It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
For products I’ll immediately start with Project Farm on YouTube and see if he’s covered the thing I’m interested in. If he hasn’t I’ll try /r/buyitforlife. I’ll look on multiple sites of retailers I’ve heard of for reviews of products from a manufacturer I’ve heard of (no “WEEJIANGBEST” on Amazon) and give conditional trust to ratings averaged from 3000 or more individual reviews. If I’m feeling wildly thorough I might visit Fakespot to vet those reviews. If the product is expensive, I might pay for a month of access to Consumer Reports. If it’s really expensive, I will pay for Consumer Reports.
For services, those are local to me, so I tend to rely on fuzzy word-of-mouth stuff. I might look in the subreddit for my city, but tend more toward simply knowing the reputation of what’s around me.
Edit: for local businesses, I also look them up on the Better Business Bureau.
This post “feels” a great deal more relatable, I don’t think AI applies, or at least, I’m not familiar with the issue you are outlining.
As can be seen in some other replies here, and in some other threads, some have taken to using AI in the sense of ChatGPT to aid in finding/researching/summarizing info, hence my mention of it in my thread.
Appreciate the feedback btw, I was in a drier headspace with my questioning a couple days ago, so it does read more detached.
If you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Don’t knock it til you try it.
It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.
The problem is that monied interests want to control the spin on information, just as General Electric was able to strictly govern television news during the cold war, and the George W. Bush administration and the military industrial complex wanted to control the newspapers and news sites during the war on terror (and game reviews occasionally gave below 7.0 out of 10)
Truth leaks to the people though novel means of communication, sadly with all the rumors. And any time a fact-checking service develops a reputation for veracity, it’s going to face pressure to close, such as Snopes; or pressure to adhere to company marketing guidelines such has Wikipedia, for whom Kelloggs Company and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints both have a mareting subdepartment devoted to assuring no controversies or elaborations will stay on their respective Wikipedia pages without a generous dollop of hagiography.
So yes, figuring out the real deal is still art form like processing data to get intel. For old stuff (e.g. Brigham Young’s randy exploits seducing young girls with religious mandates) we look for the theses that point to primary sources. But for new stuff, we cross-examine multiple news reports for the consistent facts, and avoid interpretation.
As for product information, yes it’s often to find out important stuff like how secure your IoT appliance is. You can assume it’s not unless they can specify how they made it so without buzzwords.
Stick to sites you know. If you’re looking for a review and you get a hit on a site you don’t know there’s a better than 50% chance it’s just an ad generated site (and frequently these days just the output from chatgpt).
Sucks for lesser known sites that are trying to get noticed, but unless google work out a way of removing the crap from feeds that’s the way it is.
Same with youtube… unless you trust the reviewer, assume it’s paid unless there’s good evidence otherwise.
Search for reddit/lemmy mentions specifically… although those can be astroturfed too… but the comments are generally helpful.
You hit the nail on the head, mate!
In previous times, I used to follow certain sites more closely, but then life happened and I lost track of things and now several sites have closed and I don’t know where to start.
For example, I used to dig GameSpy for game reviews, but it closed down. I rarely buy games these days, but I don’t know what to read when I do and want to inform myself (I remember IGN, but I don’t know if it’s good). I can check out reviews on Steam, but they’re short reviews.
Same deal goes for PC reviews or computer accessories. I don’t know where to look: everything looks like an ad site. I remember PCmag.com but I don’t know if itself is an ad site or what to compare it to, if I wanted to check a second opinion. Every YouTube video about technology feels like a sponsored ad, though some are legit
Edit: fixed grammar
For videogames specifically, I usually turn to these sources for reliable advice:
- Eurogamer and other reputable media outlets I’ve been following for years, so I know their journalists well and their tastes
- Metacritic and GameFAQs
- Watch streamers play the game I’m interested in for a while and make up my own mind as to whether I like what I see or not
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
Games I tend to look for people playing it on twitch. You can’t get much better than actually seeing a game in action to know if it’s for you.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer! I am still resisting watching Twitch for lack of time, but if that’s a good source, I’ll go for it!
I like OpenCritic for game reviews now. It’s a site that aggregates a lot of reviews into one site. If not there I always trust steam reviews of games.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
To add to this, I suggest sorting the comments by controversial on Reddit for another take.
Mostly Google-fu and a strong Spidey sense of links that look like they’ll waste your time.
Type stuff into Google.
Scroll down until you find something that looks like a forum. Random PHPBB boards, Stack Overflow, Reddit, old Experts Exchange topics, etc. Or a wiki page.
If it isn’t one of those two things, it’s probably AI generated blogspam with a dozen adverts on it.
