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Comment by coolso | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying I should be giving them revenue for not being terribly open about the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission, and that furthermore, they deserve revenue from me for recommending products I spent about $500 or more in total for, only for them all to have significant flaws?

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I don't know what you are referring to but plenty of times they link directly to a retailers' website where they don't earn commissions.

It's also a reasonable way for them to make money that isn't:

1. Invasive tracking 2. Nasty ads 3. Direct subscriptions

Take your entitlement elsewhere.

> Take your entitlement elsewhere.

What are your thoughts regarding ad blocking? Specifically, do you also find people who use adblockers (I assume you don't use one of course) entitled?

Absolutely (I am one of them though I'm a member of or otherwise monetarily support publications I frequent).

The thing I hate is people who try to come up transparently disingenuous reasons for why they are entitled to not support organizations they extract value out of ("ehh I don't like your CSS so I'm going to not give you any money").

You are consuming the product. They have an asking price for the product (which includes affiliate links and ads).

If you don't like the asking price, that is 100% fine. Don't consume the product.

You seem to be wanting to decide what is a fair price for product that they produced and set a price for.

> Are you saying I should be giving them revenue for not being terribly open about the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission

It's right on the top of their front page:

"Wirecutter is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more."

You missed the key word "only" in my comment. Yes, they certainly make it clear they earn affiliate commission, which is fine. But what they do not make clear is the fact that they will totally ignore products that do not allow them to earn a commission, or at best, they will put them very far down on the list for some strange reason that doesn't really align with their explanation or lack thereof. This is very misleading.

Do you have hard evidence for the "only" portion? Based on their response to NextDesk, they do review items for which they don't get a commission:

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/our-response-to-nextdesk/

That's simply not true. I've bought products from Wirecutter recommendations that simply link a clean merchant url - no affiliate link.

Yikes. The overwhelming sense of entitlement is very strong here.

In both directions. I've never seen clicking on affiliate links as price to be paid for a service. That's also sure as hell not what the ToS say.

Using affiliate links to pay for content creation/hosting is reasonable. Bypassing affiliate links is also reasonable. If you want to be owed something, put it in the ToS.

"the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission"

So you're saying https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/about/ is a lie?

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