It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. “users arent looking at our site enough.” You’re fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It’s a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.
Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You’re searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you’re looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to “help you find them” while you’re flipping through cards. Imagine if you’re walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.
That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn’t about helping the user find what they want, it’s about making sure the user sees that specific content.
Because every website wants traffic. That’s all it is.
Every site wants traffic, and I’ve been guilty of gaming search results myself in the past, but also don’t forget the other big conflict here:
Google wants ad revenue.
As such, if you are small and do it honestly, you have very little chance of getting any actual traffic your way because Google sends everyone to the “big end of town” and search engines / internet marketing has become a pay to win platform.
Back links made sense when we were all linking to each other early on because it was how you found good content, but nobody is linking to anyone anymore - unless it’s for some return to the linker, such as making a high traffic blog post with affiliate links etc - and it’s time to come up with another method.
Right now most effective for me to get information / reviews is add “Reddit” to the search and you get a discussion of the pros and cons. I’ve been using chatgpt for a surprising amount of “I just need to know this general info” kind of stuff. Ie I used chatgpt to work out the temperature and time it would take to dehydrate lemons in the oven, and also how to clean said oven with what I had on hand. Both of these would have been much more time consuming to do the traditional way, and I would have been bombarded with ads and people’s life stories before they get to the “just use vinegar” part
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That’s accurate and doesn’t contradict the person you replied to. What they are saying is that SEO was never about fixing a search engine user’s problem; it exists to solve web host’s problem of “we aren’t getting enough ad revenue.”
The same is going to happen with these LLMs once they rely more and more on searching the web: folks are going to find out how to poison the results in a way that pushes users toward their products/services/ads.
SEO should always have been called index poisoning, because that’s exactly what it is.
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Trying to rig the cards using book titles.
First you get a ton of books whose name starts with “AAA” and a whole race-of-ever-more-As.
Eventually they figure out people are actually searching for other letters so you get the same in other letters: BBB…, RRR…, III… and so on.
Then people start jumping over that big fat bulk of titles which start with just the one letters repeated tons of times in the first cards of any letter, so they start misusing the most common and searched for words, for example a book about digital coins with a title that starts with the word “Cooking”.
And so on.
Doesn’t it sound strangelly familiar (maybe not the explicit techniques but the “slimy arms race” aspect)?!
The problem is that monied interests want to control the spin on information, just as General Electric was able to strictly govern television news during the cold war, and the George W. Bush administration and the military industrial complex wanted to control the newspapers and news sites during the war on terror (and game reviews occasionally gave below 7.0 out of 10)
Truth leaks to the people though novel means of communication, sadly with all the rumors. And any time a fact-checking service develops a reputation for veracity, it’s going to face pressure to close, such as Snopes; or pressure to adhere to company marketing guidelines such as Wikipedia, for whom Kelloggs Company and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints both have a marketing subdepartment devoted to assuring no controversies or elaborations will stay on their respective Wikipedia pages without a generous dollop of hagiography.
So yes, figuring out the real deal is still an art form like processing data to get intel. For old stuff (e.g. Brigham Young’s randy exploits seducing young girls with religious mandates) we look for the theses that point to primary sources. But for new stuff, we cross-examine multiple news reports for the consistent facts, and avoid interpretation.
As for product information, yes it’s often to find out important stuff like how secure your IoT appliance is. You can assume it’s not unless they can specify how they made it so without buzzwords.
Extensions help a ton. Some of my favorites:
Block or Highlight Search Engine Results - Does what the name says. When you run a search on Google or DDG or whatever engine you use, and you get a result from a shit website, add it to the filter and you’ll never see that trash again. I filter out the following trash: chegg, timesmojo, coursehero, numerade, forbes, instagram, and pinterest. I’ve only been using this one for a little bit, so I expect that list will grow a LOT, but even with just those removed from my search results, HOLY HELL has the quality of my searches has increased. This one is probably the most relevant to OP’s question.
Dictionary Anywhere - For vocab. Double-click any word on the web, and a little text bubble pops up with its definition - works on words in that bubble too, for when you run into shit like “Redundancy: the state of being redundant.” -_- double click the “redundant” in the bubble to get a second bubble with a more useful definition. (doesn’t happen often, but it’s a cool feature, so worth calling out)
Fandom Enhance - For videogames, since every game wiki is on Fandom for some reason. This extension scrubs a LOT of the unnecessary clutter from the page.
