I have no reason to believe your review site is a shill for another company, but I have no reason not to believe that either. It was recently revealed that Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor and now owner of PrivateInternetAccess and ExpressVPN, are doing this.
The first step would be clearly identifying ownership and benefactors.
It's curious that your #1 listed VPN NordVPN has a pretty tasty affiliate program but I can't see Mullvad (no affiliate program) on your front page at all in spite of it being most peoples' favorite ;-)
I tried to start a site similar to this one in the past. I gave up in the end because honesty and $$$ just wouldn't mix. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't square this circle. Economically I think it doesn't even work on a theoretical basis. The mullvad of most industries just wouldn't have affiliate programs whereas the scummy companies would have the best affiliate programs.
And yet ExpressVPN is rated 5th on your site. A reputable review site would have ExpressVPN and NordVPN rated 0.0, or even not rated at all and shoved into a separate section, "VPNs to Avoid."
Just one data point, but the "No, I'm not interested in joining a fun community or a chance to win an awesome VPN" text on the solicitation for my email after ~20 seconds on the site was enough to get me to leave. I am currently unhappy with my VPN and shopping for a new one when my annual subscription ends early next month.
VPNs are a mess. It's becoming a very commercial market, and companies are bought up by less reputable and bigger ones, making it hard to know what to trust.
The biggest pain points when researching a good VPN are:
- Sponsored content / Ads
- Fake reviews
- It takes time
- Inconsistent metrics and info across sites
To make finding a good VPN even easier, we've aggregated over 500 online reviews, 3k Reddit posts, 4k HackerNews posts, and 400 Youtube videos.
## How it works
Using GPT-3 and BERT, we've built a service that collects VPN reviews from all over the web, filters and aggregates them, and presents the summarized results in a short and understandable form.
## What's next?
We're constantly improving SeekVPN and will soon add new features like:
- Building a community for VPN enthusiasts that helps each other
- Running statistical analysis to spot discrepancies and contradictions among reviews and filter out fake reviews
- Increase catalog and add more filters
- Improve summaries (pros and cons style)
We eventually plan to do our analysis for other categories of SaaS products. It should become the Rotten-Tomatoes for software products.
Let us know what you think! What should we add or improve?
Wirecutter is a great resource, and we'll soon include their lists for our analysis. But most people visit 5 different websites and spend many hours doing research before they buy a product.
Our goal is to build a service that gives you a holistic view about what the internet thinks of products.
Again, garbage in, garbage out - how is rampant astroturfing and review fraud taken into account?
Edit: the site highly ranks the ones I see pushed on YouTube, so I’m guessing this is just “how often is this vendor referenced” and not “how quality is the vendor”.
Agreed, aggregated reviews are not helpful when you can't trust the source. For example, I just looked at the NordVPN page and all three of the highlighted YouTube reviews are pushing the NordVPN affiliate link in their description. Can I really trust these YouTube reviews when the creators are getting paid for each referral?
The way I see this going is that a bunch of people are writing VPN reviews because these companies pay high commissions. This site is going to aggregate these untrustworthy reviews, and also try to earn a commission in the future. As the end user, I don't see the value here, because I don't trust anyone in the process.
Disagree that specific forums are more trustworthy than others. To me, a trustworthy source is a known entity that tests themselves and keep a track record of accurate reviews. For specific forums, keeping track of users that post honest reviews would be a good way to start.
How do you figure either HN or Reddit (anonymous, unverified accounts) are trustworthy when there’s money to be made by astroturfing? The incentives are stacked against you.
How do you propose someone actually review VPN services? All of them work, have many countries available as egress points, and are fast enough.
The only actual differentiation is in attributes that are impossible to measure from the outside: Do they log accesses? Make logs available to governments? Sell it to data brokers for advertising purposes?
That's pretty much the only difference between good and bad providers, and there's no way to tell, so in-depth reviews are an impossible task.
Maybe remember your audience here and drop marketing bullshit like that. If you're using specific techniques, great, tell us. But don't use hand wavy marketing buzzwords.
Haven’t been on the website for one minute and you already shoved a popup in my face asking for my email. The options are “submit” or “No, I'm not interested in joining a fun community or a chance to win an awesome VPN”.
If you’re going to be as annoying and manipulative as every other scammy website out there, why should we trust you? My reaction was to close the page. Considering you’re posting this to HN, I doubt I’m in the minority.
The #1 result NordVPN had servers hacked to root and then attempted to covered up the huge security breach rather than disclose it. [1] Not to mention their concealed relationship with Tesonet, a shadowy data mining company. On top of that, key personnel of Tesonet (including the CEO) are stationed in Lithuania, which has a "cozy" relationship with the CIA, which extends as far as knowingly hosting rendition sites there.
