Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.
Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports.
By the time it gets critical mass to be good crowdsourcing it’ll suffer from astroturfing and spam and other SEO techniques, which will have to be met with stricter and more proactive moderation, which may go a bit too hard and alienate casual users from participation, which will hurt its own reliability.
Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.
By the time it gets critical mass to be good crowdsourcing it’ll suffer from astroturfing and spam and other SEO techniques, which will have to be met with stricter and more proactive moderation, which may go a bit too hard and alienate casual users from participation, which will hurt its own reliability.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
https://www.rtings.com/
They’re trying to avoid the pitfalls of popularity.
Project Farm on YouTube is an alternative I’ve been happy to have discovered
Torque Test Channel is another good one, but very niche