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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

Generally I'd say product reviews are one of those ideas like passwords that work but don't survive introduction to the general public and mass use. The problems of authenticity are obvious, but I've also noticed that people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier. And why wouldn't they be? A colleague tells you this e.g. monitor is perfect for your line of work so you get it and find it also good. No fuss, nothing nerve wracking, no time wasted. Compared with reading through dozens of reviews that even when authentic raise good points that are maybe entirely irrelevant to you.

I try to buy stuff in shops now. It's more expensive only if my time spent on reading reviews is free. And these days it's not even more expensive to buy in real shops anyway.

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In addition, reviews are a prime example of sub-optimal communication by us. A lot of people don't write reviews for others but for themselves and thus, many of them are just unhelpful to me.

"Great restaurant, food was lovely. price is OK!" - Well, what was great about the restaurant. What is an "OK" price? Is it 5€ or 30€? You didn't probably order the entire menu, so what did you order? What did you like about your order?

>people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier.

The problem is that the vast majority of my non-grocery items are not purchased by my friends & colleagues so word-of-mouth information isn't available. E.g. I buy stuff like hi-end camera gear, woodworking tools, audio equipment. Even more common items like books don't work because my friends don't read the same type of books I do.

Even your example of a computer monitor doesn't work in my situation. About 15 years ago, I wanted a large 30" monitor but none of my friends had that so I have to research on my own. Likewise, they also can't depend on my experience with computer monitors because a big external 30" monitor is never something they'd need because they just use the builtin laptop screen.

A lot of times word-of-mouth works great for recommending local restaurants or grocery items such as the Costco brand of paper towels and olive oil being good buys. For all other items that your social circle doesn't buy, you have to research external information sources.

That's true of course, but I guess my point is it's better if you have it. I realized this since I know a lot of illustrators, and when I first started seeing them at work I saw a lot of them have the same setup: Macbooks, EIZO monitors, Wacoms etc. At first I thought it was a cult and group think, but eventually I realized they save a lot of time on figuring out what to get. There are probably better things than what they have, but what they have works good enough and that's fine.

There's a risk to this as well, though - marketing becoming more important than quality, and difficulty for new products to make it into the market means stifling of innovation, which can lead to semi-monopolies. In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine, but Apple are a bit more dubious.

> In the case of Eizo and Wacom it's probably fine

I can quickly name up their primary competitors in this space, and for some reason (note: definitely anecdotal) I do see that for them, for the last ~5 years they are now being fiercely competed from both budget and professional angles.

> but Apple are a bit more dubious.

Me too. While Apple is definitely stumbling right now, unlike the previous two there is no serious competition for Apple. While Windows might be fine on a desktop that was built for-spec by specialty builders (and Linux render farms!), laptops are definitely still subpar even for the best attempts (like Acer's D series and Microsoft's Surface laptops). For iPad, I can say that Microsoft and Samsung are only the somewhat competent here, especially that stock Android is still atrocious when it comes to tablet factors, and ChromeOS still generally uses Android apps.

Listen to me, consider this an "online review".

Just buy a Dell (for the money) or Thinkpad (for longevity) laptop. I haven't had a problem installing a Debian-derived distro on either brand since 2007 or so. Wifi, external monitors, printing, sleep, everything just works.

I have heard people have trouble with bluetooth and with fingerprint readers, but I don't use them so I cannot comment.

... I hope that you have read the thread and knew that this is for those in arts and media production, right? While large companies (like Disney) do have Linux render farms, and I am satisfied with Krita and Blender, most people do use Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere and cannot switch due to network effects?

The other risk here is that you'll have '100 million' dollar company that makes a good product, and it gets bought up by one of those multi billion dollar groups designed to suck every bit of profit out of companies like it. The product and support will quickly turn to trash, but peoples momentum will allow the new parent to profit handsomely off the transaction.

Simply put, every single product a company puts out needs subjected to review, and those same products need checked on to ensure the manufacture isn't starting to skimp and change the exact same model number as time goes on.

a great example is doc martens, and then infuriatinly once we'd all jumped ship to solovair they went the same way

Stop trying to make no passwords happen. It won't happen

It can happen, I've seen many Lightning Network applications that do account creation/login and identity verification using LN wallets/nodes/etc.

I wouldn't consider those solutions passwords in the traditional sense.

Public key authentication would be a great replacement for most passwords.

Email a login link or temp pw. Passwords gone.

Depends on how often you’ll be logging in and out though

I share accounts (legally) with friends and my wife. How are we going to log in separately?

Forward the email ;-)

Or just add an extra email to the account

Forwarding the email is not a good solution. I don’t want to be checking emails at all times just because someone wants to login somewhere.

Adding an extra email account is not always possible. The option is not provided.

