is (seemingly) greater than the risk, no person or company is accountable: The entire system is at fault. This dynamic is a great factor in many overarching issues today. In politics, it's so easy to get stuck on ideology, ethics or morality. But in practice, it comes down to incentive structure. And carrot usually works better than tick, for several reasons. Consider the problem of tax evasion in retail. Greece is imposing fines on those who conduct a large enough ratio of their transactions in cash[0]. Taiwan solved this more elegantly in 1951, IMO, with introducing a lottery with a number coming up on each receipt, thereby creating an incentive for consumers to ask for a receipt[1]. 0: https://fortune.com/2019/12/16/greece-digital-economy-cashless-fines/ https://fortune.com/2019/12/16/greece-digital-economy-cashle... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  That is elegant! makes me optimistic about society.
- gwd 7y ago
  How about this: 1. Have a way for buyers to report when a seller is bribing them to fake reviews. If the report turns out to be genuine, give the buyer a small reward ($5/10). 2. Have Amazon occasionally pretend to bribe people to do fake reviews. If a user does the fake review, their account is banned for one month. If the user reports the fake review, they get the small reward. Between the carrot of reporting fake reviews, and the stick of being banned for falling for the request, you'd "crowdsource" a lot of the issues.
  - elsewhen 7y ago
    “If the report turns out to be genuine” This still requires the platform to detect _genuine_ transgressions which is very difficult.
    - gwd 7y ago
      > This still requires the platform to detect _genuine_ transgressions which is very difficult. I had in mind situations where a seller contacts a buyer who has left a negative review, and offers free merchandise for changing the review. If it happens within Amazon's system, they should be able to verify it. Obviously an attack you have to defend against is unscrupulous seller E posting fake review requests on Facebook (or wherever) "on behalf of" honest seller A, causing Amazon to ban / punish A in the rankings.
naringas 7y ago
what about the underlying currency system which depends only on everone's trust in it? there's very little which keeps fiat money connected to reality...
- quadrangle 7y ago
  Except some enormous military power and other law enforcement requiring the payment of taxes in the fiat currency…
lowdose 7y ago
62% of ad revenue goes to publisher so there is a clear incentive to keep people outraged. https://ibb.co/k8F413r https://ibb.co/k8F413r
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
> Machines aren’t going away, but they are learning from us - both our lies and our truths. Respectfully, I disagree. Programmers are responsible. Machines only follow the instructions humans tell it to follow. Everyone who codes should really look at themselves in the mirror now and then.
- notacoward 7y ago
  > Machines only follow the instructions humans tell it to follow. I suggest that you read something about AI and ML. The "instructions" that go into these pipelines are many levels removed from the outputs. It's like saying that cells only follow the DNA instructions given to them - ignoring evolution, mutagens, exogenetics, etc. The original instructions don't tell anywhere near the whole story. Is the opacity of these algorithms a problem? Yes, it surely is, precisely because the machines are not just following instructions in any meaningful sense.
  - jazzyjackson 7y ago
    Just because the instructions are convoluted and implemented by people who don't code the math themselves doesn't mean the outcomes are removed from the inputs. It's still a machine. Heuristics use random number generators and produce random (non-deterministic) results, is that not following instructions written by programmers?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Heuristics use random number generators and produce random (non-deterministic) results, is that not following instructions written by programmers? Yes, on one level. However, the programmers are not determining what those numbers are, so on another level, no.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      > is that not following instructions written by programmers Not in any useful sense. Everything's deterministic with perfect knowledge, but nobody has perfect knowledge. The universe is still a machine too, and yet somehow manages to surprise us anyway. As soon as you inject non-replicable random numbers into the process, "following instructions" isn't entirely true any more.
fhood 7y ago
Luckily products from well established companies are still free from fake reviews (on Amazon) by and large. As long as you avoid the hordes of 5 star products with very generic brand names that you have never heard of, you can still trust reviews to have some degree of accuracy. Not to say that the suspiciously cheap product with near perfect reviews that always shows up at the top is always the wrong choice. I bought a knock off dremel for $20, and later ended up using it to cut quite a bit of 1.8in mild steel and it performed great. Only a little bit of smoking from the internals. On the other hand, I bought a cheap microphone from the same style of seller, and it was an unmitigated piece of garbage.
tomp 7y ago
We can criticise the regulators as not doing enough and complain that they lack resources, but the reality is, they don’t need to compete with (and beat) tech giants, they only need teeth. Ideally the regulator (FTC or whatever) would just write some sensible laws (e.g. no fake reviews or no lies in ads), then burden the tech giants themselves with enforcing these laws... then investigate not necessarily non-compliance (i.e. evidence of fake reviews), but also lack of process, i.e. the inability to detect potential fake reviews... and of course impose humongous fines (% of worldwide revenue, a la GDPR but actual fines, not just threats).
- nkingsy 7y ago
  This is exactly how things are currently done (DMCA, “sex work” search results), and it leads to more people being outraged by big tech companies acting as judge jury and executioner.
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    But it works.
