Yes. Any online review should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The vast majority are influenced by affiliate payments.

Some, like credit cards and other financial products, are especially bad since the payments per conversion (i.e. person who looks at the review site and then signs up for the credit card) can be massive. But even seemingly innocent niche markets, like light-weight backpacking equipment, can be full of affiliate marketing.

That said, just because a blog or website is influenced by affiliate marketing doesn't mean they don't have useful information in their reviews. They usually are accurate when describing a product's basic attributes. Where they typically bend the truth is when they're comparing products against each other (the one with higher affiliate payments is almost always better), or they simply won't talk about genuinely better products that don't pay for conversions.

And they certainly won't tell you "don't buy any of these things". I recently came across BabyGearLab (http://babygearlab.com), which has nice reviews of, say, different car seats or different strollers, and will tell you which one is the best if money is no object, which one is the best if you're on a limited budget, etc. But what I really want is the web site that will tell me "you don't need a smart sock". Yes, that's a thing.

Of course I can just not buy a smart sock. But I pretty much know that at some point I'm going to buy some thing that's almost as useless because it's for the baby.

This is the reason why I’m traditional journalism there is a very strict divide between the content and business sides of the company. The journalists don’t know about the deals, and the business side don’t get to provide input on the content side. Unfortunately in these smaller, newer forms of content business, those concerns are just ignored.

Erm, the traditional journalism buisness knows ads as well. And there are countless examples of articles being stopped investigating/published, because the main add customer objected and threatened to leave

Or when it so happens, that the boss of the media concern is a golfclub buddy of the senator who is accused of something.

etc. etc.

It does happen, but most of the industry has a really strong negative reaction to the journalists and business side mixing in particular ways. It's a cultural divide that was established a long time ago and is still very important now.

There are very few review sites for any given product / service that aren't in the pocket of businesses through things like referral systems and sponsorships. It's an industry.

This is how the entire affiliate industry works. Content curators will generally pick the most profitable products to promote, not always but most of the time. I tried to explain that here to the HN crowd that the wirecutter reviews fall into the same affiliate bias but got downvotes to hell. The mere fact that most of their products point to amazon should tell you that they cannot possibly claim to give an honest review. I say this knowing there will be a ton of replies telling me I’m wrong but sure, what would a super affiliate know anything about that...

The Wirecutter/Sweethome states that part of their review filter is that reviewed products must be available for purchase online. This results in the exclusion of a lot of specialty and other retail-only goods.

I will note that for many products, they have recommended items not sold on Amazon, even over competing products that are available for sale on Amazon.

And let's face it: when Amazon sells the majority of goods most people are likely to buy (and that you are likely to review), "affiliate bias" isn't really that big of an issue because it just means you're comparing one Amazon product against another. At that point, the primary bias would be from recommending the most expensive product available on Amazon, thus earning the highest commission. And Wirecutter/Sweethome definitely doesn't do that.

Yes.

Review sites, in general, are mostly cash cows and 99% of them should be avoided. There's no incentive to give honest and unbiased reviews.

Morality? Wanting better stuff, that is actually designed to work well? Environmentalism? Altruism?

Surely not everyone is only driven by greed?

Today's society does not favor unselfish behavior. Somebody with morality or the other qualities you enumerated is more limited than somebody without them.

Greed is somewhat what our race is breeded for in terms of society design. Greed is rewarded by our society.