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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

How many people and organizations online actually provide real filtered hands-on reviews of things these days? There are exceptions like Wirecutter and sites like Amazon provide some insight assuming you're willing to wade through all the fake reviews, But generally speaking, consumers aren't willing to pay the cost for in-depth reviews.

ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.

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They control like half pf webe economy, they decixe who makes money from ads, they decide who survives and who does not.

They dont get to complain there is no content to steal after bthey've pillaged and burned half the web

This is why they may need a new CEO.

Currently they have a "caretaker CEO".

Google was sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.

In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.

They don't have this.

That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.

Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.

Reddit has lots of them. Not sure why google can’t pick them up. YouTube also has specific reviews on anything you might want. Considering google owns YouTube, it’s strange that these results don’t bubble to the top.

Now, you're talking about essentially manual curation of trusted reviewers though. At that point, you're getting close to essentially resurrecting a Yahoo-style directory of good content. I don't really use Reddit but I have sites and people I go to for reviews of certain types of gear. But I don't know how scalable that is.

A big part of Googs secret sauce is ranking relevancy in part by reputation. They totally could index text-to-speech of youtube videos and rank channels by popularity in their content niches, then supply those when searches overlap their the content terms. Clearly they do _something_ like this, and probably could do more. Wirecutter and reddit should show up higher than random SEO fake-review sites, not because of manual ranking, but because NYT and reddit get higher traffic, and have higher reputation from other sites. They should able to derive signals that them so.

YouTube has ostensibly strong policies around disclosing commercial activity, but Reddit does not. This "you can trust Reddit for reviews" narrative is nonsense. It costs basically nothing to subtly shill a product on Reddit, and more sophisticated operations will manipulate upvotes as well. On most niche subreddits, you only need a dozen upvotes to bubble to the top. Impossible to track abuse on that scale.

Not to mention the transparency nightmare of subreddit moderation.

For Google, given the amount of knowledge it has on people, it's possible to know if someone is reviewing a product just for the sake of it, or is it a job for him.

But in that ideal world, ads are clicked less.

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