    - salawat 7y ago
      Only to people judging what "works" means with similar criteria as yourself. I'm fairly certain GP does not share your criteria; ergo, your statement that "it works" degenerates to "it is, despite the protests of those opposed."
    - rusticpenn 7y ago
      You should talk to all the indie youtubers who had their videos taken down by DMCAs
      - freeone3000 7y ago
        Yes. Their videos are still down. It works.
hirundo 7y ago
There seems to be a lot less gaming of the negative than the positive reviews. So on Amazon, etc. I like to read the worst reviews and see if they talk me out of buying. I suppose if this approach catches on, scammers will spend more time denigrating competitors than boosting their own products, and it'll become less effective.
- ike0790 7y ago
  this is funny because i do this exact same thing haha
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I don't know if gaming negative reviews is less common than positive ones (I assume it is), but there are plenty enough fake negative reviews to cause me to stop paying any real attention to them too. I use reviews for only one thing -- to find out about specific tips and tricks about using whatever the product is. I pay very little attention to how the reviewer actually rated the product.
baryphonic 7y ago
> Two months before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first investment bank claimed by The Great Recession, The New York Times ran a story entitled, "Can banks self-regulate?" Clearly, the answer was no. Yet, in the face of new regulations that followed, the surviving big banks have grown bigger and more powerful than before. A similar situation may play out with big tech companies. I turned skeptical when I read this plus the Upton Sinclair quote. Nothing about Amazon's marketplace or ad business or even fake reviews is even remotely close to the financial system pre-financial crisis. AAFG are not holding the bill for trillions in potential liabilities on highly leveraged positions in complex derivatives. They're operating a market that doesn't involve any credit whatsoever outside of payments. Seems like the author has something of an axe to grind rather than a rational assessment of the risk and problems. I don't think it's good that this system is the way it is, but caveat emptor seems like a perfectly fine solution. I've become more skeptical about what I buy on Amazon, and I imagine most other consumers have done the same. If Amazon wants more business from me again, they can improve the quality of offerings.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >Two months before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first investment bank claimed by The Great Recession, The New York Times ran a story entitled, "Can banks self-regulate?" Clearly, the answer was no. To nitpick on this quote further: recessions are the market correcting itself. A recession can mean that a bubble was growing in the market and it burst. In that sense, if banks are allowed to fail then they are self-regulating: the market decides which banks can survive and which can't. The downside is that due to how fractional reserve banking is set up and how the banks are interconnected that the failure of one can cause a cascade. In regards to tech companies, I wonder if they're not simply overvalued. If the value of tech companies gets cut in half then I can see it causing quite a few problems.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > In regards to tech companies, I wonder if they're not simply overvalued. I believe, by and large, that they're not only overvalued, but often very greatly overvalued.
curiosity_100 7y ago
It shocks me we don't have a place to read honest reviews. Where professional reviews who get paid will test things and give an honest opinion, anonymously, so they won't be bribed, and you can go there to read what they say and see their rating.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  It's called "Consumer Reports". It costs, though.
- Spare_account 7y ago
  In the UK we have 'Which', a private organisation that does not allow advertising in its magazine or website to avoid conflicts of interest. I understand that their reviews are impartial. They prioritise features that do not always overlap with my own preferences so their 'best buy' recommendations are not always aligned with my personal preference, BUT their reviews are very thorough and I purchase a membership whenever I plan to buy a significant item.
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  There is something called "OKO Test" in germany, which is pretty trustworthy.
Zigurd 7y ago
As of the middle of 2019 Google continued to be inundated with fake business listings, some of them are outright scams and fraudsters who harm consumers. All of them are intended to harm local businesses by making them invisible compared to the fake listings. I have not heard of Google finding a solution to this problem. Some specific fields, like dentistry, seems to be flooded with SEO that is meant to prevent price comparison research. I'm no expert in ad fraud but I suspect the most polluted categories are the ones with very high click-through revenue. While there are many things Google gets right, including fighting SEO where revenue is not much at stake, they have obvious perverse incentives to ignore these problems as well as the way fake reviews contribute to these problems.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
We need a review site linked to hard identity + purchase verification + ability to see all other reviews by that reviewer (how many things do they review, in what categories, and are they potentially biased? Also, for complex products, do they have any authoritative credentials that might make them subject matter experts?) + ability for other reviewers to review reviewers, sort of like a peer rating system...
- quadrangle 7y ago
  Not what you're suggesting, but a site with at least ethical aims (and potentially additional features for things you bring up): https://lib.reviews/ https://lib.reviews/
- TheCapeGreek 7y ago
  Unfortunately this would make the barrier to entry high enough that even for "qualified" individuals, people won't go through the effort without a separate incentive.

