The problem is that even reviews from verified purchasers get gamed in the real world, and aggregated reviews can only cover simple information because people don't have the expertise for a proper review (e.g. try to find basic information like idle power consumption for computers. Or whether some part has working or broken pcie power management). So the problem is that you need morally unassailable competent reviewers.

In theory, you'd need consumers to fund such an organization only until they had so much sway that a review from them became essentially mandatory for anyone to consider your product, at which time they could charge a fee to review a product without becoming beholden to the companies paying the fees.

For an increasing set of product attracting attention and midshare is the product. Creator economy; open source projects that have many stars safer to use then ones that don't. AWS better to use than some small competitor because you know many others are in that same boat. "Not fired for using Microsoft" etc.

Widely used and viewed is value; less and less does a product evaluation work in isolation. So very difficult to evaluate products fairly in that sense. Something may be better but it's only in so far that your review agragation / index is a fair market for attention.

Think GitHub stars and amazon reviews for products or product hunt for new startups, or YouTube or LinkedIn views; all have their game of gathering attention / marketing that plays into products visibility and viability.

> The way I look at this is that the Adam Smith-ian free market makes the implicit assumption that market information (pricing, quality) disseminates via neutral, unbiased channels.

This couldn’t be more incorrect. In Smith’s day your sources of information would be interpersonal, or one of your local newspapers. Newspapers in the 18th century wore their bias on their sleeves and had very particular world views, they were anything but neutral. You might also learn about commercial interests in coffee houses where stock markets first developed. This was a place where people were trying to sell you something, like shares in a commercial shipping business.

I’m always astonished that people make these claims about Smith’s work without having read his books or any relevant history.

I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.

I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.

My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.

That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.

None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.

This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.

Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.

Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.

Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.

This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.

There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.

That's the thing with activities anyone can do - pretty much anyone does. And 90% of everything is... not great. I think a lot of those doofuses on LinkedIn just portray some level of success when in reality they're desperate for business, at least some folks I spoke to that are very active there were like that. But that's anecdotal evidence. Depressingly, just how some folks succeed with just a good offering, some folks just succeed with good marketing. But I suppose if you manage to be reasonably good at both, you have a good chance to succeed.

> This pov assumes that everyone engaged in "marketing" is remotely competent at what the are doing

What? No, it doesn't assume any such thing. The mere fact that marketing is necessary implies nothing about the skill of those attempting it.