WEBVTT

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back in the day we didn't have much way of knowing if a restaurant hotel or

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decorative singing fish was any good how long is this sauce

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i don't know other than word of mouth

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or some kind of vague brand reputation but here in 2019 everyone is tripping

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over themselves to plaster their opinions all over the internet places

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like amazon google maps and tripadvisor have literally

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millions of reviews for just about anything you can think of and i mean

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anything however at the end of the day you're

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still relying on complete strangers while making potentially expensive

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decisions like which resort to stay at which car to buy or even which school to

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attend so exactly how much trust can you

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put in these reviews now a good jumping off point is probably

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the overall rating of a product or service so how many

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stars dots or eggs it has out of five

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but it's going to be worth your while to read through some of these reviews and

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figure out if they're likely to be fake

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you see the thing is it's pretty simple for sites to automatically delete

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reviews that are posted by bots as good as artificial intelligence has gotten

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these days it's still not easy for bots to write convincing reviews

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the problem is that doesn't stop shady businesses from hiring small armies of

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paid reviewers from places like freelance writing sites and giving them

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a small amount of money to write short reviews for gadgets they've never used

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or places they've never been in fact it's estimated that up to 30

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percent of online reviews might be fabricated

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so then here are some tips to help make fake reviews easier to spot from my

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experience they're typically written in either overly formal language or at the

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other end of the spectrum with atrocious spelling and grammar

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not much lies in between and for positive reviews while they tend to

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either lack specific details about what they did or didn't like or go into far

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too much detail about features that probably wouldn't matter much to anyone

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but the person who designed the product conversely a fake negative review these

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are actually more common than you'd think they're often paid for by

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competitors might read like straight up bashing of a

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product or they might even ignore the product altogether and just hate on the

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brand in order to try to damage it again usually without getting into any

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specifics now we're not saying that someone with

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bad grammar or who had a really bad experience and hates a brand doesn't

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have a valid opinion we're just saying that in any case you want to keep an

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eagle eye out for anything that smells fishy and then compare it against the

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general consensus so once you've made sure that the

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overall rating hasn't been artificially inflated or depressed by fake reviews

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what's your next step well now we need to dig into the reviews

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themselves and understand what is driving people's rating decisions

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you see many reviews tend to be either very positive or very negative as people

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who had either a really good or really bad time are the ones who are going to

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be more motivated to put the effort into actually telling other people about it

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compared to others who are like yeah man it was all right i guess but the things

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that cause people to give either a glowing or a scathing review might be

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quite different from the things that you care about for example a hotel might

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have a bunch of low ratings giving it you know three stars out of five overall

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because lots of people didn't like how noisy it

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was but maybe you're just looking for a spot to host a bachelor party and then

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to your pleasant surprise most of the five star reviews have nothing but good

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things to say about the nightclub on the first floor

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so by applying a little bit of common sense and knowing exactly what you're

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looking for in whatever you purchase it's often not too hard to weed out the

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fake reviews and to look beyond the bear

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star rating except when it is you see

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not only have there been controversies over review sites promoting certain

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styles of reviews uh selling reviews or

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even extorting businesses but some operations that pump out fake reviews

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have become more sophisticated even going as far as to try to influence

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conversations on huge sites like reddit

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by taking care to maintain the appearance of a legitimate user while

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steering the conversation around a product or a service in a certain

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direction they can even manipulate the voting system in a way that makes detection

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less likely sometimes it's also even more complicated than that and review

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integrity can be damaged by legitimate

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users on steam for example groups of

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gamers have been known to review bomb titles by game developers who have made

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unpopular decisions that are completely independent of the quality of the actual

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game now some of the more reputable review sites have tried to combat such behavior

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with actual human employees that can look for this type of subterfuge and

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stop it but even if you're looking at reviews that are entirely honest

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remember that less than two percent of consumers actually take the time to

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write reviews and much like the people who show up at a

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city council meeting they're not necessarily representative of the

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opinions of the general population so with that in mind are we saying that

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online reviews are worthless well of course not just remember to keep

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your wits about you when you're reading them if you wouldn't take investment

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advice from you know your bankrupt cousin over thanksgiving dinner then you probably

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shouldn't take their advice on amazon.com either

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speaking of advice here's some advice private internet access supports a

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variety of vpn protocols and types of encryption and authentication this

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allows you to dial in the exact level of privacy protection that you need from

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your vpn they've got apps for Windows macOS Android iOS Linux and google

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chrome and they've got over 3 000 bare

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metal servers in 44 locations across 28

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countries with pia you can connect up to five devices at the same time with a

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single account and their apps include dns leak protection and ipv6 leak

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geographic location to get around pesky censorship and you can check it out at

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LMG.gigi pia techquickie we're going to have that

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linked below so thanks for watching guys like or dislike check out our other

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videos and leave a comment with a video suggestion we really like doing these

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topics on the things that you guys want to see also while you're down there

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