117 points by midef 7y ago

Until marketplaces are fined by the FTC directly for enabling I think this will continue to grow as an issue.

What should we/they do? Even in real-life, you're never sure, when someone recommends a product, be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store ("this one here is a lot better then that one there", even at the same price, could mean different profits). With platforms like youtube, you have atleast minimal trust in a few youtubers you follow regularly (and this literally means "a few"), but doing a random search means 80% chance the reviewer got sponsoder or atleast received the product for free in exchange for a good review. Star systems on sellers pages have their own sets of issues... usually people don't write reviews at all if the product is good, and complain only after it breaks (unless they're 'paid' for the review).

ignoramous 7y ago
> Even in real-life, you're never sure, when someone recommends a product, be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store... This is real-life too but the difference is the dis-honesty of the influencers is more damaging than the next-door salesman's whilst at the same time affording more convenience with proportionally limited accountability to the said influencers. > What should we/they do? Force on-demand transparency and information disclosure? I am not really sure, to be honest, but regulation might be one way to curb or limit the game to a few enterprising entities (which comes with its own down-sides)?
JohnFen 7y ago
> be it a salesman in a brick and mortar store Never believe what salespeople tell you when they're trying to make a sale.
- buckminster 7y ago
  They are always trying to make a sale. Which was probably your point. Honestly, I have no idea why anyone ever engages with salespeople. There is no upside.
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    Because they're knowledgeable about their domain and want to make a sale, so want to push you towards a product that suits your needs? It's a positive-sum interaction.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      If most salespeople did that, then there wouldn't be a problem. But that's not what most salespeople do -- they're much more likely to push you towards products that will earn them the greatest commission, or will help them hit whatever sales targets they have.
rchaud 7y ago
They can do what legacy retailers have done for ages, which is to not stock goods from fly-by-night sellers. Offer customers choice among established brands, and eschew becoming the Western version of DealExtreme, AliExpress or Wish. I don't see fake reviews of TVs or headphones on Best Buy's site, and I've begun purchasing from brick and mortar establishments (buying online or doing instore pickup) more often now. Amazon's supply chain can't be trusted.
- mml 7y ago
  having worked on a system that managed reviews for a certain giant electronics retailer, I have bad news for you.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    I'm less worried about possibly astroturfed reviews if the brand is something I've already bought from, like Samsung or Sennheiser, or a cheaper but otherwise reliable one like Anker.
lubesGordi 7y ago
Exactly. This problem is not new. The issue is that people feel like they should have easy access to truth and that is just not the case, ever. The best we can ask for is a good way to do research to try to discover what is true, which is what the internet is for and basically what we have now.

fyrefoxboy12 7y ago

This is a failure of lack of regulation, as human nature is to go too far in order to understand how far they can go. Therefore, some of us will always take it too far until we reach the wall. This wall cannot be built by ethics or morals or any "self-regulation". It needs to be externally built, and well-enforced.

amiune 7y ago

That's not a false economy, that's the only economy that started since it's inception. Information asymmetry and game theory talks a lot about it

101404 7y ago
Yep. That's a 100 years of Edward Bernays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays That's the guy who started it all.
three_seagrass 7y ago
Yeah, the entire ads industry exists because of information asymmetry, but what is new is how bad actors are using technology in these imperfect markets to abuse it.

Legogris 7y ago

> When the reward of being dishonest is (seemingly) greater than the risk, no person or company is accountable: The entire system is at fault. This dynamic is a great factor in many overarching issues today. In politics, it's so easy to get stuck on ideology, ethics or morality. But in practice, it comes down to incentive structure. And carrot usually works better than tick, for several reasons. Consider the problem of tax evasion in retail. Greece is imposing fines on those who conduct a large enough ratio of their transactions in cash[0]. Taiwan solved this more elegantly in 1951, IMO, with introducing a lottery with a number coming up on each receipt, thereby creating an incentive for consumers to ask for a receipt[1]. 0: https://fortune.com/2019/12/16/greece-digital-economy-cashless-fines/ https://fortune.com/2019/12/16/greece-digital-economy-cashle... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Invoice_lottery

