In general, are you losing trust in online reviews because of incentives, including Amazon's affiliate program?
Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
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Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#3Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this has happened plenty in the past, I wonder if Amazon has cracked down on that behaviour? Even so, that it has happened so frequently in the past doesn't help since we're talking about 'losing trust'.) These practices have hurt much more than their affiliate program has, in my view.
My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#4In general, the in-depth review sites that I tend to go to for reviews seem to be fairly trustworthy. One thing working in their favor, is that they tend to review many similar products and could collect referral commissions on most or all of the products they review, so there is reduced incentive to give a positive review of a bad product.
There are, however, two types of sites benefiting from referrals that I have a complete lack of trust in. The first is tech news sites (Gizmodo, for example) that feature posts about sales on specific items. Sometimes these are actually good deals on good products, but often a little research indicates that the price and/or the product are nothing special and they're just trying to drum up referral bucks. Often times these sites still post actual reviews worthy of reading, but I definitely will not depend solely on that one review.
The category of sites that I wish I could just erase from the internet is the SEO blogs that seem to exist for just about anything these days. Often times these purport to be review sites, but a little digging reveals they're likely just people regurgitating information from manufacturers and making recommendations for products they've never actually used. For popular product categories, I often have to sort through pages of search results to find a page that's not just some low-effort SEO blog. I shudder to think about how many consumers may be misled by these sites and make poor choices because of them.
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#5In general, the in-depth review sites that I tend to go to for reviews seem to be fairly trustworthy. One thing working in their favor, is that they tend to review many similar products and could collect referral commissions on most or all of the products they review, so there is reduced incentive to give a positive review of a bad product. There are, however, two types of sites benefiting from referrals that I have…
A close relative of the low-effort SEO blog is the low-effort YouTube review. I'm not speaking of the dude unboxing something in their kitchen, but the videos that just feature screenshots from the product's website while somebody just reads the features from the same website. Thankfully these are typically pretty transparently useless, but I do wish they would disappear altogether.
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#6In general, the in-depth review sites that I tend to go to for reviews seem to be fairly trustworthy. One thing working in their favor, is that they tend to review many similar products and could collect referral commissions on most or all of the products they review, so there is reduced incentive to give a positive review of a bad product. There are, however, two types of sites benefiting from referrals that I have…
I too share your logic behind placing more trust in sites that go in-depth and review across all the brands, as opposed to focusing extra attention in only one or a couple.
Regarding SEO blogs, I have seen a lot of "review rewrite" jobs posted on a freelancing site, indicating there is a market for this kind of devaluing behavior (worse than not adding value, this actually is a net-negative on society, where costs are externalized)
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#7Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this…
> If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?
The Which magazine sounds like Consumer Reports, who purports to have no interest outside of the consumer's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_ind... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#8Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this…
> If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go? The Which magazine sounds like Consumer Reports, who purports to have no interest outside of the consumer's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_ind... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic
I purchased a subscription to CR. I trust their reviews, but they’re very limited. I want a new lawn mower, but their top rated mower isn’t available any more.
Re: Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
#9Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this…
In Germany, there's Stiftung Warentest ("Product Test Foundation"), with the best domain: https://www.test.de :-D
They are a non-profit with a 55-year history, a stellar reputation and a track record of calling out any issues found. Their test results are broken down in a detailed way, and they have useful graphs like price vs rating. They actually buy their products instead of taking prototypes or commerical samples. They report the real-world, online consumer prices. Their own prices are reasonable (8€/month for all access, incl. PDF downloads).
Washing machine tests are actually one of their staples. See https://youtu.be/6Oke76VZiRw?t=48 (0:48 long term testing, 1:04: standardized lab prepared detergent, 1:56 standardized test clothing and loading schema, 2:15 waste water analysis, 2:36 analysis of cleaned cloth via light reflection, 2:49 power/water usage, 3:31 acoustic test lab, 4:05 useability)