The war to sell you a mattress
This reminds me a lot of the web hosting industry, which also has a huge issue with questionable review sites set up for affiliate payments and hosting companies owning supposedly neutral sites about the industry.There are at least a few active forums you can ask about good hosting companies on (which is something the mattress buying process seems to lack), but then you have to deal with astroturfing and companies 'hinting' that you should use their service in every post.Either way, I think these industries (and many others) are in this situation because the internet has just made good, high quality journalism unprofitable. Along with clickbait and actual lies, it seems affiliate commissions are where the money is in writing nowadays, meaning there's a huge incentive to write pandering crap and an equally large disincentive to care about being a truly helpful source for this information.