“The biggest scam in YouTube history”

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it’s crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      1 month ago

      There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.

      Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.

        • DasAlbatross@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          They didn’t say anything because they’re not pro consumer, they’re pro linus media group. They didn’t want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There’s a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn’t help that.

          • runjun@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            lol certain criticisms of LTT are quite funny to me. They literally were “unfriendly to advertisers” with Anker. They’ve done it several times in the past. The “tech Jesus” video you’re referring to caused them to pause production and they haven’t ever returned to a video every day since that came out. 🤷‍♂️ you can just not like their videos, it’s ok.

            • misk@sopuli.xyz
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              1 month ago

              There’s probably some overlap between people calling for more social responsibility and people who thought some earlier behaviour from LTT was not ok.

          • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            Why would being problematic to honey hurt them? If anything, it’d make the other sponsors more confident in their affiliate links. They’ve burnt plenty of brides with Apple and Nvidia, I don’t see why they would be afraid of honey.

            • DasAlbatross@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Why would publicly burning an advertiser on their channel cause other advertisers to be reluctant to work worth them?

              Could be any reason.

              • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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                1 month ago

                They’ve had public spats with Anchor and Plex, doesn’t seem to have hurt them too much. I don’t see how honey is more dangerous to them.

                • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 month ago

                  About to entirely make something up

                  Maybe there are 10 more advertisers they want to rip on but they already felt two was too many

                  IDK!

              • person420@lemmynsfw.com
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                1 month ago

                I don’t have a dog in this fight, but just to play devil’s advocate the advertisers too could have been losing money and be happy it was brought to light?

                • jrs100000@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  You are ascribing a lot of human reasoning and emotion to corporate entities they they just dont have. Gratitude is not part of their decision making process. Instead, they might attempt to use past behavior to predict future behavior when evaluating an outlet for their marketing budget. They arnt going to prefer an outlet that occasionally burns advertisers, even if the benefited from it once.

        • aleq@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          They didn’t make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers.

          Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that’s kind of their job, and we’ve seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn’t matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it’s made to be everybody’s business.

          This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.

          • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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            1 month ago

            It’s not just creators though, it’s also preventing customers from getting a good deal, because stores can pay honey their protection racket money to stop it from giving their customers discounts.

            Admittedly it’s a lesser issue - you are just not getting a discount you could have gotten - but it’s the opposite of what it was claiming to do for you.

      • Kushan@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I don’t know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren’t the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it’s not like it’s a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.

        I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I don’t think anyone is saying they’re the bad guy. At least I didn’t read it that way.

          • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            There’s a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit

            Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487

            In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn’t load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Why not name and shame? It’s not like burning that bridge would matter if you’re unwilling to do business with them anymore.

          If you quietly move on, that doesn’t help anyone.

      • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        but for some reason didn’t make a video about it?

        Neither did every other creator who stopped doing paid promotion for Honey years ago.

        They’re not scambusters, they’re a computer/tech review channel.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 month ago

        I don’t get how anyone thought they would work. If your color blind they obviously don’t magically alter the receptors in your eyes.

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          Colourblindness knows many types, most can still see color. Some types even see more or shifted colors.

          At least on paper it seems plausible to measure the colour detection cones per iris and then build a filter to strengthen color per eye for which detection is lacking.

          The moment i realized they sold them without detailed personal eye scanning involved i knew they were a scam. Gimmick at best. Worst part is they seem catered to people as gifts for colorblind friends, thats just a way to obstruct people from analyzing them to much. What are they going to say? “I dont for a sec believe this overly saturated view is realistic and your gift sucks”? No, they will say “wauw thank you” and shove it in a drawer somewhere next day, never to mention them again.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          If selling false hope wasn’t profitable, there would be a lot of companies (and religions) go out of business.

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          1 month ago

          If they had worked they might have done so by some sort of contrast enhancement or edge detection, but I don’t think either are possible with just optics

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            1 month ago

            Yes you could absolutely do it with a camera and a computer screen and some software but I can’t see how glass or plastic lenses could possibly be expected to do it

            • psud@aussie.zone
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              1 month ago

              I just watched the megalag videos on the glasses — the first episode of three — and the claim is they cut out confusing areas of colour that abnormal chromats see.

              So if it worked, it only works for people with abnormal versions of one of the three normal colour vision sensors, and only if their deficiency is in green, and then only if it’s the correct degree of deficient

              But it doesn’t work anyway.

