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by TheRealDunkirk 1512 days ago
What's the point? Product reviews are all gamed. Having been burned several times trying to use "reviews," and buying "the good stuff," only to have it break within a couple years, has soured me on any and all review systems or services (especially Consumer Reports), and convinced me that they only way to get REAL quality is to spend 2x-5x as much for something as the mainstream leader in the category. I believe that nothing you find at Reddit is in any way indicative of an honest review, but, hey, YMMV, TACMA, IANAL, etc., et. al.
1 comments
dmschulman 1512 days ago
Take the commentary on Reddit with a grain of skepticism and an understanding that people are speaking from a personal point of view, not an expert point of view. I treat the information I find via Reddit as a strong data point, but not the end of the search.
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technothrasher 1512 days ago
Right, the information on Reddit is more likely (but not guaranteed) to be authentic, not necessarily more likely to be correct.
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ludamad 1512 days ago
As well, authenticity can be investigated more than in reviews. If the person has a bunch of genuine seeming posts in other categories the risk of not being authentic is acceptably low for me (might seem like a bit much, but be burned by obscured ads enough times...)
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plonk 1512 days ago
If a tweet gets shared enough, its author gets approached by brands who want to pay them to add ads below the tweet. The same probably happens on Reddit, except it's even easier, because anyone can write a review, since the author of a popular post doesn't have a visibility advantage when posting a reply to it.

Just find some random users, and offer to pay them for a good recommendation on some "what is the best product to do X?" post.

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ludamad 1511 days ago
When the results degrade, I'll stop using this approach. This feels like an "argument from cynicism" given that there's a widespread feel this gives better results (and intuitively, this feels like microbartering and more as likely to get a reddit post about the phenomenon as acceptance, no not everyone will accept random $100 solicitations, and they're not influential enough for more)
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