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robbedpeter | 3 years ago
Metrics that track good faith interactions are needed, like eBay reputation - if someone isn't 98% or higher, they're going to be overlooked or bypassed in favor of someone with a higher score.
Product reviews and ratings get gamed, because current systems don't reward good faith transactions - Amazon and Google customers purchase attention and shuffle facts around top maximize purchases. If quality reviews and curation were incentivized, there would be a thriving class of reviewers and experts playing a role in the marketplace. Their absence is glaring, and the horde of product influencers and professional reviewers underscore the deep corruption of adtech. Those people leech money from the market by selling the ability to lie. The lies are sanctioned by adtech firms, and often laundered through otherwise reliable data sources.
Any legitimate attempt to compete threatens the entire adtech ecosystem, so a majority of all consumer marketplaces are incentivized to cultivate the corruption and prevent any changes or reform that threaten the sanctified lies.
Things like Angie's List and product review vlogs and expert podcasts are stuck within the system, regardless of their intent or functionality when they start. They eventually converge into niches that support the system as a whole. Even reddit, requiring individual human dialog and interaction, has been infested by professional reviewers shilling crappy products.
You can't trust the data sources because trustworthy sources are incompatible with adtech. Google has sufficient data to fix it, but they'd lose money by allowing reform, so they maintain the ethically gray areas ferociously. Their business is not quality search, it's maximizing advertising profits, and it's more profitable to have 50 people paying a premium for scraps than 5 high quality vendors with vetted products earning those spots through quality and service.
The system is working as intended.
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