I don’t have a specific name, but in general, I avoid review videos made by Indian Youtubers or Instagrammers in at least the following three domains: hotel/accommodation, restaurants, and automotives. For tech domains, we have a lot of other non-Indian options. For health/nutrition, I do not rely social media for them.
To be honest, I never understood why a good proportion of the educated crowd needs to be influenced by these influencers to do anything in life.
Who can keep up with all the new stuff coming out
Ankur Warikoo and Akshat Shrivastav are the main ones in financial domain, though any big time “fin-fluencer” is a hack
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You missed Finance With Sharan
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he’s done his own share of shady stuff for money.
Look at his truecaller video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDEhJvfC0UQ
He’s also done those sale videos recommending phones with terrible hanging issues, can’t find that one right now. definitely not someone you can trust.
Any website with a database of products is much more detailed in terms of availability and specifications compared to most of these influencers reading out the spec sheet and giving the same comments about look, feel and camera in qualitative terms like okay, good, great.
Saheli Chatterjee and Ishan Sharma also come to mind.
yeah, basically any big time finfluencer is just fleecing you for money
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Yeah, but how do you find out when something new comes out?
Good, bad or indifferent is a separate question.
There is no shortage of digital media announcements on any tech website. For mobiles, it is easy enough to look into something like GSMArena.
I think we’re just talking about reviewers from different domains, and in a perfect world, their existence makes sense to me. You can’t possibly know a lot about every domain, and need to rely on a better source of information that could help you form your judgement, be it friends/family, colleagues, marketplace/website reviews, YouTubers, etc.
For someone who doesn’t know anything about PCs, landing on a website with a spec sheet or info would only overwhelm them. You can say the same about someone who doesn’t know anything about cars, audio equipment, and so on. The idea that these reviewers/influencers, or some other people with significant knowledge in that domain could help you understand things or make your decision with ease is reassuring.
As I said, this works well in a perfect world, but with the caveat of brands dictating what some of these people say, and them being knowledgeable in the first place, makes this complicated. Who do you trust? And if you can’t trust anyone, what do you do? That person is back to square one and is in a position where they’re clueless. Sure, they could spend several hours, educate themselves about the domain as much as they can, try things out in person, and seek whatever unbiased/objective information they can, but that’s not always possible. Time has a large opportunity cost, and I know a lot of people who will be overwhelmed and just give up.
So I don’t think it’s as simple as you suggest it is, and that’s why so many of us resort to viewing content from other people who supposedly know a lot, and make things seem simpler, usually giving a straight opinion of whether something is good, bad, or a mixed bag.
Also, I don’t even know what this f***ktard Puneet “superstar” is supposed to be, especially on Instagram:
I agree on the point of accessibility. Most of my YouTube consumption is focused on learning about new topics and areas from professionals in those fields.
To a lot of people, I imagine that these YouTubers fill the same role where they see them as experts in the field when they are in fact just marketing those products without due knowledge or consideration for the consumer.
Only thing is I wouldn’t consider it time efficient as a single video would span 20 minutes advertising a single product compared to consuming more aggregated and streamlined information, which as you said might not be easily accessible, especially considering that Google is also now just an advertising engine gamed by SEO.
‘Hate’ isn’t the word I’d use for them here, but yeah, indian influencers for the most are in for the greed. Some start out well, but eventually get sold for money.
Tech reviewers are what I’m a bit familiar with. And except geeky Ranjit, I’ve found almost every youtuber out there to be milking stuff and being heavily biased for the products they review. Mainstream youtubers in this field don’t even make any sense. Every product they review has the same praises repeated over and over.
A shit sounding audio product is called ‘Amazing’ with most not even talking about the sound profile, let alone the technicalities and other stuff. Trakin Tech English, previously a pretty good channel, has also ruined itself with bias.
I haven’t seen his content for a few years so can’t say about present. But he just had a parody type instagram account, doing weird things, taking paid requests from people to make birthday wishes etc.
One of our college society(Club), even paid him to make a promo video for their event, But this was all around 3 years ago