Isn't this an immediate disqualification of the site's methodology?
I thought the general consensus was that the only VPN worth a damn was Mullvad?
I'm not interested in a review aggregator. Individual reviews are the problem in the first place. What I want is someone to have a set of criteria and then rate the services individually based on that criteria.
Also, your family of review sites are for VPNs, backpacks and knives. This sounds like a writing prompt.
Reminder that if you only need 1 specific location you need to appear in, you can get a VPS for less than a monthly VPN subscription.
These VPS, while still distinguishable from normal residential connnections, are more likely to pass filters etc, it won't also trip up IP-change-detection mechanisms as you'll get an stable IP address.
Rotten Tomatoes works because (1) its audience generally trusts some (maybe even most) of the reviewers, and (2) some movies are good. I don't see how Rotten Tomatoes for VPNs can work.
They're doing something fishy with that "sorted by adjusted score."
If it sorted by tomato-meter value instead, the esteemed classics would rise to the top, and the entries you took issue with wouldn't even crack the top 50.
Whatever "adjustment" they are doing seems to strongly favor recency.
I get the impression that VPNs massively overcharge for what they are; every YouTube video that is even moderately mainstream is sponsored by some sort of VPN provider. Is the idea behind choosing this industry in particular to charge a referral and suck away some of their sweet, sweet profit for yourself? Seems like a good idea.
Take a look at mullvad. There's no real way of knowing if they're telling the truth, but I think the fact the have no affiliate program or even advertising and don't collect your email address is a good thing.
(They give you a token, you send them cash or use a credit card to add money to the token, you input the token in the app.)
How do I pick a VPN from this website? Let's say I go with the #1 Trending VPN, it scores very well, but the Reddit threads are negative. The "Reviews by Topic" are then suspiciously almost all positive. Do you audit the reviews?
To make it easier for people to pick a VPN, we plan to add lists for Top X vpns for absolute security, top ones for privacy, top ones for reliability.
About the reviews:
We collect the reviews per topic by doing a web search. Unfortunately, many VPN reviews are bought and paid for, so we need to improve the collection, filtering, and ranking of the reviews. We did this for other products, but VPNs seem to be a very tricky category.
I'll save you, and everybody else, the time, and just say that Mullvad is the best VPN currently available, and the day they get inevitably bought out will be a sad day. But until then, they beat all the competition hands down easily.
Avoid ExpressVPN & NordVPN because of problems with support and shady practices. I suggest you delete these two from your list and/or show prominent warnings.
I currently use SurfShark which works well for me.
March 5, 2018: Hacker gets root access and key material on a NordVPN server.
404 days after hack, NordVPN finally discovers server is compromised
594 days after hack, a twitter user boasts of experiments with NordVPN private key material that had "been floating around mostly unnoticed"
595 days after hack: NordVPN finally acknowledges they were breached. Apology hammers on two themes, "it's not our fault we had no way to restrict access to that server" and "you should still trust us because we confirmed this guy didn't do many of the awful things we allowed him the capability to do"
That's a whole year of running a compromised server, and 27 whole weeks of cover-up between discovering the breach and getting called out on twitter.
Wow... the immediate email nag is pretty catastrophically bad already, but then your "top" VPNs are... Nord? ProtonVPN? I'm not here to point fingers or assign blame, but I've gone through a fair handful of VPNs and I can tell you firsthand that those are faaaaaar from the best options, especially if you're trying to get the most out of your service. Mullvad and Azire are head-and-shoulders above anything I see on the top. Kinda disappointed.
Edit: Also, your "about" page is surprisingly non-informative.
Are you going to disable or reweight user scores when they dunk on a VPN you're in a strategic partnership with, in the name of "preventing review bombing by white supremacist alt-right trolls"? Because that'd be necessary in order to achieve feature parity with RT...
I notice that page 3 of 4 doesn't have a Next button to go to the next page - that seems wrong. In fact, the second-last page (even in a search result) doesn't have a Back button, but the last page does have a Previous button. Classic off-by-one error it looks like :)
Is there any info on parent companies? I don't know much about VPNs but I thought ownership was conentrated into just a few firms, and that some of them are owned by chinese companies - both of which could be useful information when making a decision.
I have no reason to believe your review site is a shill for another company, but I have no reason not to believe that either. It was recently revealed that Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor and now owner of PrivateInternetAccess and ExpressVPN, are doing this.
The first step would be clearly identifying ownership and benefactors.