When you Google for “best whatever” and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.
You’ll find many cases where the only post they’ve ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.
A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.
Good suggestion.
I think the savviest of the savvy out there are both properly seeding comment histories and continuing to post other comments after they astroturf which makes it all but impossible to identify.
Big bummer and no perfect solution I’ve ever heard of but we do what we can and can always hope.
Because Reddit is infested with bot accounts at this point I tend to trust older threads over newer ones. Easy as hell to buy accs to say a competitor sucks dick
Or it’s just late stage capitalism where the product has truly gone to shit.
Can we all just take a moment and be thankful that Lemmy exists? Because if it didn’t, I don’t know what I’d do.
there needs to be a crowd sourced product review and maintenance website that can see trends of enshittification.
Let’s say everyone used an identity verification service to signup, like had to send photos of their ID and their SSN (national identity number) to be vetted by a third party.
How long after the service got popular would it take for the most aggressive marketers to pay rings of fraudsters to lend their identities and/or make fake reviews?
I think it would definitely start out great until it got big enough to be super useful and then the fraud would ramp up. I think an organization like Consumer Reports has a chance at successfully maintaining a low-bias product database, but the paywall is a big obstacle, as is the fact they’ll only review the largest product catalogs.
These are the pitfalls with the “amazon reviews/yelp” model.
A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.
That’s not to say these systems haven’t been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can’t be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).
I think it would need to be a subscriber service paid for by consumers who are willing to pay for good reviews. Otherwise the consumers become the product and eventually marketers take over.
Also crowd-sourced reviews are what we’re supposed to have already, both on Reddit and Amazon (and anywhere else).
What I envision would be a publication that funds a set of reviewers (maybe a mix of full time and part time, since some products are appropriate for testing as a job while others are more appropriate to just use for a while).
Each product would either be bought by the org directly, or if manufacturers provide review samples, a layer of indirection is used to avoid the reviewer feeling like they need to give a good review to keep the free shit coming (with clear communication to the supplier that free or not well have no effect on the review).
Any issues get included in the review fairly, along with any kind of resolution (which should ideally go through both consumer channels as well as reviewer back channels, the former to show what average customers should expect, the latter to hopefully resolve design flaws).
The reviewer will then keep the product and give updates, either in the form of “still using it and it is like x after y months/years”, “doesn’t get much use because I’m using this other thing instead because of x, y, z”, or “doesn’t get much use because I’m not really part of the target audience”.
My complete vision includes brick and mortar locations where products are available to try out, and maybe sales handled there, where any product available has a “we vouch for the quality of this product” where flaws are highlighted as much as features are.
Though I think the idea is self-defeating because if it gains momentum, it could halt or reverse enshitification and make it redundant, fail, then enshitification returns. Ideally, enshitification is stopped with legislation about quality and enforcement that questions why a bad design is used when a better one is obvious.
This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy’s hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.
Now, it’s all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that’s the type of page you’ll be served.
I’ve had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don’t have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.
My exact experience finding out Audacity has adware
After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.
In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, leading to the creation of a new fork with virtually the same intentions. Unsurpringly, this fork was named Sneedacity.
Sneedacity lmao
though not 100% audio software, i recommend davinci resolve! it’s free, and no ads
No it doesn’t?
I just googled it to be sure, but i already assumed you meant ‘spyware’ (which is something completely different), referring to the telemetry (which i can get is a sensitive thing, but anonymous usage statistics to know where to focus their development sounds like a decent idea, and afaik they implemented it with respect for the user)
I remember the concern years ago was: since the application was bought (acquired?) and the tool was still publically free, that the new owners had added the spyware to try and monetize the data coming from said spyware/telemetry.
After reading your comment I went back and did some cursory searches, and it looks like the general concensus is that its less of a concern than it was originally - although, there is still uncertainty around how the tool is being monetized, which is enough for some to stop using it.
It just joined the musescore project, great open source music notation software. For funding the only commercial thing they offer is a site where you can upload & download scores, with the paying part also paying licensining fees for copyrighted music. Imo all looks very legit. I was already familiar with musescore before this drama, and watched some of tantacrul (head of the musescore project, and now also audacity i guess). He’s a very down to earth guy that has quite some insightful videos on the musescore development and figuring out what to keep/remove when going for new versions. But also great videos regarding other topics.
So far i’ve seen nothing that rings any alarm bells. The open source community can sometimes be a bit too sensitive regarding paid services linked to open source software. But in this case as long as the actual software remains open source, and the paid part actually adds value (a nice place to exchange sheet music, without any copyright issues as that’s covered by your payment, so a very legit reason to ask money), why not?