Recipe Filter - Works with recipe websites. Scrubs out the 528 page life story from the author and reduces it down to just “Grilled cheese: bread, cheese, butter. Put butter on two pieces of bread. Put a slice of cheese in between. Put it on a griddle at 250 degrees for 2 mins. Flip it over, two more mins. Eat that sum’ bitch.” ✔
Youtube-shorts block. Youtube shorts NEVER have good content - get that TikTok shit outa here.
uBlock Origin - This one’s a HEAVY lifter for taking the trash out of the internet. This will improve both the quality of information on screen by removing a TON of sketchy shit, and make your browsing a lot safer by filtering out malicious links. If you’re not already using uBlock and take nothing else from this post, TAKE THIS ONE.
…that’s pretty much it on my end, but there’s a lot of other useful extensions out there. If anyone else has one to add, by all means let’s keep this ball rolling!
Well damn. Thank you. Saving this! I have Ublock origin already. I’m excited about the other suggestions too!
Pinterest is half the fucking google image search. Bye! And the other half is shopping ads. Google can kiss my grits.
Use alternative front-end ends of the popular sites such as youtube , Twitter, medium , Google,etc you use to get a privacy enhanced, ad free, clutter free experience.
https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
There’s apps that can automatically redirect you to these alternative whenever you encounter their counterpart.
That looks cool! Saved. What apps could do the redirect? Would that be possible with an extension? That would be awesome.
That libredirect plugin is awesome! Just tried it quickly on Quora and that works.
Should also be said that for various edge cases where a extension doesn’t exist, uBlock’s element selector function lets you get very granular with filtering things. If you know a bit of html/css, you can get creative with it and consistently hide just about any element you like across many different sites.
For example, recently I’ve been on a quest to de-rating all my favorite media sites and Google results, etc. No more wayward rotten tomatoes, metacritic, or imbd scores when I want to look up info on media unless I go looking for them on those websites. No addon that I’m aware of exists solely for this purpose, so I’m basically using uBlock to do it by using the element selector any time I see them. Some sites make this tricky, and any adjustment to the design of the page could break it, but the joy I get from being able to curate my web experience to exactly what I want to it to be can’t be understated.
Using uBlock to block-element to block a prompt asking me to disable my ad blocker is one of the best feelings ever.
There’s a list for that I believe
I wish kbin had a save feature; I’m replying so I can find this later 😆
On lemmy, you can click on the little … at the bottom of the post and save bookmarks of posts and replies :)
I like Ghostery too. It blocks cookies and trackers so I can just search for something without being bombarded by ads for it later.
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? I should ignore ad content?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.
Saving this comment. Thanks!
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Thanks! Was looking for useful extensions. Saved!
Stick to sites you know. If you’re looking for a review and you get a hit on a site you don’t know there’s a better than 50% chance it’s just an ad generated site (and frequently these days just the output from chatgpt).
Sucks for lesser known sites that are trying to get noticed, but unless google work out a way of removing the crap from feeds that’s the way it is.
Same with youtube… unless you trust the reviewer, assume it’s paid unless there’s good evidence otherwise.
Search for reddit/lemmy mentions specifically… although those can be astroturfed too… but the comments are generally helpful.
You hit the nail on the head, mate!
In previous times, I used to follow certain sites more closely, but then life happened and I lost track of things and now several sites have closed and I don’t know where to start.
For example, I used to dig GameSpy for game reviews, but it closed down. I rarely buy games these days, but I don’t know what to read when I do and want to inform myself (I remember IGN, but I don’t know if it’s good). I can check out reviews on Steam, but they’re short reviews.
Same deal goes for PC reviews or computer accessories. I don’t know where to look: everything looks like an ad site. I remember PCmag.com but I don’t know if itself is an ad site or what to compare it to, if I wanted to check a second opinion. Every YouTube video about technology feels like a sponsored ad, though some are legit
Edit: fixed grammar
For videogames specifically, I usually turn to these sources for reliable advice:
- Eurogamer and other reputable media outlets I’ve been following for years, so I know their journalists well and their tastes
- Metacritic and GameFAQs
- Watch streamers play the game I’m interested in for a while and make up my own mind as to whether I like what I see or not
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
I like OpenCritic for game reviews now. It’s a site that aggregates a lot of reviews into one site. If not there I always trust steam reviews of games.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
Games I tend to look for people playing it on twitch. You can’t get much better than actually seeing a game in action to know if it’s for you.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer! I am still resisting watching Twitch for lack of time, but if that’s a good source, I’ll go for it!