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
That is elegant! makes me optimistic about society.
gwd 7y ago
How about this: 1. Have a way for buyers to report when a seller is bribing them to fake reviews. If the report turns out to be genuine, give the buyer a small reward ($5/10). 2. Have Amazon occasionally pretend to bribe people to do fake reviews. If a user does the fake review, their account is banned for one month. If the user reports the fake review, they get the small reward. Between the carrot of reporting fake reviews, and the stick of being banned for falling for the request, you'd "crowdsource" a lot of the issues.
- elsewhen 7y ago
  “If the report turns out to be genuine” This still requires the platform to detect _genuine_ transgressions which is very difficult.
  - gwd 7y ago
    > This still requires the platform to detect _genuine_ transgressions which is very difficult. I had in mind situations where a seller contacts a buyer who has left a negative review, and offers free merchandise for changing the review. If it happens within Amazon's system, they should be able to verify it. Obviously an attack you have to defend against is unscrupulous seller E posting fake review requests on Facebook (or wherever) "on behalf of" honest seller A, causing Amazon to ban / punish A in the rankings.

naringas 7y ago

what about the underlying currency system which depends only on everone's trust in it? there's very little which keeps fiat money connected to reality...

quadrangle 7y ago
Except some enormous military power and other law enforcement requiring the payment of taxes in the fiat currency…

lowdose 7y ago

62% of ad revenue goes to publisher so there is a clear incentive to keep people outraged. https://ibb.co/k8F413r https://ibb.co/k8F413r

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

> Machines aren’t going away, but they are learning from us - both our lies and our truths. Respectfully, I disagree. Programmers are responsible. Machines only follow the instructions humans tell it to follow. Everyone who codes should really look at themselves in the mirror now and then.

notacoward 7y ago
> Machines only follow the instructions humans tell it to follow. I suggest that you read something about AI and ML. The "instructions" that go into these pipelines are many levels removed from the outputs. It's like saying that cells only follow the DNA instructions given to them - ignoring evolution, mutagens, exogenetics, etc. The original instructions don't tell anywhere near the whole story. Is the opacity of these algorithms a problem? Yes, it surely is, precisely because the machines are not just following instructions in any meaningful sense.
- jazzyjackson 7y ago
  Just because the instructions are convoluted and implemented by people who don't code the math themselves doesn't mean the outcomes are removed from the inputs. It's still a machine. Heuristics use random number generators and produce random (non-deterministic) results, is that not following instructions written by programmers?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Heuristics use random number generators and produce random (non-deterministic) results, is that not following instructions written by programmers? Yes, on one level. However, the programmers are not determining what those numbers are, so on another level, no.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    > is that not following instructions written by programmers Not in any useful sense. Everything's deterministic with perfect knowledge, but nobody has perfect knowledge. The universe is still a machine too, and yet somehow manages to surprise us anyway. As soon as you inject non-replicable random numbers into the process, "following instructions" isn't entirely true any more.

fhood 7y ago

Luckily products from well established companies are still free from fake reviews (on Amazon) by and large. As long as you avoid the hordes of 5 star products with very generic brand names that you have never heard of, you can still trust reviews to have some degree of accuracy. Not to say that the suspiciously cheap product with near perfect reviews that always shows up at the top is always the wrong choice. I bought a knock off dremel for $20, and later ended up using it to cut quite a bit of 1.8in mild steel and it performed great. Only a little bit of smoking from the internals. On the other hand, I bought a cheap microphone from the same style of seller, and it was an unmitigated piece of garbage.

tomp 7y ago

We can criticise the regulators as not doing enough and complain that they lack resources, but the reality is, they don’t need to compete with (and beat) tech giants, they only need teeth. Ideally the regulator (FTC or whatever) would just write some sensible laws (e.g. no fake reviews or no lies in ads), then burden the tech giants themselves with enforcing these laws... then investigate not necessarily non-compliance (i.e. evidence of fake reviews), but also lack of process, i.e. the inability to detect potential fake reviews... and of course impose humongous fines (% of worldwide revenue, a la GDPR but actual fines, not just threats).

nkingsy 7y ago
This is exactly how things are currently done (DMCA, “sex work” search results), and it leads to more people being outraged by big tech companies acting as judge jury and executioner.
- freeone3000 7y ago
  But it works.
  - salawat 7y ago
    Only to people judging what "works" means with similar criteria as yourself. I'm fairly certain GP does not share your criteria; ergo, your statement that "it works" degenerates to "it is, despite the protests of those opposed."
  - rusticpenn 7y ago
    You should talk to all the indie youtubers who had their videos taken down by DMCAs
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Yes. Their videos are still down. It works.

