
Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews? - doglet
In general, are you losing trust in online reviews because of incentives, including Amazon&#x27;s affiliate program?
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DizzyDoo
Ignoring 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?

~~~
doglet
> 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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_independence)
I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR
relating to this topic

~~~
impostervt
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.

------
Exmoor
In 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.

~~~
Exmoor
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.