Lemmings are going to crucify me for this, but here goes anyway…
site:www.reddit.com
Fair. One day that recommendation will end up being a lemmy instance instead.
I mean, technically it should work if you use an instance that is federated with most other instances.
E.g.:
For some reason, it doesn’t work for lemmy.ca, indexing may be disabled. So YMMV.
An idea would be if they allow the option to choose an instance of your choice and seach through there with just “lemmy”
Perfectly understandable imo. Reddit has been around for ages and has a huge backlog of information that users aggregated. Can’t really expect Lemmy to match that after only (somewhat) taking off not that long ago. And i won’t fault anyone for using this accumulated knowledge, i can’t quite avoid it myself.
For me the big question is where people contribute new things. And considering how reddit is behaving, Lemmy/the Fediverse is the far better place to do so.
I use Kagi and it’s just amazing. Don’t have any problems. You can also configure Kagi to prioritize certain sites and remove others you don’t care about. Very happy with it.
The bullshit is because Google wants you to visit shitty sites because of ad revenues.
Throw them out of your life.
I’ve tried it for a couple of days, but didn’t work for me. I’ve switched to ddg and loving it so far. Much better results than Google. Even Bing works better at work where Edge is the default browser.
I was on ddg for a while too, but found myself switching to Google sometimes with the !g syntax.
This is the way. Kagi has been worth the price of admission.
For how much I use search on a daily basis though, paying per search is a little too pricey
I thought the same thing, but I’ve only ever searched about 700 things per month. With better search results, you end up searching less. $10 per month is a small price to pay for the restored sanity from a working search engine.
A huge part of it is psychological. Knowing that I have to pay per use would deter me from searching or make me decide every search if this is worth using Kagi for instead of Google. The mental cost would probably be more than the financial one.
There’s an interesting blog post on this subject (likely someone posted it already): https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying
I find it to be very agreeable. Search is dying and I don’t agree that appending “site:reddit.com” is any kind of permanent solution, just a workaround that will also break.
It’s already breaking.
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Some stuff just links to deleted comments
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Newer stuff is just crap since a lot of knowledge has left the site
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I follow some reviewers on YouTube, Project Farm is a great one.
I think it’s becoming a lost art … but basically, you need to go by reputation. Pick well known sites that you trust, compare what they say about the subject, don’t even base your opinion on just one random blog article or tweet / reddit / lemmy post.
For some, Wikipedia is trustworthy since it (usually) cites its sources and has a pretty good track record, while for others it’s not to be trusted, cause anyone can edit it. In the end it’s up to you what you trust. Another example: The CDC (in the US) can be considered trustworthy for health information, being an official government agency, but many also don’t trust it as it has become more politicised and so, biased. Again, you decide what to trust, and always consult at least two trusted sources, more is better.
For product reviews, I simply don’t pay much attention to the star rating, but instead, read the actual reviews, and sort them chronologically so I read the most recent ones. Check that they are actually reviewing the product / service you think they are, as there are ways to get good reviews then “switch” the product listing (amazon) and other similar tricks. Check if it seems plausible, level-headed, or if it’s just someone being angry, or likely fake. Like I said, it’s an art, not a science. Sometimes, you have to actually buy the product / service and judge for yourself, then compare your experience with the reviews, and you’ll learn to tell the truthful reviews from the fake or unreliable.
A tip regarding Wikipedia is to check the edit history if the last edit was made very recently since it could be spam that no one spotted yet.
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I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
You’re asking about a pretty tough problem, and I don’t have the silver bullet for that one. However, I do have some tools that might help you out a bit. None of these tools are 100% reliable, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Fakespot and reviewmeta can help weeding out some of the junk reviews.
When I have a lot of text to go through, I just dump all of it on chatGPT or Bing and ask for a summary. It’s a language model after all, so it should be pretty good at this sort of thing. A horse won’t plow a field all by itself, but if you’re there to steer it, it will get the job done faster than you would.
When I’m looking for a good book to read, I’ll usually use the reviews of goodreads. Just skip all the 5-star reviews, because they are usually written by people who aren’t competent at reviewing books. Take all the the 1-4 star reviews dump them on your favorite LLM and let it look for frequently reoccurring complaints.
On programming topics, your top search results will be stack overflow followed github followed by sites that scrape stack overflow and then the sites that scrape github. It’s great.
Ayo how do I automatically remove those scrapers from search results? I know I could manually exclude them all in the query, but that’s tedious
Free ublacklist extension and list you can find on Github or Gitlab with updated scraping sites you can either “subscribe” the extension to or copy and paste manually in one go.
I just search ddg and get my results. I don’t get those affiliates, top 10 lists, or whatever you’re talking about. I just get good results, and if I don’t then I try using Google.
you will almost get nothing for most of the phrases in quotes
