5 ms·

This article starts by citing problems which could be solved using a more "open web." But then the author proposes their own centralized discovery service, Insi

This article starts by citing problems which could be solved using a more "open web." But then the author proposes their own centralized discovery service, Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Beyond that the author's specific arguments don't feel very convincing to me: > Think about the last time you did some research, e.g. choosing a phone plan. You asked your friends, compared on forums, looked at the official sites, scribbled some notes and made a decision. Even if this journey was quick, you likely traversed a dozen services and products to do this. The only site I went to is reddit. reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations (e.g. I buy coffee equipment by researching on r/coffee). In fact I avoid searching for this kind of thing widely, because I get a bunch of random blogs and content marketing sites of questionable provenance and accuracy. > Over the years you keep shopping there, until you've forgotten that - free 2 day shipping is now near universal - amazon isn't often the cheapest place Well no, free 2 day shipping is not "near universal." I still find most sites which aren't themselves backed by giant corporations (and even so which are!) don't even have multiple shipping speed options, let alone free 2 day shipping. I also have a degree of trust in Prime shipping and I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.

pretendscholar 6y ago
Wait until reddit is fully captured by the groups that do that sort of content marketing.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Yeah, that might happen. I'd have to find an alternative in that case. Whatever I replace it with would probably still be another highly centralized source though.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I know a couple of people who go through these types of Reddit threads and embed referral links into their answers. Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers. We are more captured than we think.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Doesn't reddit automatically strip referral links and put in their own? I thought they started doing that a few years ago as a monetization strategy but I could be wrong.
    - csa 6y ago
      The content marketers have had a work around for that for years. Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post. It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Does anybody click on such articles? I'd think any subreddit I used for product recommendation would immediately delete such comment and ban the author. I'd also think content marketers would be smarter than to do that.
        csa 6y ago
        Yes. It really depends on if it looks scammy or not. Some criteria: 1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link. 2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community. 3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.
- tw25261371 6y ago
  Reddit, along with Wikipedia, seems to have already slowly been claimed by groups pushing you to buy, only they're seeking something besides (direct) transfer of stuff for cash: buy-in and validation of which political positions are even valid to consider holding, let alone actually adopting. I'm on the left myself (although I think in terms of being liberal first over being "a part of the left"), and as Jon Stewart said during simpler times, "Reality has a liberal bias!", so I don't see it as much a direct threat to my existence as say a center-right conservative would, but oh geez. It's been getting really intense over the last year or two. Over the summer I was listening to a podcast where someone was discussing the remarks of a non-partisan entity (can't remember who, but the podcast itself was The Fifth Column), and the hosts referred to the undertones of those remarks as having an "implied 'we'". Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play. I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.
  - cthor 6y ago
    It's probably related to their policy of preferring secondary sources[1]. (Without a link to the article in question though I can only guess.) You could argue this is a bad policy, but it's certainly not a new one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
    - tw25261371 6y ago
- quantummkv 6y ago
  I'd argue that is already is. Wasn't there some big controversy about a SuperMod that was paid by companies to manage Reddit for them all day? The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life
klerpi 6y ago
When I want to search "the best something", the query is always preceded by "site:reddit.com". It's really hard to get an honest review otherwise. But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore. All r/hailcorporate I guess...
- abhinavsharma 6y ago
  Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop. We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use. http://share.insightbrowser.com/4 http://share.insightbrowser.com/4
- eng2prog 6y ago
  Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing. You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.
dnautics 6y ago
> I also shop at Amazon because I have a degree of trust in Prime items and I've never personally had a painful experience returning something. My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  I ordered a small food scale to replace one I thought I had lost in a move. Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in. I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them. Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.
  - s5300 6y ago
    I accidentally ordered $200 worth of items through prime pantry, 95% non-perishables (including 24pk Monster, Solo cups, paper plates/bowls) to my home in the MidWest instead of where I was at on the West Coast. 2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice) Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I use the "return at Kohl's" option for amazon items, and it has been super easy. Don't even have to box the item up.
aaron32311 6y ago
Anecdotally I got some great recommendations to gym equipment on Twitter. I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.
tayo42 6y ago
> reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing. It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many. In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice. I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes
- BalinKing 6y ago
  > everyone repeating the same thing Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?
  - rei0 6y ago
    I think it's called "echo chamber".
    - tayo42 6y ago
      yes there it is, though the other is accurate too
- Threeve303 6y ago
  > I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".
- lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon. This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them. No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.
abhinavsharma 6y ago
Hi, and thanks for the feedback! I'm the original author of that post. > Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be. We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice. I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability. Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!

