251–260 of 334 posts
What are some solid sources of product reviews these days, where the reviewers are both competent and unbiased? I will occasionally go to sweethome or wirecutter, but I'm never sure if I'm just reading a well hidden PR piece from a sponsor or if this is their actual opinion.
Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I…
I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before. I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and…
Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.
Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]
[0] https://canopy.co
[1] https://canopy.co/aboutEarlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon kind of audits and reviews products, or at least has an official program for sellers to solicit user reviews: it's called Amazon Vine [0]. For the reviewers (the "Vine Voices"), it looks like this: on a regular basis, you can choose a product to review (based on your past reviews, purchasing history etc., maybe - they don't disclose how that works), and Amazon sends the product to you. Within one month, you ha…
I don’t ever want to read any reviews by someone who gets free product, so if that’s how vine works, it’s broken by design.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: First, he covered that by saying searching by brand still had his "real" search results on page 2. Second, maybe you're super young, but Amazon used to be "good stuff", not just "hey, let's compete with eBay, on their level." What if you actually don't know the difference between "good" arrows and "bad" arrows? It used to be that Amazon had already made that call for you. Amazon used to be the place you b…
> Their prices are so mercurial I was discussing a barbell set with my trainer and by the time I got around to buy it next morning it doubled in price. Came back down in a week. WTF.
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While this could be seen as off topic, I don’t think it is: I strongly recommend purchasing that bike light from your local bike shop. If you have a local bike shop, it is likely struggling. But it is also likely that the lights they have on offer there are specifically selected for their utility, particularly their utility in your locale. Perhaps it will be a few dollars more than Amazon, but you will reap the benef…
Depends on the shop, I guess. My local bike shop carries quite a lot of cheap garbage too, but at high markup. I also have trust issues with many such shops. I know some where at least one person working there seems competent, but in most I've been, I get the distinct vibe of employees being domain-clueless salesmen paid to push things (similar to what's typical in electronics/home appliance stores).
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It's really baffling to me how despite being one of the largest companies in the world and being centered around e-commerce Amazon doesn't do anything about these issues weakening their core product. I say "do nothing" not "fail to stop" because I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon does anything at all to prevent or discourage these behaviors. I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it…
I don't think it's baffling at all. Facebook is the largest social media company, and what do they do to try to stop all of the propaganda, troll factories and hateful things going on there? Naught. They know that they are the largest company and therefore doesn't have to do anything as long as their position stays the same. Which it seems to be doing. Yes, there are people leaving the platform but where do they go?…
I now check fakespot before every Amazon purchase.
There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.
This is a fascinating construction. To me, it makes perfect sense (and reality seems to be heavily underscoring this perspective) but I feel it challenges some profound assumptions very commonly held by Western culture, about how the world works.
If markets replace normal transactions with the optimal ways to cheat people, as a natural consequence of what markets are, how can we disrupt that phenomenon and replace markets with something else that selects for other values?