Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse.<p>I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but  it just doesn&#x27;t work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don&#x27;t have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias.<p>For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what&#x27;s the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you.<p>Again, it&#x27;s different from what we have today because even though it&#x27;s tempting, sexy and scalable, it can&#x27;t be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.