It has got to the point where any time someone posts something that seems to too clearly show a brand name or speaks too highly of a product I suspect its the PR people at work and I downvote it.
The new way: making sure that 95% of the snowboarding videos you see are subliminally designed to sell you a snowboard (the guy riding the competitors snowboard goes slower and crashes... the guy riding your company’s snowboard wins the race and his girlfriend looks like a supermodel)
I think eventually we will pine for the old way. Already you can’t get useful reviews anymore because all of the “comparison” searches are run by manufacturer mouthpieces.
Absolutely. A lot of reviews these days from google results read like someone who has only ever read the feature list from the marketing page. There is a bit of a search engine hack where you just put "reddit" after any search and it brings up fairly real results for now.
If the third category can be used to construct a narrative about something that is a deal-breaker, then that's the information I'm looking for. Of course, it has to be taken in context of the competitors.
My expectation is that the best products have some type (I) and type (II) bad reviews, but no type (III). Almost as good is something with type (III) that are about something that either doesn't matter to me or is actually a positive from my perspective.