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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

90% of the reviews I see online are sponsored, fake, and dishonest. The other 10% are not found by Googling. They're buried deep in Amazon customer reviews of similar products or somewhere on Reddit. I never trusted Wirecutter because their reviews were always in stark contrast to the reviews I'd read on Amazon (by actual people who used the product), so I'm not surprised if Wirecutter is also bought by companies. What better way to promote your product on a website that's supposedly honest because it's NYT after all...

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> I never trusted Wirecutter because their reviews were always in stark contrast to the reviews I'd read on Amazon (by actual people who used the product),

To be fair, I've known multiple people (when my peer group hadn't yet established their veblen side hustles) who got paid to write Amazon reviews for products they had never used.

Yes, some Amazon reviews are even written by ChatGPT. But my point is that there are far better reviews on Amazon than these "review" websites.

That’s true but for a lot of these products, they were negative ones like “broke after a few uses.”

Super sus when Wirecutter is promoting something as a top pick.

But it also makes sense. A review site like Wirecutter is using the product like one time — they have no idea if it’s going to last.

Many of the negative reviews are posted by competitors

Not from my experience.

I’ve used Wirecutter top picks. They suck and actually do break

Can you give a couple examples of Wirecutter top pick items you bought that broke after a short time?

I've used Wirecutter top picks and have never been burnt. This entire thread is people bashing Wirecutter without providing any examples of bad products.

Yes, some stuff does break, and some categories suck more than others, and sometimes Wirecutter gets it wrong. But I have not seen anyone point to any meaningful evidence that Wirecutter is improperly biased or is anything worse than simply a product review site that does it best but sometimes gets it wrong.

I don't find such a review very informative. Especially if it's a popular product sold 10000s times. Even quality things sometimes break. Does it have stupid buttons that are hard to press? That's worse

My kneejerk reaction to that is that we need that sort of dishonest behavior, where reviews are fake, or bought (without disclosing) to be policed in some fashion. Of course, I'm sure there's some second or third order effect I haven't thought of, but it seems to me that this type of behavior erodes the trust of consumers and drives the market into lemon territory where consumer expect this asymmetry of information.

I feel that corporations would have an interest in coming together and creating a non-profit organization to be an independent tester of products, to increase the trust that consumer have in high quality products and therefore to help them increase demand on high cost items. If you can get a highly trusted organization to say that your item will last 20 years and be of higher quality, you can probably charge an order of magnitude more than your next competitor and still be profitable.

That's why I only used Wirecutter as a reference. Part of that was also they had different priorities than me. But it was still helpful to find what I wanted. But now their site is rarely updated.

The brand of truth, the paper of record. Not one that would market that brand.

Surely inapplicable to its editorial-like headline and subject choices on the front page.

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