dawalker

lmao true, already seen a few companies gunning for the YouTube for AI generated videos mantel so we'll see how it goes

A couple of ways from my understanding. We have different focuses in our UX and UI as we, for example, feature reviews directly next to the product and show products 1 at a time instead of a listing view. We also place more emphasis on having a semantic search where you learn about the products being offered and how they're relevant to your specific situation instead of a keyword based search. From a business standpoint, we're also affiliates of Amazon and Stylevana while Looria isn't.

That's crazy, going to be really interesting once this ramps up/if it starts getting good traffic.

Interesting, haven't seen one of those yet. With public video+audio models getting much better that will only get way worse over time. Excited to see what YT/Google decides to do about it.

Fair. The best solution we've seen is building the product in some way where it's somewhat defensible, either through data, features that bigger players won't build, etc. and then using a subscription based model if users are willing to pay for that and value the searches high enough or using an ads based model if you're optimizing for traffic rather than pure value on each search.

Great question. This would be a bigger issue if we were only aggregating results and summarizing them, but because we both aggregate and show (in our opinion) the highest credibility reviews from YouTubers (and other sources like blogs once we add them), our idea is that while the general mass opinion can be shifted through campaigns like that, the top end of the spectrum should hopefully still remain pure.

If on the other hand the top end of the spectrum is corrupted, then hopefully the masses can compensate for that. If both are corrupted and all of the data sources available are, then it really comes down to our ability to filter out LLM or promoted content which comes down to how well they can hide it. AI detection tools have been scaling alongside models, so it's also a question if that will continue over time. We'll think of some more advanced things if that becomes a bigger issue for us :)

At the end of the day, if a company can do a coordinated advertising campaign across the internet over months to block out any negative opinion, it's a big deal for both us and the social media/data sources we pull from that's going to be a challenge we have to deal with.

The top comment on that clip scores home that point. While there's no way to verify that, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more than we realize. That being said and to play devils advocate - if all of them are already astroturfed with some people discovering that, then how much do most people care about it?

Great points, not sure those are fixable either. It definitely has some advantages from those same things in some respects, but monetizing reddit outside of ads (i.e. ecommerce like tiktok/instagram) because of these things is going to be a challenge for sure.

Sorry that happened :( What were you searching for? We'll look into it.

Thanks! We just watched your review together in the living room, and we really appreciate your thoughts+detailed feedback. The list of items is an interesting idea that we'll think about how to fit into the ux. Comparisons is definitely something we want to add later down the line as well.

The idea of restaurants, like you mentioned, would be really great to have. It's not an immediate priority, but once we get Tiktok/short form videos on the site and integrate it well, it'd be really exciting to make and use.

That's what I've heard as well. Also, the lag to when you actually get paid is super painful.

Also curious - how do you think about affiliates as someone who runs an ecommerce site? Are there any reservations about whether services like us take search traffic or ads revenue?

For sure! We'll work on that in the next couple of updates, it's been on our minds for a while.

Great point. While reddit may be astroturfed, all it takes is one good comment.

we'll do our best :)

would love to say that it was a gift from sama, but he hasn't blessed us :(

Is the implication here that you need to charge and users will leave you once you do? If you can make a product that's significantly better, then you should be able to charge. The thing I'd note for affiliate marketing as a business model is that for it to generate significant revenue, you need to have a lot of traffic while other business models can generate that much faster (subscriptions) or make you money based off of that traffic (ads) instead of how many products are purchased.

They're getting smarter for sure, maybe some shadow marketing going on with the IPO too lol

lol true, the state of youtube ads is pretty bad nowadays (although the raid shadow legends spam is gone from my feed now). Just places more emphasis on how much people trust the individual channel.

Thanks! Super interesting how many different approaches there are to this problem. Definitely encountered these challenges, and we think there's solutions to them eventually that we have to build towards. I'll drop a message sometime, would love to chat :)

Very true. It's interesting how Reddit has maintained a relatively high trust within most people though. It's also worth noting that while this is happening, there aren't many other places that most people go to where the site is mainly text-based and there is a higher level of trust that I know of. Personally, I'd trust Reddit over a random blog from a Google search, but that isn't a high bar.

All of that being said, I think this will be a much bigger problem with misinformation generally on all of the internet as AI gets better, especially considering the election later this year.

Thanks, we really appreciate it! This is something we've been thinking about too. One of the things that we've noticed is that video reviews have a lot more effect on us than almost all text reviews, which are harder to fake (for now). We're thinking that letting people upload their own video reviews will help solve this problem as long as we can detect video deepfakes, but that's definitely not a complete solution (like you said though, not sure anything is).

Thanks and makes sense. Supplements+general health and beauty will probably be one of the first things that get added outside of skincare. Would be interested in seeing the reviews as well for those considering how supplements are sold+regulated.