🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨 Reform UK has OVERTAKEN the Conservative Party membership. We are now the real opposition.

Sadly inevitable, lol. It's funny, really. The reason so many of us *were* routinely appending "site:reddit. com" to those types of queries, was specifically to AVOID recommendations that involved affiliate links. Many of us just didn't trust sites to truly promote the best products when they have a clear financial incentive to promote some products over others -- namely, those that have the best affiliate payouts. (Which, for example, has long been known to be a major factor in why Bluehost has always been so commonly recommended and promoted for web hosting -- they have a particularly good affiliate program.) Those of us who had been involved with niche product review sites in various capacities, particularly pre-Product Reviews Update, were also keenly aware that typically, your average affiliate site's so-called "product reviews" were generally put together by people who had never so much as been in the same *zip code* as the products in question. Can't tell you how many affiliate site product reviews I wrote at bottom barrel rates in the mid to late-ish 2010s, lmao. The general protocol was to scrape things together based on a combination of existing affiliate site reviews, and whatever info could be gleaned from user reviews on Amazon. I certainly don't blame the content writers, and tbh I can't even quite blame the sites' proprietors. Those approaches *worked*. Why spend considerable amounts of time, money, and effort testing out products -- particularly higher-value stuff like refrigerators, recliners, etc. -- when there was no functional need to do so? Like, who in that context is gonna like, buy a whole bunch of $500 large home appliances for purposes of actually testing them? Point is, previously, if you didn't trust affiliate monetized reviews and wanted to take a look at real feedback from real people about a product, a good way to look for that was to look for reddit threads consisting of someone asking a relevant subreddit for input and advice on what to buy. These tended to, or were perceived to, often give a clearer picture of quality than UGC reviews posted on retail sites or third party review sites. Such product reviews, e.g. Amazon reviews etc., have a bimodal distribution at best, or skew unduly negative at worst. Especially for mundane everyday products, people don't take time out of their busy day to write a user review of something that didn't really, really stand out as either stellar or abysmal. Such reviews tend to be either "this is the best thing ever and changed my life!!", or "this product poisoned my water supply, burned my crops, and delivered a plague unto all my houses!!!" Whereas on Reddit, you're more likely to see responses that are like, "Oh, I bought the Widget 5000. I like A, B and C about it, but really I thought it wasn't great in terms of X, Y, and Z. Not bad for the price but not the best. If you have the budget and you really need something with better X, Y, and Z features, you should really probably opt for the Widget 10000 LX Pro Edition instead. If not, though, the Widget 5000 will probably do what you need it to do, and it's not terrible for the price point." Of course, cutting a deal with Reddit, then proceeding to feature Reddit threads at the top of the SERPs, has pretty much entirely ruined this, lmao. I made a post some time ago predicting that this would inevitably happen, aimed at non-marketers who may not know to anticipate this stuff in the then-near-future: old.reddit.com/r/CasualConve…