To add to this, I suggest sorting the comments by controversial on Reddit for another take.
Don’t stick to one channel. Don’t get your news from social media, because social media is an echo chamber.
Use an RSS feed aggregator app to consolidate boring news articles from multiple boring publications. This will give you an even spread.
You will see the same news stories from different news outlets with different spin. You will quickly come to understand various news publishers biases and how extreme they are.
Always go into an article with an understanding of the publishers biases that might be at play.
If you must do the news on social thing… Only use social to discuss stories you already understand to some degree. Or as a place to research the news topic deeper.
For the most part, just use social to hang with your communities… you know… like a social network :)
What do you recommend for an RSS app?
I could use android and desktop Linux recomendations too
Inoreader RSS app for Android.
iOS & MacOS recommendation Free: NetNewsWire Paid: Reeder 5 (one time payment)
I use NetNewsWire (on iOS) and swear by it. Super simple and easy to use.
The developer has an intensely focused vision for simplicity that I love and think is pretty wise too.
I’ve been using Nunti (FOSS, Android only) for a few months now. I love it’s adaptive learning feature which does a good job of filtering articles that I don’t care about.
Do you happen to know how long it may take the “adaptive learning” feature to kick in? I gather it may take some extended usage, however if that feature does seem to work I may have to reconsider Nunti, as I was initially put off by the absence of some other features when last I looked at it.
You can access it after you like/dislike 50 articles
Thanks! I must’ve missed or forgot that since I only briefly looked into it (and looking with a different feature in mind).
Search for open source rss feed readers. There are a few good ones.
QuiteRSS
NewsBlur is great.
I’ve just recently found iOS app “feeeed”
Inoreader
I’ve been using FocusReader on Android.
You can also check out ground.news for the same bias-check aggregator thing.
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I use ImproveTheNews.org for this.
First story they show a picture of Yvan Attal (actor) when it is about what Gabriel Attal said (minister of education)
Definitely. You’d love Allsides.com btw. Gives great info on how a topic is covered across the spectrum and summarizes them really well. There’s an RSS feed for it too.
Uh yeah but also I think I get a chance to get out and buy one yet or not to bad people I know you are going to be a little more than I do you know.
Lemmings are going to crucify me for this, but here goes anyway…
site:www.reddit.com
Fair. One day that recommendation will end up being a lemmy instance instead.
I mean, technically it should work if you use an instance that is federated with most other instances.
An idea would be if they allow the option to choose an instance of your choice and seach through there with just “lemmy”
Perfectly understandable imo. Reddit has been around for ages and has a huge backlog of information that users aggregated. Can’t really expect Lemmy to match that after only (somewhat) taking off not that long ago. And i won’t fault anyone for using this accumulated knowledge, i can’t quite avoid it myself.
For me the big question is where people contribute new things. And considering how reddit is behaving, Lemmy/the Fediverse is the far better place to do so.
I go on 4chan and insult the product/thing/person that I need info on. Then I wait, rubbing my uhhh hands like a perv behind the tree.
4chan has proven surprisingly useful as of late. A hell of a lot more than reddit and Google.
I would give you lemmy gold for this comment if it existed…
I guess rule 7 (Anon is still able to deliver) applies here
Mostly Google-fu and a strong Spidey sense of links that look like they’ll waste your time.
Type stuff into Google.
Scroll down until you find something that looks like a forum. Random PHPBB boards, Stack Overflow, Reddit, old Experts Exchange topics, etc. Or a wiki page.
If it isn’t one of those two things, it’s probably AI generated blogspam with a dozen adverts on it.
Google-fu is no longer valid
Yeah, it’s all been exploited by SEO. Search was always doomed to turn to shit. It’s an escalation game that never ends.
I remember when google originally broke into the search engine space because they gave results that were actually useful.
Given that is no longer the case, I wonder if the system is now ripe for another search engine competitor…that does what google used to do.
I think meta-search engines like searx are very good avoiding seo if configured correctly
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For how much I use search on a daily basis though, paying per search is a little too pricey
I thought the same thing, but I’ve only ever searched about 700 things per month. With better search results, you end up searching less. $10 per month is a small price to pay for the restored sanity from a working search engine.
A huge part of it is psychological. Knowing that I have to pay per use would deter me from searching or make me decide every search if this is worth using Kagi for instead of Google. The mental cost would probably be more than the financial one.
That’s understandable. They do have an unlimited option, but that is definitely in the pricey realm. I think it’s $27 a month.
