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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this. Large parts of the review business doesn't seem to abide by common ethical standards. Paid adverts are deceptively presented as objective reviews in a myriad ways. Is it even legal?

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Nope not legal but the FTC/others are really bad at enforcing it. Look at all the brand “embassadors” out there promoting products on personal accounts and trying to hide their affiliation as much as possible.

Which makes it really hard for people who actually enjoy the products to talk about them. If I mention any brand name in my comments, it seems about 40%-50% of the time I'll get someone accusing me of being paid to mention the name. Word of mouth is being ruined by advertisers who don't know what word of mouth actually means.

To be fair, publishing something online is not quite the same as traditional word of mouth, which is shared between friends that know and trust each other. It's a lot harder to discern the biases and motives behind a post from an unknown person on the internet.

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

$ecretary of $tate ;)

I don't even understand why word of mouth would even be a thing when it comes to mattresses. People sleep differently and have different preferences when it comes to what they sleep on such that I can't see buying a mattress without first lying on it for a while.

I recently bought one of the newish high-tech foam brands (not saying which one so no one accuses me of shilling), but only after going into one of their showrooms and spending a couple of hours testing out the various options.

The only thing I looked at reviews to determine was what the return process was like, and for that you really need to look for user-generated content sites like Yelp rather than people with their own review sites since the return process for a demo model won't be representative.

They were doing this before the internet - giving stuff free to beautiful people to promote.

cf. "The FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking", https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

Nope. A recent expose in the NYT on "teacher-ambassadors" will hopefully get this issue (paid but undisclosed reviews) on the FTC's radar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/technology/silicon-valley...

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