              The glasses help people see the number in some sheets in the colourblindness test, but hide the number in others. Their colour blindness would appear slightly worse than reality.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              You could do AR glasses. And with just optics, you could probably adjust some color spectrums a bit, provided you knew the exact deficiency and which way to adjust colors.

              But yeah, no one size fits most situation here.

    • bizarroland@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      I can see how it happens though.

      No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

      I’m just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said “Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people.”

      • lobut@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        I dunno man, whistleblowers aren’t getting good treatment from what I see. Two got “suicided” last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They’re doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That’s why you’ve got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.

          • Gloria@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.

            • grue@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that’s where he was when the US revoked his passport.

              • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.

              • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                I knew a guy–Ola Bini–that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov’t. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for ‘hacking’ Ecuador gov’t computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it’s possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )

                Point is, there aren’t a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            1 month ago

            Snowdon was treated appallingly. He didn’t exactly get away with it simply because he left the country.

      • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I’m not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?

        1. There’s no bounty, even if there was you wouldn’t get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.

        2. Once it’s discovered it’s you, you’re fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.

        3. Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain’t a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You’re risky.

        The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That’s not most Americans right now.

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

          If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

        • falidorn@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          What do ethics have to do with saving money and owning property? Do poor people not have ethics?

            • falidorn@lemmy.world
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              And I’m saying it’s a point based on no evidence. History is riddled with people making sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also riddled with the people that own things doing nothing. Financial comfort does not increase the likelihood that someone will rock the boat and become a whistleblower. There is no factual basis for that statement.

              • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                So what, then bribes and intimidation just… aren’t actually effective ways of bending morals?

                I gotta say I have 0 papers backing me, but I feel like the fact that the very concepts are words in the English language carries some weight.

            • falidorn@lemmy.world
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              I don’t understand how having things and being well off means a person has nothing to lose. Have none of y’all seen Trading Places? People value different things.

              I’d be curious to know if the whistleblowers of the last 25 years or so match this description of the “most ethical person”. I doubt it.

          • pixelscript@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

            These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

          • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            … How much are you willing to overlook to keep yourself from going homeless?

            There just ain’t enough protection for whistleblowers right now.

            • falidorn@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics. Do you think someone financially stable is more prone to being altruistic? Being a whistleblower is about doing something beyond yourself. What if the person with a fully paid off house and savings has family? Are they still going to make the same decisions? How did that person obtain wealth?

              I don’t disagree with your list but I very much disagree with your conclusion. Honor and altruism do not correlate with owning property and having money.

              • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
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                You don’t share food if you’re starving. You don’t share time if you work 12 hour days, every day.

                If you spend all your energy on survival, you got no energy to spare on anyone else. I bet our hypothetical starving person would be moral and share, if they had the chance and materials.

                If they don’t… then it’s not a matter of won’t it’s can’t. People are more likely to share food they have excess of, time they have excess of. If they can’t spare it, they won’t.

              • Trebuchet@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                I believe what dukeofdummies is saying, is that people with a financial cushion have fewer obstacles to acting on ethical principle, whereas your average person living pay check to pay check will be more cautious about whistleblowing because the consequences (loss of employment, vexatious lawsuits, blacklisting) will be felt more severely. Moreso if they have a family to support.

                I consider myself to be ethical, but i live in a wage economy. If i see behaviour which needs to be reported, but i believe that the organisation/society will punish me for speaking out, i will wait until I’ve secured an alternative livelihood or am relatively safer before blowing the whistle.

              • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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                1 month ago

                I’m still stuck on why you think someone with money has more ethics

                That is a misreading/misinterpretation of the original statement.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        No one was doing any oversight on their practices.

        So that raises the question: where the fuck was the FTC?

        • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          No idea, but I can tell you where they will be after President Elmo is done with them: defanged, and run by a one-man skeleton crew whose only job is to sweep the floor every Friday night.

        • bizarroland@fedia.io
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          I think Amazon didn’t care, so even if someone inside the company figured it out Amazon was just like, it’s not our problem to deal with.

  • dance_ninja@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Glad he mentioned Honey/PayPal isn’t the only one operating in this space. Capital One has been trying to push their program on me for quite some time.

    • rustyricotta@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      I haven’t seen anyone mention Rakuten. I see it occasionally on r/buildapcsales giving a sizable cashback (10-15%) on big ticket items like GPUs or monitors. I’ve used to some benefit, but I assume it’s the same shtick as honey.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        It has to be the same shtick as honey, but unlike honey you’re getting some value from it I guess.

