A few months ago, an essay went viral by a website called HouseFresh that reviews air purifiers, apparently quite thoroughly. They wrote about a flood of articles rounding up the supposed best air purifiers on the market, assembled by Dotdash Meredith -- people of a certain age might know them better as the former About.com -- and reputation-laundered through publications most people had no reason to distrust, such as Real Simple, Food & Wine, Better Homes & Gardens, and Serious Eats.1 These articles claimed to be based on actual, in-person product testing, but their turnaround time and dubious authorship, as well as the sheer masses of them, suggested otherwise. They claimed to exist to help readers avoid buying junk, but the actual article content was junk-agnostic at best. According to HouseFresh's follow-up post (also viral), conditions have gotten even worse, and every trend in search engine "innovation" suggests that they'll keep getting worse.2
Dotdash Meredith has taken a lot of the heat here3, but they're not alone. John Herrman at New York Magazine wrote recently about the Associated Press -- the AP! -- getting in the game with product roundups assembled by Taboola. (People of a certain age might recognize them as the company that inflicted their psychosexual grossout spam upon legitimate publications, shellacking every article with posts like such as "2015's Controversial 'Skinny Pill' Work Too Well?", "1 Weird Food That Eats Your Diabetes," and "28 Sexiest MILFs You've Ever Seen." Local newspapers, absolutely starved for money and short on staff (due to laying them off), have filled their inner pages with slop for decades now, from unvetted press releases to Patch.com to, now, LLMs. Boutique lifestyle publications have their boutique versions of the #content game -- in my fitful media career I've written more than one unbylined piece of artisanal, hand-crafted sponcon based solely on some Googling I did on a train or something.4
Basically, there's a lot of bullshit out there, in the Harry Frankfurtian sense: "[The bullshitter] is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." One facet to the bullshit, though, is obvious but bears mention anyway. I feel pretty safe in predicting that very few people who read that article had previously heard of HouseFresh -- including people who were in need of an air purifier. You could maybe scrounge a crumb of cynical, extremely online amusement that complaining about SEO is apparently a better marketing strategy than doing SEO -- both HouseFresh posts are in some part marketing, albeit for a good cause, and it's worth keeping that in mind -- but the implications are mostly just bleak. The writer goes on to mention other niche sites in various product categories, such as Dogster for pet products. I feel pretty safe in predicting that most people hadn't heard of those either. And I feel very safe in predicting that almost no one had heard of them all. This includes the target demographic for this stuff: My mother was a lifelong Consumer Reports subscriber5, but she hadn't heard of the big-name successors like Wirecutter until I'd told her.
So now you know where to read about air purifiers and dog stuff. Great! You now have intel on exactly two product categories. Look around your living space. Suppose something in it were to break tomorrow, which is likely. Where would you shop to replace it, and how would you know where? What is that product category's HouseFresh? Do that for everything there. Where you sleep, what you eat and what you eat it with, what you wear, all the department store and furniture store staples. All the thousands of things where you'd benefit from knowing the best ones and best bargain-priced ones, because otherwise you likely buy junk.
"Just do the research" is the easy, glib answer. But the popularity of these product roundups is due in some part to people doing the research: correctly noticing that actual website storefronts and their supposed customer recommendations are horrible, and looking elsewhere for actual, solid advice on how not to buy junk. (Surely the non-junk is out there... somewhere... right... ?) "Do better research" is the next easy, glib answer. You could Google the most reliable product curators, but that's sort of like plunging into the ouroboros's mouth in hopes of coming out the other end. You could ask around, and hope whoever you ask both A) knows and B) didn't get that knowledge from the Google results you were trying to avoid.6 You could do the better research on the alternate search engines, a few of which the HouseFresh post details: "If I don’t find something on DuckDuckGo, I check Kagi, Bing, Google, and Brave." But, I once more feel safe in predicting, I doubt that most people in the world have heard of DuckDuckGo alone. I'd be surprised if a majority of people interact with a search engine as a discrete website they directly visit, rather than the thing that pops up when you type a question into the address bar.
The problem here isn't that the reliable parts of the Web are falling apart or rotting from within or embodying other metaphors for junk that breaks -- that's been happening for decades.7 The problem is that the Web has imploded, suddenly, into fragments, and the reliable parts of it are now scattered to thousands of different places, such that it is now virtually impossible for even the savviest, most extremely online people to know about enough of them to navigate a normal, everyday life. Nor is this just about buying things, just anxiety over being an imperfect shopper. If you're the sort of person who uses this website, your friends have probably either scattered across more social media sites than you can keep up with, or dropped off the online grid. If you're the sort of person who read news online, the people you read have scattered to countless niche blogs and newsletters, more than you could read even if you knew about them all. Sure, you don't have to keep up with every single thing; the idea of that even being possible is an extremely modern fantasy. It just feels -- vibes-based conclusion alert! -- harder than ever not to miss out on the good ones.
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that last one? J. Kenji López-Alt's former employer
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todo: create css crime to blow up scare quotes to infinity px
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personally, I blame their gruesome, Frankensteined, Tronc-tier merger name
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see also The Strategist, which can sometimes feel like a SkyMall catalog for shoppy shops
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and also of their sister publication for kids, Zillions
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todo: stop self from writing 5,000 words on how artisanal, hand-crafted human recommendations are not the solution to everything
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see: Demand Media, Examiner dot com, content mills, article spinning...
