Corporate astroturfing is the norm

Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 212 points –

Went to Google Play to complain about Hulu. I noticed Google advertising that over 300 reviews had the verbatim quote "watch and movies that you love". It's always confusing that buggy corporate apps have >95% 5 star reviews until you see that the majority are just completely fake, and no one cares or is doing anything about it.

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The only use reviews have is to make sure that the app youre downloading is most likely the original and not a malicious lookalike.

Artificial content has poisoned the web to the point that adding "reddit" to the end of google searches so that you could get real human content was commonplace.

I miss the days where you had to learn HTML if you wanted to share your opinions online.

adding "reddit" to the end of google search

As if there's no astroturfing on Reddit :) there's plenty of companies in the comments there, posts promoting particular brands or products that get to the front page, etc.

Its especially bad these days to the point where im not even sure how to find good results anymore, but 5 years ago things were much better (or at least astroturfing was way less common).