Comment by nekoashide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nekoashide | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit is only one of the many sources I use to determine if something is worth purchasing especially from unknown sources or products that do not have a brand name attached. Just recently I was looking for a wireless card to replace the one I had in my laptop. Reddit not only gave me the the a link to the card that works for my laptop but posters also chimed in on how to install it but also gave me an idea on how it performed.

I think the most important thing that Reddit gives is a shared perspective on any purchase where people can comment on others reviews. You don't get that with Amazon, it's always a mix of 5 stars and 1 star reviews and your left to determine if these 5 star reviews are real or not. It's the same with the 1 star reviews because I feel that other vendors may negatively brigade reviews as well.

In the end information for my purchases are sourced from traditional reviews, Reddit, online forums and of course the sellers site. It's not always prevented me from buying something that doesn't work for me but Reddit has by and large been my source of trusted reviews and has never really let me down.

How many of those user perspectives are real? It seems to be if you are a manufacturer of a certain product that it wouldn't take too much effort to promote your product with a few sock puppets in a subreddit until your product is on the subreddit's shortlist of recommended products. From that point on new users to the community will evangelise your product for you and you can scale back your sockpuppets. If you manage to get your sockpuppets to be admin of the subreddit it's also not too hard to delete negative comments or reviews about your products or to generally steer the discussion in the direction you want it to take.

I don't trust reddit product reviews anymore than a top 10 SEO site on google with top 10 best <product>.

True, but I always take in information from many sources. As I type this I'm sitting next to my no name bluetooth headset from some Chinese company I have never heard from before and it's worked flawlessly for the last 6 months. I found reviews from Reddit, Amazon, Online forums and even one person who has a blog. I found enough of what I consider actual users experience. Especially on Reddit people will comment and generate back and forth conversations that give me confidence that I'm not wasting money on something that does not suit my needs.

It may not be perfect, but in Reddits case you can see a users comment history as well and if they are active on other subreddits not dedicated to a single product or set of products. Redditors also tend to overshare information about themselves, so, you can really tell who's a user and who's not. I could be wrong but it takes more than cat pictures to fool me.

You’re wrong. It’s about $10k to promote a product to people like you.

Even Reddit has a limit to how much it can be trusted. Marketers are savvy to the fact that people take purchasing advice from Reddit. Definitely need to be sure the community you're checking is active and aware enough to find and downvote out the shill posts.

But still it's better than reviews on Amazon and even from trusted professional reviewers. The reason being that with Reddit you can get the perspective of people who have owned the product for a while. Even if all of the reviews on Amazon were real they'd be biased towards the first days of the reviewer having the product. People don't tend to come back 2 years later and post a review.

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