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Comment by dzek69 | Hacker News Reader

> Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot.

It drives me CRAZY!

How often I want to know something about a product (something less popular than smartphones, let's say IP cameras) and I find only ~3 reviews, I watch them all and they are all full of BS, because the reviewer has no experience with the product type they are given, they just follow the manual/or some given instructions by the sponsor how to make the product work. So I still know nothing about the product, its pros and cons and I can spot mistakes and BS even in those basic info that was given. In this specific case of IP cameras for example there are TONS of videos NOT showing the real video feed (recordings) from the camera, they just record the smartphone screen with another smartphone/camera and that's it.

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Many reviews the reviewers don't have the product and instead cobble together information from the description and other sources, that's why there is no unique information in the reviews and they are so information light. They do this so that they can have affiliate links where they can make money, with a heavy understanding of SEO this can be a very profitable practice.

When I discovered this practice from a well known SEO guru, I was both sad and angry.

It's so frustrating, too.

I watch those videos to learn something new about the product (actual pros and cons, specific feature implementations, ...). But most of the time the "reviewer" basically reads the product description and goes over the list of features that I can find on literally any shop page that has that product.

It's so hard to find videos of people that have actually used the product for longer periods of time and can give an actual review.

This extends to review articles as well. 20 years ago there used to be magazines that reviewed products by actually using them. There were also users reviewing products and there were websites where these personal reviews were aggregated

Nowadays all review article just work off the specs without using and testing the products. And the user reviews have moved to Amazon, which are mostly very poor quality or just fakes, or possibly reviews for other products. In any case, there are no incentives to give high quality reviews of products, and google seems to have no incentive to show me the few remaining real review blogs.

For all its flaws, this is why I still check the Wirecutter before I buy a lot of things. Although they seem to make their picks in part based on what will get them affiliate revenue, you can be sure someone on the staff has actually picked up the product and used it enough to understand how well it works.

I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.

That's a difficult problem to solve and extends far beyond Youtube. The reason why that happens is just due to timing, first one to review a new product gets all the clicks. So they can't spend weeks actually using the product to write a proper review, as interest would have been largely faded at that point. Back in the paper magazine days they had much more time, as magazines only got released once a month.

Meanwhile if you ignore all the commercial Youtubers and look for regular people using the product, you might end up with a more 'authentic' review, but also with an equally uninformative one, as most people just don't have access to all the latest tech gadgets on the market. They just have the one they are reviewing right now, so it's hard to get any meaningful comparisons.

There are a couple of good review sites left, but not nearly enough to cover all the tech stuff that gets released in the wild.

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