4 ms·
Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product categor
by mc32 5y ago
Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues:
1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.)
2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge.
3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands competing with you, the time demand may be overwhelming and not worth it.
4. If you are a trusted reviewer or site, you will get economic pressure to review a particular thing or brand you may not like very much but the money may be good. So you will begin to experience conflicts of interest.
5. If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers.
7. Some things are timeless (a pipewrench, let's say) and some are seasonal (consumer electronics, toys, etc). The former deserves a through review but the latter doesn't deserve as much but it may get the bulk of interest due to seasonal demand). Does it really matter if the latter's latest iteration has 2% increased battery life to discuss?
I'm sure there is a lot I didn't think of. But it's a doomed category, unless people are willing to pay for professional reviews (Consumer Reports types and other independents).
- chongli 5y agoIf reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby. So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aquarium gear and coffee machines, grinders, etc. On the other hand, nobody does plumbing or HVAC as a hobby (that I know of) so it's very difficult to find high quality reviews of water softeners or furnaces. It takes a very special rare sort of person who would install these things just to review them. The closest thing I could find was this video [1] on a DIY water filtration system by an RV/off the grid type hobbyist (from what I can tell). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8
- treis 5y agoPeople like to talk about their work too. There's plenty of those sort of reviews out there. Mostly on reddit because like others have mentioned organic search results are completely gamed.
- eatonphil 5y agoI pay for Consumer Reports. I'd encourage more people to too. I don't trust it completely but it's a good companion to manual searches on Reddit/HN/car forums, etc.
- aemreunal 5y agoSomeone pointed out yesterday on that other search thread that [most?] libraries provide free access to Consumer Reports through a membership. I just looked at the San Francisco Public Library and it does indeed give me access to the magazine and a searchable database.
- giantrobot 5y ago> Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues Review sites suffer from a singular problem. They are overwhelmingly SEO spam content farms. People go find some product niche and pay some Fivvver/whatever people to write literally fake reviews of products. Because they're pulling all the SEO tricks and are in a niche category they shoot to the top of search results for that niche. Their reviews sound realistic and viable but they're pure fantasy. The writers never touch the products being reviewed. Many times they'll pull details from Amazon listings (including factual errors) and even other "review" sites. Once they get established in their niche they'll accept paid placement from product manufacturers without marking it as such. A single scammer might own dozens of these sites, even supposedly competing ones.
- sanxiyn 5y agoOne way out is to grow a community of enthusiastic reviewers. LibraryThing succeeded for book reviews. LibraryThing book reviews are better because LibraryThing caters to bookworms.
- wyclif 5y agoGoodreads also has a community of enthusiastic reviewers, but because Amazon owns it I'm afraid they don't have much incentive to improve the site or change anything.
- Kerrick 5y agoWhile I agree with everything you said in general, Ken Rockwell seems to buck the trend for photography gear, especially lenses.