@worldsendless i remember some smol channels talking about why they were giving up on tablet reviews. there is a whole chinese industry of making clones and seeding youtubers with the clones. you use it for ten minutes, give a good review, they get some sales, and by the time the device falls apart everyone's scattered to the winds. and people hesitate to give bad reviews 'cause as soon as people find out you give them everyone runs away from you.

to be fair this isn't just a chinese thing a lot of companies like toyota have been doing deeply profiled marketing strategies.

@worldsendless i read from a marketing book (Guerilla Marketing, i think?) that toyota or so tried a marketing program where they deeply profiled some "influencers" to see if they were predisposed to liking the product, so they could seed them with "free" stuff. there were no provisos publicly attached to the items. so the company could outwardly "encourage" speaking freely about the product. but internally, they had as good of a predictive model as they could get at the time of the people who were going to gush about it.

so there's definitely some folk in the industries with ethics. but there's also a ton of ... odd behavior. like the twitch streamers that always say everything is "great" even though you can hear the stress in their voice like they hate it (but don't want to get on the blacklist for criticizing anything)