Kagi has an unlimited plan, it’s just a bit more expensive. I can also vouch for them in that their search quality is quite a bit better, and being able to blacklist/prioritize sites is pretty great.
I could probably ask around to see if anybody wants to share an account. That’s a thought.
This is the way. Kagi has been worth the price of admission.
I’ve tried it for a couple of days, but didn’t work for me. I’ve switched to ddg and loving it so far. Much better results than Google. Even Bing works better at work where Edge is the default browser.
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Back in the day, Wikipedia was so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV. Yes, certain articles get political, but that is when the talk page arguments, counter-arguments, and linked ARBICOM evidence pages give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion. I haven’t been a editor for a while, is wikipedia not a hotbed of nerds who have to be in alignment with the facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right nowadays?
so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV.
Academics have since acknowledged the impossibility of achieving this fantasy “unbiased” perspective.
give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion.
This has been such an incredible change to Wikipedia’s work, allowing dedicated spaces to talking about rhetoric and talking points for readers to learn.
facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right
Yeah, more or less. We are always free to check the sources, which is also a part of what Wikipedia nerds debate - what is the best resource to link to for those who need more info?
I mean Wikipedia is not without a shitload of bias. Try searching democracy in China or homelessness in the USSR.
Take the contrast between the pages democracy in China vs democracy in the US. The Chinese page uses shit like oxford and Cambridge to call China an authoritarian one party state. Which: okay, but the framing of this is incredibly negative given the same argument could be for the US. Notably, the US page (redirected from democracy in the US) simply outlines US government structure and function.
The Chinese page condemns the current government of China as being antidemocratic while unironically citing the government that lost the civil war to the Chinese communist party instituted martial law for 38 years in Taiwan. Yes, the current Chinese government does not allow other parties to run candidates (as far as I understand it) but given what the people experienced before this government, its not that shocking that the vast majority of the population believes they live in a democracy.
Long windedly, Wikipedia is also super biased and corrupt.
Wow are you saying Wikipedia is biased and corrup because they didn’t inaccurately call the U.S. a one-party Authoritarian state?
The “Democracy in China” page explicitly states at the top that i’s going to be an overview of political concepts and that there is on-going debate.
Homelessness in Russia does have a section on Soviet Union, talking about “Densification” following the October Revolution ie. Forced re-housing into small state owned flats.
Criticism of the US is indeed found directly in the same paragraph about how our government works:
It has higher levels of incarceration and inequality than most other liberal democracies, and is the only liberal democracy without universal healthcare
Open your eyes, Wikipedia is showing how it can be an incredibly dense and informative resource.
The debate is from western scholars and from a western perspective.
If you are going to call communist party control of elections authoritarian and undemocratic, then two capitalist parties controlling all elections in the US isn’t really functionally different. I’m not a China Stan. My point is that even trying to research how Chinese government and politics function using Wikipedia is exposing one to western propaganda.
Also, I think it should be fairly obvious that the western state and intelligence wings clearly are influential on Wikipedia.
Calling the CCP Authoritarian and Undemocratic / Illiberal is accurate. They disappear those who protest or object.
Having a two party, first past the post, electoral college system in the US is less democratic than other Liberal Democracies. And wikipedia has links acknowledging that.
Researching China is always going to be exposing oneself to Western Propoganda. Why? Because Chinese Propoganda is the direct source we have to go by. We are unsure 100% how it works, and must try to read China state actions, and makr educated guesses - because of China’s obfuscation of the truth.
The thing is most of the people who say they’re making educated guesses are actually just being deliberately dishonest to plant dislike for a geopolitical rival in the population. And obviously Chinese state media is being dishonest too. You don’t have to pick one over the other.
One of the longest running ARBICOM cases is about Tawain. The first one ended, and then another one pops up literally on naming conventions of geography in Tawain. It is like a unmovable obstacle vs. an unmovable obstacle with endless chineese editors vs. endless wikipedia burocracy.
I would hate to see what the mandarin version of Wikipedia has to put up with.
Again with this. Wikipedia can’t be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn’t exist.
There is absolutely no way to be “politically unbiased” when talking about things. Being “neutral” just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.
If you want to get an “unbiased” view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.
People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they’re somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.
A good chunk of Wikipedia content is minor sports teams, players, towns with sub-1000 population, and minor highways that connect them. I’m not sure how you can be “politically biased” when describing “Alberta Highway 564 which runs mostly west-east from the east Calgary boundary”.
