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Comment by jamescun | Hacker News Reader

What you'll find difficult is establishing trust.

I have no reason to believe your review site is a shill for another company, but I have no reason not to believe that either. It was recently revealed that Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor and now owner of PrivateInternetAccess and ExpressVPN, are doing this.

The first step would be clearly identifying ownership and benefactors.

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I fully agree; we need to be more transparent about our process, intentions, and ownership. We'll work on that.

Here is a good Reddit post about the fake reviews from Kape Technologies: https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/r160ll/spottin...

And yet ExpressVPN is rated 5th on your site. A reputable review site would have ExpressVPN and NordVPN rated 0.0, or even not rated at all and shoved into a separate section, "VPNs to Avoid."

We're working on improving the site and the data quality. Keep in mind that it's still an MVP.

...but you are a review site... The data quality is your MVP.

This.

Why to avoid?

It's curious that your #1 listed VPN NordVPN has a pretty tasty affiliate program but I can't see Mullvad (no affiliate program) on your front page at all in spite of it being most peoples' favorite ;-)

I tried to start a site similar to this one in the past. I gave up in the end because honesty and $$$ just wouldn't mix. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't square this circle. Economically I think it doesn't even work on a theoretical basis. The mullvad of most industries just wouldn't have affiliate programs whereas the scummy companies would have the best affiliate programs.

Maybe it's a recent change, but I typed in mullvad and got this:

https://seekvpn.com/review/mullvad-vpn?keyword=mullvad

It has a fairly high rating overall.

Youtubers are still promoting ExpressVPN, unfortunately.

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