With the power and supposed transparency of the internet comes a serious threat, that of shills.
You may wonder what a shill is, we did too, we must be very naive, as this is probably our least topical story, but we’d heard about it a a few times and only yesterday dug into the matter some more, a shill is a person, a forum member or a blogger that pretends to be a user whilst being in effect a member of staff, be it via true employment or via gifts.
A shill will pretend to be a normal Joe Bloggs on a forum, pretend to have bought a multicopter and rave about how good it is and typically shout down anyone with a negative opinion or fly-away.
For review purposes most companies will provide said review item for free or actually pay for the review, some reviewers pretend to take the high moral ground by saying they were not paid for a review whilst forgetting to mention they could keep their review item, which itself makes any review biased. Given the time and effort taken to do reviews, we have no issue with people keeping review gear but it would be welcome to see more openness.
As users we need to understand marketing and ask questions no matter the reviews that are presented to us as facts.
