I disagree. I pay for Consumer Reports and like it the way it is. Keeping comment sections civil is hard and a lot of work, which would distract them from their primary purpose.
I think that's a fair point. But paying for forum accounts (ex: SomethingAwful forums) is certainly a possibility.
Before the days of the internet, clubs came-and-went based on "membership dues". The recognition that the members had to pay for the various costs of the community: the space they rented for and meet up in, ongoing expenses of equipment (ex: Yacht Club may have to pay for dock fees), etc. etc.
In a few years, when enough other people understand the importance of 3rd party financial independence, maybe this old-school club methodology (except applied to the internet: to pay for moderators, forum hosting, etc. etc.) could become more mainstream. The time isn't right yet, but I think people are beginning to wake up to the importance of an independent financial stream.
I've been trying to build this over the last couple years with productdork.com. It's somewhere between review site and community. For a long time it was just me, but it's at a point where I'm getting a few new commenters each week.
Long-term I'd love to have representatives from brands/manufacturers commenting as well. Maybe have badges to provide context to other members of the community.
Searching for reviews of replicas, usually around $800-1.5k, will get you a bunch of similar reviews on subs like /r/malelivingspace. There are 2-3 big replica makers but I think the chairs are pretty much the same, cheap Chinese ripoffs with shoddy materials. For some things, you have to become a seasoned gumshoe to figure out if a review is legitimate or not. I assume there are other niche industries that are using similar marketing techniques.
I think wirecutter is pretty close.
At a minimum, that means you won't get to learn about smaller niche stores like JetPens.com (very good for stationary / high-quality pens), since such small stores don't have any affiliate links for Wirecutter to make money from.
As old and outdated as Consumer Reports is... they're clearly primarily driven through reader-contributions. There's a degree of independence through that methodology that affiliate links / advertisements / etc. etc. fails to replicate.
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Speaking of which: Jetpens.com, and other smaller niche online stores, do manage to solve the problem to some degree. Their blogposts about their products is certainly "shilling their store", but they review a wide enough variety of products that they've earned my trust. They aren't shilling for any particular company, they're simply shilling for their wares.
I guess smaller webstores really do have that advantage. As long as they have good and useful reviews on their blog ( https://www.jetpens.com/blog ), I'm going to be reading their posts and possibly buying their stuff. Yeah, its shilling their own website, but that's something that most people understand innately when they read the blog.
There's also a quality-level associated with the store brand: JetPens doesn't offer cheap or low-quality pens. You can pretty much buy stuff at random and get good stationary. Careful control of the store's inventory is clearly important to building a brand.
After all, if I wanted cheap stuff, I'd go to Amazon (or Walmart) instead. I'm going to JetPens because I feel like a premium quality pen or pencil.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
It goes beyond and deeper than that.
Affiliate-based ad-model is beholden to Amazon for revenue. If Amazon launches their own review site (ex: leveraging the Washington Post brand, as a hypothetical), then you can almost be assured that Wirecutter would be killed off. All Amazon has to do is stop paying paid affiliate-links and instead offer review services through Washington Post (and ONLY Washington Post).
We're beyond the point of simply having websites "function". We're at the stage of the internet where we need to consider how to build web-businesses / web-organizations that last for longer than 10 years, even in the face of unknown changes. Too many websites make short-term assumptions (such as "We can trust Amazon to keep giving us money perpetually"), and end up getting swallowed or shut-down as soon as those assumptions fail.
True: Amazon Affiliate links still are a decent source of money. But just two years ago, most people probably thought that Google Adsense money was good enough to be sustainable also. The collapse of the banner-ad money (as money has shifted to Youtube ads instead) has especially hit online sites (especially those without a Youtube presence) extremely hard.
Lately the reviews I've seen are selecting for what Amazon link will perform for them, rather than truly what product (available via Amazon or other retailers) is the best product or value. I've found their picks frequently have bimodal ratings, with a large chunk of users hating the product.
in my reading, most of the Wirecutter recommendations that turn out to be suboptimal suffer from flaws that only surface six months into ownership, far longer than you can reasonably expect a reviewer to test a cheap product.
the one truly dubious article I've read is the "best small saucepan" review where their top pick is a tramontina product. tramontina's line was getting rave reviews from all the cooking sites/communities a couple years ago, but it appears to have gone downhill since they recently switched manufacturers. the article was updated this year, but makes no mention of the current quality discussion...
There was a time when I trusted Amazon reviews, but the 5-star bots, and now the 1-star griefers, have totally eradicated any trust I have in that system. Amazon's crowdsourced methodology has been corrupted by greed.
Reddit works for now, but I also question the long-term sustainability of Reddit. Popular Reddits are clearly becoming more-and-more visited by shills and marketing teams. This is useful in some Reddits (ex: /r/AMD) for now, since it provides a communication channel to the company. But there's this feeling of astroturfing that I can't shake... a more "malicious" company could very well ruin the careful balance we have.
In the long term, its clear to me that marketing shills will too ruin the Reddit / community methodology. Its impossible to tell who is, or who isn't, a shill. After all, shills simply pretend to be fanboys posting from normal accounts, and they're getting better at it.
In the longer term, I think something old-school, like Consumer Reports, is best. What we really need is a team of trusted 3rd party reviewers, who are independently funded __outside__ of the advertisement system.
Yes, OUTSIDE the advertisement system. So that kills YouTube (yeah, Gamer's Nexus is good but... Steve constantly has to worry about pissing off his advertisers. Same with Linus Tech Tips: they're subservient to the ads whether they like it or not). It also kills most websites, which are reliant upon ad revenue. Its absolutely imperative that your 3rd party review site has the financial independence to be able to issue "negative reviews".
Even newspapers of old are clearly a poor model: as its basically impossible to tell the difference between an "advertisement-article" and an "actual investigative article" upon publishing. And since most old-school newspapers got money from advertisers, there is still a conflict of interest when you start to follow the money.
Consumer Reports is unfortunately stuck in an age-old era. There needs to be a more modernized version, with more recent hardware reviews, better discussion forums, better community engagement, etc. etc. A combination of Reddit-like discussions, but with a core set of trusted reviewers who can lead the community (and who can be trusted to be "non-shills").
Shills and marketers should be welcome to a site: Marketing is not bad in of itself. But they need to be carefully moderated and probably should be publicly noted as an official representative of a company. Policing shills is probably impossible to enforce in the long run, but the prevalence of trusted writers independent of outside finances is the core issue of trust that needs to be built.