        For a moment after watching the Honey video, I considered setting up a company and a browser addon to do the same, but be upfront about it: You buy items, we get the affiliate fee, but you get half the affiliate fee as cashback in a month or two when it’s been processed and paid out, at least for some large storefronts like Amazon and then other high ticket items like NordVPN which apparently pays a huge percentage out to affiliates because it’s so overpriced they can have outrageous discounts and/or pay affiliates.

        Then I realized it’d be a pain to set up on the legal side of things likely.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Same thing, but it pops up with the cashback deal you will actually get. It’s at least splitting the money with you

  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Honey in the chrome webstore: 4.7 stars. With no clear way to see written reviews, just the aggregated stars are visible.

    Honey in the firefox add-ons store: 3.2 stars.

    Honey in Trustpilot: 2.7 stars. Closed for new reviews since 4 days, but old reviews and history are still accessible.

    Google manages to do worse than trustpilot. Google is once again confirming what a useless company they’ve become.

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      I don’t trust reviews at all at this point, from any service like those mentioned.

      I will say that it’s diabolical that trust pilot closed the reviews. Meaning people can’t express there disappointment with the app, and that people might still trust it.

      • faultyproboscus@sh.itjust.works
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        Trustpilot tries to weed out fake reviews. A huge influx of reviews all at once looks like fake reviews. And, to be fair, I imagine a chunk of those reviews are “fake” in that the reviewers never used the app. It’s easier for Trustpilot to cut off new reviews for the time being than to deal with evaluating all these new reviews.

        • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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          Wouldn’t you expect a large influx of negative reviews when news breaks of this story?

          As I said I don’t trust Trust Pilot, but this really doesn’t help their cause.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            Sure, and I’d expect a lot of those to be from users who don’t use Honey, but are outraged by the news.

            If they were going to leave a legitimate negative review, they would have done so before the news broke.

            • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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              I don’t think they would know about the issue until the news broke. The average user would assume it is doing what it said, and the content creators were non the wiser either.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                Sure, but I hope you can see the potential for knee-jerk reactions polluting otherwise relevant reviews, no?

                Given that the reviews are already low, I’m guessing a lot of users noticed that the coupons weren’t the best available before the news broke. That’s exactly what I would expect, and having a bunch of people regurgitating things like “Honey are hucksters screwing content creators” doesn’t say much about the quality of the service to end-users and is simply a reaction to the news without any further research (how can the average user validate those claims?).

                • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  1 month ago

                  Oh I can absolutely see that. I guess my issue is that the whole review ecosystem is flawed I guess.

                  As you (or someone else) said it’s a no win for TrustPilot. Either they stop review bombs or they allow them and people will be mad either way.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        Now that AI can write reasonably good-sounding copy, reviews are increasingly unreliable.

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Aggregate scores on all sites have become untrustworthy, they’re just poor first indicators now, but reading user reviews is still very much worth it imo. It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago. Once ai llm catch up with writing credible texts, then that method will be toast as well and then we’ll be really screwed when choosing a product.

        And I kinda understand why they’re blocking new reviews. Trustpilot doesn’t have a way to verify if the reviewers are actual product users, so their system is very vulnerable to review bombing. It’s a catch 22 for them: damned if they suppress review bombs and damned if they don’t.

        Trustpilot’s method could be better (Fe: they could allow reviewbombs to happen and show 2 scores, with and without), but what Google is doing is probably the worst possible way to go about it: On the chrome webstore page there is no indication whatsoever that anything is amiss. Atleast Trustpilot tells visitors to go check the news.

        I actually can’t believe that I’ve been defending Trustpilot, they’ve always had a repuation of selectively removing reviews, but well, Google is now worse than them.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          It just takes way longer to figure out whether a product is good/bad than it did 10 years ago

          Exactly.

          On Amazon, I need to go at least a couple pages in to get past the “curated” comments or whatever to see legitimate reviews. I try to sample a dozen or so starting from at least a couple pages in to see what the trends are (and no, I don’t trust the AI crap Amazon shows), and I’ll read through some 2-star reviews as well (1-star reviews seem to mostly be complaints about shipping or defective products, which may not be relevant).

          ai llm catch up

          We’ll just have to go back to how we used to do things: word of mouth. In the modern age, social media can absolutely help, provided you trust the author. I have some YouTube channels I trust, some websites that haven’t yet been overtaken by AI nonsense, etc. And the last option we have is returning bad products, and most companies seem to have automated returns to the point where you don’t really need a good reason to return something, it’s generally cheaper for them to accept the return than to piss off their customers.