I agree with a ton of the sentiment here, but this is just how internet marketing works and regardless of how hard you try to avoid it, shills sneaks in sometimes. The biggest problem right now I feel though is that people will base a decision solely off of a single source or thread of information, without comparing their own personal preferences to that of the people writing all the information.
Compare it to movies or food, occasionally you'll find a critic that you really agree with on multiple occasions. Those are the kind of critics that you can really follow along with and (hopefully) find more things you'd enjoy by reading their reviews. The food network and papers (think siskel and ebert) all have established "personalities" that people, occasionally you'll relate your tastes to one, and be able to follow along with their reviews to hopefully discover things you enjoy.
The problem right now is that the reviewers that do constant reviews are few and far between, and are scattered across the internet across various sources. Each different community out there related to vaping seems to have it's own personal preferences when it comes to vendors they prefer and juices they like. I've been pretty active in the /r/electronic_cigarette subreddit and I see a dominant presence for a few vendors that I rarely see mentioned or reviewed here. It also goes the other way as well, and I've heard about vendors here that I've never seen mentioned on reddit.
Another problem we run into is that sometimes it's hard to tell someone shilling for a product apart from someone who's just incredibly happy and excited about their most recent purchase. People (myself included) get really excited when they find a product they like, which makes their review almost seem staged. All the sudden everything's wonderful about the vendor/juice they've tried and they want to shout from the mountain tops and profess their love. The only problem is, your taste isn't the same as their taste.
It's an incredibly hard problem to tackle. I've been studying the community for about a month now and trying to find the best ways to solve some of the problems I see. So far, the best approach I've come up with is to crowdsource the reviews and have an arbitrary rating assigned based on the user's opinion of the juice. This presents it's own set of problems, because if no one tries a specific flavor, it's under-represented in the system.
I think the ultimate goal within the community should be to have tons of "personalities", grouped by their preferences on flavors (tobacco, sweet, rich, etc), and be able to follow along via social media to see what these people like. I've really enjoyed reading through the NET thread and watching everyone discuss different tobacco flavors, and I think I may have found a few new things I'd like to order and try out. I've spent so much on juices alone and probably 1/2 of the flavors I own now, I'm not a huge fan of. I plan on vaping it forward, sending these off to others to try, hoping they'll find things they like as well.
Compare it to movies or food, occasionally you'll find a critic that you really agree with on multiple occasions. Those are the kind of critics that you can really follow along with and (hopefully) find more things you'd enjoy by reading their reviews. The food network and papers (think siskel and ebert) all have established "personalities" that people, occasionally you'll relate your tastes to one, and be able to follow along with their reviews to hopefully discover things you enjoy.
The problem right now is that the reviewers that do constant reviews are few and far between, and are scattered across the internet across various sources. Each different community out there related to vaping seems to have it's own personal preferences when it comes to vendors they prefer and juices they like. I've been pretty active in the /r/electronic_cigarette subreddit and I see a dominant presence for a few vendors that I rarely see mentioned or reviewed here. It also goes the other way as well, and I've heard about vendors here that I've never seen mentioned on reddit.
Another problem we run into is that sometimes it's hard to tell someone shilling for a product apart from someone who's just incredibly happy and excited about their most recent purchase. People (myself included) get really excited when they find a product they like, which makes their review almost seem staged. All the sudden everything's wonderful about the vendor/juice they've tried and they want to shout from the mountain tops and profess their love. The only problem is, your taste isn't the same as their taste.
It's an incredibly hard problem to tackle. I've been studying the community for about a month now and trying to find the best ways to solve some of the problems I see. So far, the best approach I've come up with is to crowdsource the reviews and have an arbitrary rating assigned based on the user's opinion of the juice. This presents it's own set of problems, because if no one tries a specific flavor, it's under-represented in the system.
I think the ultimate goal within the community should be to have tons of "personalities", grouped by their preferences on flavors (tobacco, sweet, rich, etc), and be able to follow along via social media to see what these people like. I've really enjoyed reading through the NET thread and watching everyone discuss different tobacco flavors, and I think I may have found a few new things I'd like to order and try out. I've spent so much on juices alone and probably 1/2 of the flavors I own now, I'm not a huge fan of. I plan on vaping it forward, sending these off to others to try, hoping they'll find things they like as well.
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