I would be careful about this on reddit. Subreddit communities are heavily influenced by fotm, everyone repeating the same thing(there's a word for this and i cant think of it...) Dissenting opinions to what ever is main stream gets downvoted. Reddit communities are also heavy on beginners. Those beginners often don't realize how much depth of knowledge they are missing.
It might be a place to bounce ideas off, but I would only go there after doing some of my own research. It should only be one tool of many.
In areas I consider myself knowledgeable, I see terrible advice given out. Often parroted by beginners. Like people in the headphone subreddit can give recommendations without listening to them. cscareerquestions is the blind leading the blind more often then not. There's no way to differentiate experience with someone fishing for upvotes or think they're being helpful by repeating someone else's advice.
I also think there's some astroturfing going on sometimes
The idea behind using Reddit for product recommendation is the observation that an active community of enthusiast of some niche is hard to game by marketers - such community will try to moderate away spam, as it interferes with their regular discussion, and expert community members will be able to call astroturfers on their bullshit. It's orders of magnitude more reliable a source than in-store reviews and most review sites, as they're all thoroughly gamed and/or owned by marketers. But you do need a little bit of critical thinking to evaluate what you read there.
Marketing companies figured this out a long time ago. Even HN had a headline recently that was something like "use subreddits to drive app adoption".
Maybe "hive mind" is what you were thinking of (at least, I see it a lot in reference to Reddit)?
> Insight, as an aggregated platform for comparison. It seems pretty obvious that the endgame of this product would be just another Amazon. Why would it turn out any differently for the "curators" on the Insight "platform"?
Perhaps some of the writing was unclear, but I just wanted to clarify that Insight the is not a centralized service. It's an extensible mobile browser where you can choose as the user what the alternative services will be.
We suggest a few out of the box because we think that's important to making extensions lower friction and easier to discover, but ultimately you can override them with your own choice.
I think this is important to give the user that power in client app, and our schema for extensions is expressible in JSON for interoperability.
Thanks for the comment and for pointing this out!
My degree of trust in prime is rapidly eroding and returning things is painful in general (because it's a physical item, not because it's amazon)
Of course the day the replacement arrived, my wife pulled the old one out of the closet she had stashed it in.
I went to return the one I just bought and Amazon simply said to keep it and they would refund me because it wasn't worth shipping back to them.
Obviously won't work for everything and I imagine if I do that very often they won't let me anymore, but it's the best return experience I've ever had.
2 minute phonecall, said keep everything and instantly refunded the entire order as a credit (my choice)
Luckily had somebody to bring everything inside back home too, haha.
But considering how easy it is to game reddit I'm not so sure I can trust it anymore.
All r/hailcorporate I guess...
We found that this is such a common workflow with our first few users that we've built it in as a default search engine suggestion and also I wrote this extension for it that we use.
You bet every fortune 500 company has a reputation management company willing to "guide the conversation" with a few positive comments and a barrage of upvotes/downvoted.
Because the fervor doesn't match what I see in real life, I really do wonder how much of what's happening reflects actual public sentiment, and how much of it is the result of more subtle, nefarious things at play.
I recently found a Wikipedia article where some media organization had published an interview with a public entertainer, only rather than linking to this interview, the Wikipedia article in an attempt to cite a reference for the entertainer's quote linked instead to a Vox article that was, in consideration of prosaic matters alone, much worse than the original source. Of course it was really heavy-handed, too, and overstuffed with "implied 'we'". How did that happen, that piece getting linked in place of the original? Was it the result of laziness, ignorance, or something more intentional? I didn't dive into it (too much of a quagmire to try to wade in and correct it, either), but I wouldn't doubt if there was some monetary cause related to the big business of politics. It's certainly happening in other places.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
Even though it's one of the biggest online platforms, it's still a niche demographic. It's pockmarked by enough differing opinions that you can feel like it's a good representation, but the US has 320 million people in it, and it's hard to find concrete stats but it seems there are around 30-45 million US reddit users. Only some of them would comment on any particular topic, so what you're reading is a curated voice of a particular demographic self selecting their participation in various topics.
As a microcosm of this, checkout the Motorcycle subreddit. You'd be fooled into thinking everyone rides with full leathers and helmets on, and that the entire motorcycle community feels really strongly about it, and that it's a rare sight to see someone without gear on. But it's extremely common to see people riding without full gear in the real world.
That's why all these big political shakeups take that bubble by surprise. Reddit didn't think Brexit could happen, they didn't think Trump 2016 would happen, and it doesn't matter what your political flavours are, my conclusion is that Reddit as a hive mind doesn't really have that good of a grasp of reality.
Quora is already filled with growth hacker answers.
We are more captured than we think.
Just answer the asked question relatively narrowly, then link to a detailed write up on their affiliate site. Note that the article may have already been there (not that uncommon), but sometimes the article was custom-written for that specific reddit post.
It is really tough for reddit to capture money from these posts or prevent links to the affiliate site because the content marketer is providing (perhaps minimal) value to the community, and a link to their more detailed response is usually not a link that will get reported or deleted because it prevents "walls of text"/detailed answers that some redditors seem to despise.
It really depends on if it looks scammy or not.
Some criteria:
1. The question asked on Reddit needs to be answered completely on Reddit — that is, without a need to click on a link.
2. The linked article need to be relevant and informative to the asked question, while also providing more relevant information than was originally asked for but might actually be desired. If all of these links to articles were instantly deleted, then it would be a disservice to the community.
3. Some subreddits are absolutely sticklers about affiliate sites, and I imagine affiliate marketers avoid them. Moderation is not easy, but it does require a balance between meeting the needs of the passive users and the content creators.
How about "spammers"?
The only place left for good recommendations is the same place that was good for it all those years ago - closed small niche forums (discord servers fill that gap nowdays) and personal recommendations by people you know in real life
I tweeted what was best for small space living and got great responses immediately.
This is the number one reason I buy from Amazon. 90% of the time, it doesn't make a difference for me whether my purchase arrives in 2 days or 4 days. What matters is that if I do not like it, it is super simple and convenient for me to return it. I don't even have to put it in a box of print a label these days. I can just take the items to UPS or Kohl's, show them my phone code, and give it to them.
No other online retailer comes close to this level of convenience for returns.
Beyond that the author's specific arguments don't feel very convincing to me:
> Think about the last time you did some research, e.g. choosing a phone plan. You asked your friends, compared on forums, looked at the official sites, scribbled some notes and made a decision. Even if this journey was quick, you likely traversed a dozen services and products to do this.
The only site I went to is reddit. reddit is where I go to get on the ground crowdsourced recommendations (e.g. I buy coffee equipment by researching on r/coffee). In fact I avoid searching for this kind of thing widely, because I get a bunch of random blogs and content marketing sites of questionable provenance and accuracy.
> Over the years you keep shopping there, until you've forgotten that
- free 2 day shipping is now near universal - amazon isn't often the cheapest place
Well no, free 2 day shipping is not "near universal." I still find most sites which aren't themselves backed by giant corporations (and even so which are!) don't even have multiple shipping speed options, let alone free 2 day shipping. I also have a degree of trust in Prime shipping and I've never personally had a painful experience returning anything to Amazon.