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Comment by darzu | Hacker News Reader

YouTube or google site:reddit.com usually yields the best actual human reviews for me.

Or specific categories like America’s Test Kitchen for kitchen stuff.

I wouldn't use Reddit for anything but general product usage information. You can get some honest reviews from Reddit users, but I find a lot of it is people justifying their purchase instead of honest feedback.

site:reddit.com works and I use it often. But I do wonder how long it will be until reddit starts to get gamed as well (if it isn't already).

It regularly gets gamed very hard. You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things. It's also a thin line between astroturfing and fill on spamming products. But I have no doubts that some reviews on Reddit are payed for.

> You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things.

Why is the accounts karma important for something like that? Does the Reddit algorithm favor high karma accounts when deciding what posts to rank higher?

Just speculating, but if you create a new account and then spam some positive reviews people will notice and downvote / get you banned from the sub-reddit. If you have some built up history it looks more legit to the other community members.

I'm guessing here, but a lot of subreddits have a minimum karma requirement to make posts or comments (it's a decent anti-spam measure, but easily gamed by low effort bots reposting content every month or so, pretty high chance a lot of people won't have seen it before).

And as with other social media companies, the company behind it is fine with it; bot engagement and bot content is still content, people still watch it, upvote it, and ads and other things are still sold.

If there's money to be made (and there is) assume it's getting gamed to some degree.

100% this. YouTube's fantastic for real reviews.

Video is terrible as a medium though. Can't skim, can't grep, not trivial to index. I hate that more and more content is moving to video (or podcast) format.

Also once its removed due to whatever (copyright, owner is removed from youtube, reported, million other reasons) its gone. No archive.org, google cache or anything left.

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