Ask HN: Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?
In general, are you losing trust in online reviews because of incentives, including Amazon's affiliate program?
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?
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... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic
They are a non-profit with a 55-year history, a stellar reputation and a track record of calling out any issues found. Their test results are broken down in a detailed way, and they have useful graphs like price vs rating. They actually buy their products instead of taking prototypes or commerical samples. They report the real-world, online consumer prices. Their own prices are reasonable (8€/month for all access, incl. PDF downloads).
Washing machine tests are actually one of their staples. See https://youtu.be/6Oke76VZiRw?t=48 (0:48 long term testing, 1:04: standardized lab prepared detergent, 1:56 standardized test clothing and loading schema, 2:15 waste water analysis, 2:36 analysis of cleaned cloth via light reflection, 2:49 power/water usage, 3:31 acoustic test lab, 4:05 useability)
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.
Regarding SEO blogs, I have seen a lot of "review rewrite" jobs posted on a freelancing site, indicating there is a market for this kind of devaluing behavior (worse than not adding value, this actually is a net-negative on society, where costs are externalized)