pretendscholar 6y ago

Wait until reddit is fully captured by the groups that do that sort of content marketing.

fractionalhare 6y ago
Yeah, that might happen. I'd have to find an alternative in that case. Whatever I replace it with would probably still be another highly centralized source though.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I know a couple of people who go through these types of Reddit threads and embed referral links into their answers. Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers. We are more captured than we think.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Doesn't reddit automatically strip referral links and put in their own? I thought they started doing that a few years ago as a monetization strategy but I could be wrong.
  - csa 6y ago
    The content marketers have had a work around for that for years. Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post. It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Does anybody click on such articles? I'd think any subreddit I used for product recommendation would immediately delete such comment and ban the author. I'd also think content marketers would be smarter than to do that.
      - csa 6y ago
        Yes. It really depends on if it looks scammy or not. Some criteria: 1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link. 2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community. 3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.
tw25261371 6y ago
Reddit, along with Wikipedia, seems to have already slowly been claimed by groups pushing you to buy, only they're seeking something besides (direct) transfer of stuff for cash: buy-in and validation of which political positions are even valid to consider holding, let alone actually adopting. I'm on the left myself (although I think in terms of being liberal first over being "a part of the left"), and as Jon Stewart said during simpler times, "Reality has a liberal bias!", so I don't see it as much a direct threat to my existence as say a center-right conservative would, but oh geez. It's been getting really intense over the last year or two. Over the summer I was listening to a podcast where someone was discussing the remarks of a non-partisan entity (can't remember who, but the podcast itself was The Fifth Column), and the hosts referred to the undertones of those remarks as having an "implied 'we'". Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play. I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.
- cthor 6y ago
  It's probably related to their policy of preferring secondary sources[1]. (Without a link to the article in question though I can only guess.) You could argue this is a bad policy, but it's certainly not a new one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
  - tw25261371 6y ago
quantummkv 6y ago
I'd argue that is already is. Wasn't there some big controversy about a SuperMod that was paid by companies to manage Reddit for them all day? The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life

klerpi 6y ago

When I want to search "the best something", the query is always preceded by "site:reddit.com". It's really hard to get an honest review otherwise. But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore. All r/hailcorporate I guess...

abhinavsharma 6y ago
Hi, blog post OP here. While Reddit has its own challenges, it proven quite resilient to this particular form of content quality drop. We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use. http://share.insightbrowser.com/4 http://share.insightbrowser.com/4
eng2prog 6y ago
Yeah I seen if you post a specific corporation name, your topic will be bombarded by some companies astroturfing. You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.

dnautics 6y ago

> I also shop at Amazon because I have a degree of trust in Prime items and I've never personally had a painful experience returning something. My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)

RandallBrown 6y ago
I ordered a small food scale to replace one I thought I had lost in a move. Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in. I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them. Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.
- s5300 6y ago
  I accidentally ordered $200 worth of items through prime pantry, 95% non-perishables (including 24pk Monster, Solo cups, paper plates/bowls) to my home in the MidWest instead of where I was at on the West Coast. 2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice) Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.
cortesoft 6y ago
I use the "return at Kohl's" option for amazon items, and it has been super easy. Don't even have to box the item up.

aaron32311 6y ago

Anecdotally I got some great recommendations to gym equipment on Twitter. I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.

tayo42 6y ago

> reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing. It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many. In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice. I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes

BalinKing 6y ago
> everyone repeating the same thing Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?
- rei0 6y ago
  I think it's called "echo chamber".
  - tayo42 6y ago
    yes there it is, though the other is accurate too
Threeve303 6y ago
> I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".
lame-robot-hoax 6y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon. This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them. No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.

abhinavsharma 6y ago

Hi, and thanks for the feedback! I'm the original author of that post. > Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"? Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be. We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice. I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability. Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!