Kape Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, PIA, Zenmate, and VPN “Review” Sites

Yeah, I custom wrote a lot of the NLP years ago. It was adapted from my Master's thesis predicting box office sales using sentiment analysis on twitter data (and a few other variables like number of theaters it plays in). Back then, nothing out of the box was accurate enough to my liking and I had to custom write a lot of stuff to analyze it and it's pretty web hosting specific for understanding context. I honestly haven't tested much on newest sentiment analysis stuff available. I wonder how accurate it would be. But the biggest problem I am finding is that there is less data on Twitter. Not sure if that's fewer people talking about these companies or just lower Twitter volume in general.

For hosting, it's pretty clear based on who they put at the top and top few rankings. Is it one of the cheap, high affiliate hosts? Fake. Problem is, people unfamiliar with the space might not be aware of it. For people who know, web hosting reviews are generally crap.

As far as rating sentences of bullshit review sites. How do you think that would work and how would you train such a system? I'm worried about the non-paid training, where might one get enough sample data to show 'normal' vs 'paid'?

Honestly I don't see a 5 star rating as being euphoric/excited about the product.

The 5 stars are basically baseline if the product is good enough for the price it's sold at. Giving anything besides a 5 star is a massive FU to the vendor, as dropping below 4 is basically a death sentence for the listing. That can be warranted for sure, but only if there was something very wrong.

The biggest issue I'd see with your approach is how hard it's going to be to separate bots talking to each other from actual people writing these messages.

Most research on the matter seems to conclude that anything between 25 and 70% are written by bots.

The high range is because it's actually quite hard to confidently assess wherever a message is written by a human. Surprisingly not because it's hard to classify bots, but because people often write borderline incoherent messages too.

Yes and updated it, thanks!

I would assume the person mailing them cash is not sending it from their mailbox on their property, but instead a public access mailbox in a town or city.

If you’re worried about being actively followed by the feds and they’re tracking you drop that letter, you have much, much more to worry about than your VPN usage.

> Unless there are tons of people on that network who are using the same VPN as you, it would be trivial to figure out the endpoint.

This is why I hedged my statement with "could be". While it's unlikely that this other condition is met, it is possible.

In court precedent is an ip address doesn't equal a person.

It seems like a cartel can form without having a collective monopoly. It's the collusion that's problematic, not the combined percentage.

It'd be interesting to see a source for that although I don't doubt that similar things have happened. I'm just saying that such a rule would not just untangle Kape, but would also unravel most larger media companies.

Depending on how it would be written things like a youtuber reviewing a pixel phone or one TV show talking about a different TV show might be illegal.

Restricting speech is in general hard, what would be much easier is to require clear and obvious disclosure. Since journalistic ethics already requires that it should only require changes for dishonest actors.

Sure, but it'd be extremely hard to prove if that bias has penetrated that firewall or if it hasn't. I think the reason it has (mostly) worked for journalistic institutions is that it is a profession that are taught a set of ethics as a part of their education and it has a history of adhering to those ethics.

Proving a non-bias for what is your own actual financial interest seems almost impossible. I'm not saying it can't be done ever, but I would not want to have to argue either side of that.

I said this in a comment below but I think it is relevant here too:

Restricting speech is in general hard, what would be much easier is to require clear and obvious disclosure. Since journalistic ethics already requires that it should only require changes for dishonest actors.

EDIT: To clarify: those firewalls are often in the journalistic institutions currently but it becomes a whole other ballgame when something needs to be proven in court. The suggestion to make them legally mandated is where I think we run into problems.