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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow. Yeah, that place is pretty fucking bad:

    Quick summary of the best antivirus software for 2023:

      1. Norton — Best overall antivirus in 2023.
      2. Bitdefender — Best for lightweight scanning (with heaps of extra features).
      3. TotalAV — Best for ease of use (recommended for beginners).
      4. McAfee — Best for web protection (with a great family plan).
      5. Intego — Best for protecting your Mac.

Clearly "best" is defined as "who gives us the most kick backs".

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That's the same story with all product comparison sites. It's obvious that in most cases, they've never actually used the product for more than some hours if at all. The description of the products are just a rewritten version of the manufacturer sales material.

The only way to get somewhat reliable recommendations was to append reddit to the search terms.

Yea affiliate deals r abhorrent. And I wasn’t even aware of how high stakes it can be until this article:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

That's a great article, thanks for the link

Looking at the fortunes of the Casper place in the time since, Wikipedia has it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_Sleep

    On February 6, 2020, it went public at $12 per share, translating to a market value
    of $476 million ...

    On March 31, 2020, its stock dropped to $4.12 per share, translating to a market
    value of $163 million ...

    In April 2020, Casper announced the winding down of its European operations and laid
    off 21% of its staff ...

    In November 2021, Casper announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement
    to be acquired ...

    The transaction completed in January 2022 and Casper's stock was delisted from the
    New York Stock Exchange.

Disappeared with barely a whimper it seems like.

Love it. And now that I think about it, I have stopped noticing the incessant Casper ads scattered around SF

There is plenty of astroturfing on Reddit.

Absolutely. That has also gotten worse over time.

The internet in general has just become one giant billboard / sales grift over the past decade and it’s really sad to see. I hate how much of the American economy is based on ads and marketing, just trying to force feed us pushes to buy buy buy until we’re broke and/or dead. There are better ways to live than this.

> recommended for beginners

This is fabulous. They even draw a "learning path" from beginner to expert (sorry, who?). It looks almost natural for inexperienced users.

This whole "home antivirus" business reminds me of SoftRAM. It's just a few steps away from being a scam.

Which is why they don't like Defender. "We tested Defender against 1000 viruses, and it detected less than Norton", never says how much less.

Also it's not a VPN apparently.

lol this list is crazy

wasn't ESET always ahead of those?

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