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Product and service reviews are completely useless now too, and have been for a while. Restaurant ratings are pure noise, everything is 4 stars and there is absolutely no correlation to the quality of food or service. None of it is real.

It's bleak out there, on the internet.

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Good riddance. Reviews are just other people telling you how to live your life. Beyond it being subjective to the reviewer, there's really no upside in engaging with reviews. If it's a bad review, now you feel bad about having wanted to engage with something with abysmal scores (think: liking a movie then finding out it has a 32% on rotten tomatoes), or if it's a good review, it's useless because you were already going to engage with the thing being reviewed. You chose the restaurant for a reason, right? It sounded good.

We should get back to having our own experiences regardless of what the consensus says. If it looks good _to you_, it might just be good _for you_.

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Maybe this would be ok with good consumer protection laws, but in some places honest reviews are the best hope you have of not wasting money on products that might fail some way or another.
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Which (in the UK and Ireland) solve this for me. As I pay them every month and they don't take stuff from the companies, our interests are aligned.

I know have actually good white goods for the same money I paid for crap ones.

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Apartment reviews are pretty fucking important when you're committing to live somewhere for at least a year. I don't want to find out that my complex is infested with roaches.
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What? Why would you feel bad about a negative review of something you didn't create?

Either the product is something I was curious about and hadn't decided to spend time and money on yet, in which case a negative review might save me the trouble, or it's something I've already done and formed my own opinion about, in which case I'm probably not reading reviews.

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> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.

I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/

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I can't tell if your comment is LLM generated or not. What's the point of even reading comments anymore I should just ask claude what it thinks.
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If I can't tell the difference, why would it matter?

The problem is when I can eventually tell the difference.

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I feel like it will only get worse, too. I don't want to waste my time responding to a bot so as a human it makes me less likely to participate.

I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).

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The internet was dead before you or I or anyone else even realized that it could die. We're just zombies stumbling around in this undead wasteland, going through the motions that we used to do when it was still alive. Ironically, the thing that killed it were the tools people employed to keep the robots out.

Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.

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I'm real xutopia. I'm real.
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Social Media, Especially Reddit, is getting worse by the minute, vibe coding spam, AI bots filling subs with AI garbage links & comments, mods calling it quit because of the amount of junk they have to deal with it. IT IS EVERYWHERE... AI music on Spotify, AI pull requests on github, AI videos on youtube,... it's gonna kill the internet...
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I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.
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[dead]
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