Hacker News Reader

Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t think this is an inherent flaw in the idea of providing trustworthy third party reviews.

Just for the sake of argument, how would one go about creating a trustworthy third-party review business? Yelp has been accused of similar tactics for years with little pushback. I just don't think it's possible to create an ethical review platform on the internet. Way too much can go wrong.

Either the reviewers are paying you, the businesses being reviewed are paying you, or you're advertising. Advertising is a crapshoot, content creators won't pay to make sure their review gets posted, so that leaves the businesses being reviewed. And if your goal, as the owner of FooBar Business Reviews, is to maximize your profits, these kinds of techniques are going to start looking interesting really quick.

View on HN

Maybe some kind of circle of trust? I would trust reviews written by my contacts more than internet randos. People they know a little less, and beyond that not really at all.

I think the problem is that if you make it into a business it messes up all the incentives, but if you don't make it a business there isn't an incentive to put time and effort in to combat spam, lawsuits, and so on. Maybe a big open source undertaking, like Wikipedia but with reviews?

In a way you already get that by posting on social media or sending a group chat of "anyone know a good X around Y" and then seeing the results. Probably a better chance someone will respond to you directly than leave a random review somewhere.

> Maybe a big open source undertaking, like Wikipedia but with reviews?

Wikipedia is certainly not immune from manipulation. A friend of mine worked for a firm that edited Wikipedia pages for a fee and typically catered towards the ultra-wealthy and politicians.

I've always thought "web of trust" this is the best way forward for reviews. It's using trust that you already have, and it allows you to give feedback to people who are giving incorrect reviews, e.g. "Steve, you rated this thing 5-stars but it totally sucks. What gives?"

I'm genuinely surprised that Facebook hasn't picked up the idea of allowing user-submitted reviews of products, services, places, organizations, etc. Then you could search your friends, or friends-of-friends, for reviews. For Facebook this would be a wealth of information because it indicates which products you actually own and whether you like them. How is that not a huge wealth of information for an advertiser?

It'd be extra good if we could take Facebook out of the equation, but the social graph there is probably the largest currently in existence.

Maybe the reason Facebook doesn't want to get into this space is because an ecosystem of trusted reviews would actually be a major problem for their customers (aka advertisers).

It wouldn't be good for an ad platform to show an ad for something and then show the prospective customer the debunking of said ad.

Facebook makes their money on the market being less efficient. If the market was super efficient and everyone bought what they wanted and was satisfied with it there would be a lot less need for advertising.

Excellent point. That thought never crossed my mind.

My desire for web-of-trust reviews to exist made it harder for me to think as a ruthlessly profit driven company thinks.

I think Reddit works quite well as an effective review site for products from certain brands, and in most of the brand subs maintained by independent mods, you do get a wide spectrum of views.

Spam is automatically taken care for you too (if you ignore the non-review posts).

In theory you could be paid by customers for helpful reviews. Consumer Reports, for example.

I think this is the Angie's List model but I don't know how that is working.

I am concerned about the EBSCO model where business are ranked and then pay to be advertised as top offerings. It seems like it might not necessarily choose good businesses. Often their research is based on some kind of survey.

User-generated content for free leads to the Yelp/RipOffReport (and TrustPilot?) model.

> Consumer Reports, for example.

Not sure if it's comparable but in the UK we have "Which?" magazine which provides reader-funded "supposedly impartial" product/business reviews. (It started as a printed magazine but is now largely an online venture I think).

I haven't done much due-diligence on them but they've been going for a long time (edit: wow, since 1957 it seems!) and traditionally have had a decent reputation in the UK.

I've personally paid for their print magazine and more recently online subscription for brief periods when wanting some analysis on a couple of important purchases, and found the information to be useful.

https://www.which.co.uk

Even Consumer Reports has the problem of not necessarily checking/testing for the right things - and very rarely have the ability or time to test over long periods of time. They do some with the cars, but most things you'd buy will last ten+ years, and may exhibit faults later in their lifecyle.

An example: https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/can-we-believ...

> In theory you could be paid by customers for helpful reviews.

Nope, this will easily be gamed.

I don't think there is a financial model on the planet that would make reviews 100% trustworthy.

This is a hard business problem. I believe the only way is to have this business inside of another business entity where reviews are not the profit driver but contributes to value of the entire business.

That's why I see only Google Reviews to be in the best position in this category. It is not perfect but way way better in terms of incentives etc. compared to Yelp and its ilk.

It's primary value for Google is the huge moat that it provides against Apple maps where Apple is dependent on the crappy Yelp reviews. I say crappy in the sense of terrible incentives as mentioned in the OP I am replying to. This poisons the whole review system of Yelp and Apple maps by association.

> I just don't think it's possible to create an ethical review platform on the internet.

I definitely agree that it's a hard problem, but I would be wary about saying it's impossible. This shouldn't be rocket surgery!

> And if your goal, as the owner of FooBar Business Reviews, is to maximize your profits

What is that wasn't your goal? Perhaps such a site could be a non-profit...

> I definitely agree that it's a hard problem, but I would be wary about saying it's impossible. This shouldn't be rocket surgery!

The internet has now existed for 3 decades, it's become massively commercialized over the last decade and a half, and this problem still hasn't been figured out without resorting to the mob tactics described in the article. If it's not rocket surgery, why haven't we figured it out yet?

People still want to see the internet as this limitless utopia without boundaries or faults. If we're gonna be wary about throwing around the word "impossible", then we need to start seeing some concrete solutions to these very real, widespread problems. This is basically a modified version of the content moderation problem. You can either include all voices on an online platform and host propaganda and disinformation, or you can try to limit disinformation by removing some users from your platform. You can't do both.

> Perhaps such a site could be a non-profit...

Being non-profit doesn't automatically solve the problem. Wikipedia is a non-profit and its subjected to manipulation all the time. As long as there are people out willing to pay money to have a certain reputation online, there will be no such thing as a truly objective review forum.

As a buyer, I just take into account this reality when evaluating reviews. There is still useful information to be found, but the sentiment and comments I never extrapolate to the whole user population. Pretty typical for companies to incentivize positive reviews on these sites too, which is fine with me but also something I take into account.

I don't think you can create a for-profit business that is trustworthy here because the incentives are too messed up.

You could do an open non-profit structure where all reviews can be analyzed, including "removed" reviews (have a second data feed that is raw, with the appropriate disclaimers").

>Just for the sake of argument, how would one go about creating a trustworthy third-party review business?

clients would in some way have to be the people getting reviews of things. It would be more of an agent type tool that would go out and find things that fit the particular clients' wants. It does not admittedly seem like something that could work without a number of other things being added to it to make people want to pay for reviews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com