Yes, it's about as useless as relying on Amazon reviews.
Affiliate marketing and SEO optimization have pretty much destroyed the usefulness of searching for product reviews.
I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something.
I wish Google had a way to "downvote" results. Sure they would have to mitigate artificial manipulation, but what they have currently doesn't work well.
> I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something
I wish this was true, but I think companies are fairly wise to this now. It wouldnt take much effort to add fake positive comments about a brand or product. The technical word for it is “astroturfing” [0].
In my opinion there is no good unbiased source for consumer product reviews, maybe Which? in the Uk would be an exception though I’m not too familiar with it.
At least on reddit it's a little easier to spot astroturfing, compared to Amazon reviews or Quora or other single-purpose sites. Just click on the profile of the user who wrote three paragraphs extolling the virtues of Brand® razors. Does it look like a man with a varied set of interests, or did it just spam reposts of funny memes for karma in large subs?
I'm sure astroturfers will soon adopt text generation en masse to create human-looking profiles and add credibility to their recommendations, but I don't believe that's standard yet.
This is not always that easy to notice, as some accounts will have huge gaps between promotional posts. A (very well known) company I briefly worked at had an entire department dedicated to 'web reputation management' – every employee there had dozens if not hundreds of aged reddit (and any other forum/site you can imagine) accounts registered from different locations (proxies) and using unique browser agents. They spent non-insignificant amounts of time (my impression was 10-20%) creating new accounts, karma whoring and posting/commenting on front page subs, until someone monitoring their target subreddits discovered anything even remotely related to the product they were promoting or the company itself.
A complete side note: the way these reputation managers aligned themselves almost perfectly with the company's official statements/position was what made me disillusioned with SpaceX and Musk in general, since I saw exactly the same things happening there
I would argue that Which is no longer a reliable source of unbiased information. They have affiliate links and the number of products tested for each category is suspiciously low.
Office chairs is one recent example where the one you are thinking of is not even listed, although a much cheaper version from the same company is cited as the best buy, (Herman Miller Verus Triflex).
Affiliate marketing and SEO optimization have pretty much destroyed the usefulness of searching for product reviews.
I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something.
I wish Google had a way to "downvote" results. Sure they would have to mitigate artificial manipulation, but what they have currently doesn't work well.