Maybe I'm missing something. You're just replacing the "password" by asking the user to login their email. It doesn't move us any closer to a "no password" world, unless there is also a proposal on how to make email password-less?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

How do you login to your email?

Magic text message with an 8-digit code. ;-)

For anyone thinking about it: Please don't make it happen.

What if you are logging into something on a device that doesn't have your email on it? So called magic links are an absolute nightmare.

Ok...so on to more inconvenient methods? Medium tried it. A real drag.

The only reason for (consumer) passwords you have to remember is lack of an accepted good universal id in general. Here in Sweden it's provided by the banks and has a 94% share of smartphone users, if you look east you have other bigger markets with similar stats. Most passwords already have disappeared or are disappearing, the laggard cases will catch up too, I'd love a similar one for my "work persona".

It sort of has happened for Apple users.

For all sites whenever you signup for a website a random password is generated. And then when you re-visit the site you use FaceID/TouchID to automatically pre-populate the password. At that point it really isn't a password in the traditional sense.

And for an increasing number of sites it bypasses this step entirely and just lets me use FaceID/TouchID.

Why single out apple? This is the experience for anyone who uses a modern password manager

Most people don’t and won’t change if change requires effort. In contrast by making a password manager functionality the default on Mac/iOS, Apple carries the average user into better security.

  > really isn't a password in the traditional sense.

Can it be sniffed out with XSS? Can it be sniffed out over the wire on the university Mitm'd network? Can it be stored on the server in plain text?

The user experience might have changed, but many of the security aspects have not.

I'm pretty sure that poor passwords ("password1!") and password reuse combined dwarf basically all other password-related security issues, thus getting users to use a randomly generated password on every website is a magnitude of order more secure.

On top of that, in cases of XSS or a MiTM you've probably already lost and no password alternative will help you.

Webauthn is secure even in the case of XSS and Mitm, in the sense that the attackers still cannot access the credentials without user intervention. It tool a long time to convince me, too.

https://webauthn.me/introduction

True but mostly meaningless. XSS and MiTM allow attackers to take over and pretend to be the user after a legit user logs in. The attacker cannot store the credentials and use them later, but they have full access in the moment.

"But people will never let their on-prem servers go into an obscure, shared Cloud".

Password reset is almost as good as no passwords but with the added benefit of MFA.

This is a big reason I think influencer marketing is picking up steam. Everyone knows that reviews and SEO can be gamed, with little to no consequence. If an influencer tells you something is good, at least their reputation is on the line. If they continually sell out, they kill the golden goose.

So, as dumb as it sounds, influencer reviews are higher signal to me than typical online reviews.

> at least their reputation is on the line

I don't think it is though, the sort of people who follow influencers generally aren't blessed with the greatest critical thinking skills.

Also most of them are willing to sell themselves out for $200 in a moment

What makes you say that? We are all followers (how do you think we learned from our teachers?). We all choose what sources to trust implicitly and which to question, and most of us don't use logic-based methods for making that choice.

I'm sure that wasn't just you repeating a statement you've heard before without carefully considering it.

I will read online reviews over the salesman's bs any day. So many bad experiences, I don't trust them no more.

> I try to buy stuff in shops now.

Plus, it's better for your local economy -- your friends and neighbors.

> one of those ideas like passwords that work but don't survive introduction to the general public and mass use

What do you mean? Have I missed something?

The median user's password is guessable, reused across dozens of sites, and likely to be on multiple data dump lists.

Just yesterday I had the itch to watch through Trigun.

I was floored when I realized that it was $40 on Amazon Video (streaming), but $22 if I purchase the DVD.

Amazon's costs are __LESS__ for the streaming media than for the company/people selling the physical DVD. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to properly describe that behavior.

If companies are charging premiums for services that cost them less to run, I'm damned well going to be buying in person more often.

Keep an eye out in general. Streaming is not always a deal. Physical media is quite often cheaper, and if you know how to rip, much more convenient as a result because you can get a DRM-freed copy.

Streaming does seem to be slowly getting higher quality, better codecs are probably helping, but I've still noticed there are times when a good DVD encode will still beat an "HD" stream, because even if the "HD" stream has a "higher resolution" the DVD can afford a higher enough bitrate to even compensate for its now quite-out-of-date codec. Streaming companies are still motivated to trim their stream quality as far as the customer will bear, and your fellow customers will bear quite a lot, it turns out. And if you can get a bluray it'll certainly beat any stream anyone will serve you. I haven't compared many 1080 Blurays to 4K streams, I think I've only gotten to do it twice, but the 1080 Bluray won handily both times. (I don't have a 4k bluray player.)

There are a whole lot of other factors that go into a price besides the cost of the good.

The only factor that would make streaming more expensive is that people are willing to pay the price.

I'm not. That was my point.

You're right, ots called greed

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