I think it’s becoming a lost art … but basically, you need to go by reputation. Pick well known sites that you trust, compare what they say about the subject, don’t even base your opinion on just one random blog article or tweet / reddit / lemmy post.
For some, Wikipedia is trustworthy since it (usually) cites its sources and has a pretty good track record, while for others it’s not to be trusted, cause anyone can edit it. In the end it’s up to you what you trust. Another example: The CDC (in the US) can be considered trustworthy for health information, being an official government agency, but many also don’t trust it as it has become more politicised and so, biased. Again, you decide what to trust, and always consult at least two trusted sources, more is better.
For product reviews, I simply don’t pay much attention to the star rating, but instead, read the actual reviews, and sort them chronologically so I read the most recent ones. Check that they are actually reviewing the product / service you think they are, as there are ways to get good reviews then “switch” the product listing (amazon) and other similar tricks. Check if it seems plausible, level-headed, or if it’s just someone being angry, or likely fake. Like I said, it’s an art, not a science. Sometimes, you have to actually buy the product / service and judge for yourself, then compare your experience with the reviews, and you’ll learn to tell the truthful reviews from the fake or unreliable.
A tip regarding Wikipedia is to check the edit history if the last edit was made very recently since it could be spam that no one spotted yet.
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I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
We have stuff that is not Linux, too.
I don’t know where we keep any of that, but I’m like 80% sure we have it somewhere.
Haha I felt this comment.
I seen someone suggest Lemmy’s porn is better then Voldemort’s website now. I was like, lemmy has porn?
I think once topics have labeles with multiple similar instances or something to that effect it’ll get much more organized and hopefully factual as a result. The propaganda is thick on lemmy.
Edit: spelling
Dude, you had me seriously wondering what kind of Voldemort porn exists out there… I understood the reference… Too late.
I do better via DuckDuckGo than Google these days.
Even that sucks a lot of the time. Everything is superficial in scope, so it finds the same bland drivel as every other search engine. It just doesn’t have ads clogging it up.
DDG and Google both suck, but in different ways. Same is true for all other search engines I tried (Bing, Ecosia, Brave Search, Startpage). All of them have their own major downsides. For example Brave is pretty cool but is terrible at non-English search results.
Overall I still find Google the most consistent, despite all its faults.
Brave is pretty cool
It sucks that the owner is a shitbag
I use SearXNG to search for things, with custom redirects and block lists.
If I want a genuine human opinion on a topic, I add “site:reddit.com” to the search. Hopefully someday there will be a good way to parse the fediverse for info.
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Yes, I’m aware of that.
But I have a list of sites I’ve been collecting that I don’t want to show up, and I don’t feel like manually adding them to all my searches.
Also, I use my SearXNG instance on my phone as well, so I don’t need to type all those rules manually on a phone keyboard.
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I do the same thing: duckduckgo for general search, Google for somewhat obscure stuff if ddg didn’t get me the results I was looking for (say, information on a specific error from a specific software programming framework).
Also you can put entire sentences in between quotes to search for that whole sentence, which is especially usefull for the above mentioned errors in specific software programming frameworks (as you can put the whole error message in between quotes to get matches on the error message itself not combinations of the words in it) and for things like expressions (say “high-side switch”) when you don’t really want as results everything which contains the individual words.
Mind you, if it gets few results with quotes Google will search without quotes so just force it to search only with quotes (you get a link on the top of the first results page for that).
I was actually surprised people kept saying they kept getting bad search results and only now because you mentioned quotes did I notice that I just search using quotes almost all of the time and have been doing so for years, so that’s probably why I get mainly decent results even from Google (though DDG is better for general search imho)
you will almost get nothing for most of the phrases in quotes
You’re asking about a pretty tough problem, and I don’t have the silver bullet for that one. However, I do have some tools that might help you out a bit. None of these tools are 100% reliable, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Fakespot and reviewmeta can help weeding out some of the junk reviews.
When I have a lot of text to go through, I just dump all of it on chatGPT or Bing and ask for a summary. It’s a language model after all, so it should be pretty good at this sort of thing. A horse won’t plow a field all by itself, but if you’re there to steer it, it will get the job done faster than you would.
When I’m looking for a good book to read, I’ll usually use the reviews of goodreads. Just skip all the 5-star reviews, because they are usually written by people who aren’t competent at reviewing books. Take all the the 1-4 star reviews dump them on your favorite LLM and let it look for frequently reoccurring complaints.
