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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Are you willing to pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription? $24 for 1 year.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/headph... seems like what you want, at least for this case.

If you are not willing to pay, then who pays to carry out the reviews, and who benefits from helping you find that review vs. helping you find an advertisement?

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Who benefits from writing Amazon reviews? I've written them for years for products I purchased, for no other reason than to let other people know.

There are many companies that will pay people to write positive reviews on behalf of them or some third party (even though it's against the terms of service).

Even without that, Amazon itself (via the Vine program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Vine) will pay you in goods for writing reviews. I was a part of that program for a few years, and found my review quantity increasing and quality decreasing as I wrote more just to get more free crap from Amazon.

Many other marketplaces will also incentivize reviews in various ways. You personally might have more integrity, but the internet as a whole doesn't...

Those are clearly labeled. And Amazon Vine reviewers for the most part do make an honest effort to review the product. I tend to ig ore them in favour of those 3-4 line reviews in small caps and iffy grammar. That's a much better signal for reliability than a blog post length Vine review.

By labelling some reviews as paid reviews, readers are fooled to believe other reviews are not paid.

Some offer discounts and gifts and such for a review. They don't even say you have to give them a good review, and so they'll justify it as an anti-bias thing. But you have to show them the review, and it's a little odd to give someone a bad review right after they offer a free gift.

The big hint is that they'll have an overwhelming number of 5 star reviews compared to the competition and often average around 4.95. Some are actually quite mediocre. So I'll usually avoid anything above a 4.8.

I would definitely pay for something like this if it was accurate. I go through plenty of bad headphones, and I once even paid for a piece of software that makes the headphones less bad (couldn't fix the battery life though).

But how do I know the reviews are reliable and not being manipulated by the brands in some way?

Check your local library, ours give patrons access to consumer reports online for free.

Public libraries are awesome.

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