hirundo 7y ago

There seems to be a lot less gaming of the negative than the positive reviews. So on Amazon, etc. I like to read the worst reviews and see if they talk me out of buying. I suppose if this approach catches on, scammers will spend more time denigrating competitors than boosting their own products, and it'll become less effective.

ike0790 7y ago
this is funny because i do this exact same thing haha
JohnFen 7y ago
I don't know if gaming negative reviews is less common than positive ones (I assume it is), but there are plenty enough fake negative reviews to cause me to stop paying any real attention to them too. I use reviews for only one thing -- to find out about specific tips and tricks about using whatever the product is. I pay very little attention to how the reviewer actually rated the product.

baryphonic 7y ago

> Two months before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first investment bank claimed by The Great Recession, The New York Times ran a story entitled, "Can banks self-regulate?" Clearly, the answer was no. Yet, in the face of new regulations that followed, the surviving big banks have grown bigger and more powerful than before. A similar situation may play out with big tech companies. I turned skeptical when I read this plus the Upton Sinclair quote. Nothing about Amazon's marketplace or ad business or even fake reviews is even remotely close to the financial system pre-financial crisis. AAFG are not holding the bill for trillions in potential liabilities on highly leveraged positions in complex derivatives. They're operating a market that doesn't involve any credit whatsoever outside of payments. Seems like the author has something of an axe to grind rather than a rational assessment of the risk and problems. I don't think it's good that this system is the way it is, but caveat emptor seems like a perfectly fine solution. I've become more skeptical about what I buy on Amazon, and I imagine most other consumers have done the same. If Amazon wants more business from me again, they can improve the quality of offerings.

Mirioron 7y ago
>Two months before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first investment bank claimed by The Great Recession, The New York Times ran a story entitled, "Can banks self-regulate?" Clearly, the answer was no. To nitpick on this quote further: recessions are the market correcting itself. A recession can mean that a bubble was growing in the market and it burst. In that sense, if banks are allowed to fail then they are self-regulating: the market decides which banks can survive and which can't. The downside is that due to how fractional reserve banking is set up and how the banks are interconnected that the failure of one can cause a cascade. In regards to tech companies, I wonder if they're not simply overvalued. If the value of tech companies gets cut in half then I can see it causing quite a few problems.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > In regards to tech companies, I wonder if they're not simply overvalued. I believe, by and large, that they're not only overvalued, but often very greatly overvalued.

curiosity_100 7y ago

It shocks me we don't have a place to read honest reviews. Where professional reviews who get paid will test things and give an honest opinion, anonymously, so they won't be bribed, and you can go there to read what they say and see their rating.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
It's called "Consumer Reports". It costs, though.
Spare_account 7y ago
In the UK we have 'Which', a private organisation that does not allow advertising in its magazine or website to avoid conflicts of interest. I understand that their reviews are impartial. They prioritise features that do not always overlap with my own preferences so their 'best buy' recommendations are not always aligned with my personal preference, BUT their reviews are very thorough and I purchase a membership whenever I plan to buy a significant item.
rusticpenn 7y ago
There is something called "OKO Test" in germany, which is pretty trustworthy.

Zigurd 7y ago

As of the middle of 2019 Google continued to be inundated with fake business listings, some of them are outright scams and fraudsters who harm consumers. All of them are intended to harm local businesses by making them invisible compared to the fake listings. I have not heard of Google finding a solution to this problem. Some specific fields, like dentistry, seems to be flooded with SEO that is meant to prevent price comparison research. I'm no expert in ad fraud but I suspect the most polluted categories are the ones with very high click-through revenue. While there are many things Google gets right, including fighting SEO where revenue is not much at stake, they have obvious perverse incentives to ignore these problems as well as the way fake reviews contribute to these problems.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

We need a review site linked to hard identity + purchase verification + ability to see all other reviews by that reviewer (how many things do they review, in what categories, and are they potentially biased? Also, for complex products, do they have any authoritative credentials that might make them subject matter experts?) + ability for other reviewers to review reviewers, sort of like a peer rating system...

quadrangle 7y ago
Not what you're suggesting, but a site with at least ethical aims (and potentially additional features for things you bring up): https://lib.reviews/ https://lib.reviews/
TheCapeGreek 7y ago
Unfortunately this would make the barrier to entry high enough that even for "qualified" individuals, people won't go through the effort without a separate incentive.