noretus

There have been a few times like this but I ran into it again today. I need to buy a simple custom cork for a project and I just sought a native vendor, pretty sure that I wouldn't find one.

Lo and behold, I was wrong. I found two Finnish sites selling cork products. But something doesn't feel right. Maybe it's the amount of products, there's too many - what would have to be a fairly small producer wouldn't have that large of a catalogue, I don't think. I read their About Page and it's just some fluffy "we're a family business" bit with photos that just look like random buildings. No place names, no people.

Their contact page points to Poland: Nowosolska 12 60-171 Poznan, Poland

Okay so we have an address but it really doesn't seem like a manufacturing place, it looks like a warehouse (sorry for Google). Their site doesn't have any info about where their products are produced etc. though they fluff about "high quality portugese cork".

It feels like an European front for a Chinese manufacturer.

I had the same experience looking into a cosmetics line from Flying Tiger / Normal stores. I dig into the brand and just find some random address in Denmark that doesn't seem to have anything like a factory in it. See: https://www.sence-essentials.com/, https://www.brandfix.dk/ or https://www.karium.com/ for a similar thing in UK. And at least for the latter product, I have the handcream that says "made in UK"... but I am very doubtful because I can't find any information about the manufacturing. Everything on their site is just marketing fluff. Linkedin is a bit better but because their sites are so... insubstantial I don't feel confident in the Linkedin either. There are no people on their sites though (besides what could just be stock models), maybe at most some name for a "contact us" person. At least when I check for example, Lumene, which is an established finnish cosmetics brand, I can take a look at their page and see pictures of what look like a real store, with real people, and I can see their factory at the street view with brand logos etc.

Am I just being kinda overly critical and paranoid or are others noticing this? Between Shopify sites that pretend to be small artisans just reselling Temu junk and AI generated webpages I've become really doubtful of every product that doesn't have very transparent production process with real names and faces attached to them.

Edit: Also yes btw, doing this type of digging is annoying and time-consuming. I want more rigorous labeling standards.

(X-posted from Reddit)

Back in the day, before algorithms etc. what we had was webportals that specialized in linking sites with interesting contents. These were manually updated by people who were interested in whatever their site was about.

We still have some stuff like this, arguably Reddit sort of functions in this way still but it's kind of a mix of the old way of peer-to-peer content sharing and algorithms (and let's face it: an ungodly amount of bots). However mostly it seems to have gone out of fashion due to automatic algorithms (+bots) out-competing manual posting from people. However this is mostly true for most common denominator type stuff. It's easy to have algorithms push some topic of interest in general but every topic in the world has sub-categories. The more niche you get, the more clumsy algorithms get - not to the point of vanishing completely but they're not usually so fine-tuned - it's easier to cater things that in general appeal to a wider audience.

This is where you as an unique human can step in, and you can do it on Mastodon on Lemmy, depending on which more suits your needs. For example, I like ASMR, but I'm super picky and I dislike a lot of the current trends (fast and aggressive and overly sexual). I know I'm not the only one so it occurred to me to combine what I'm already doing (looking for certain type of ASMR vids) with posting my findings to Mastodon, giving me a reason to A: use Mastodon and B: eventually have a useful link to give to people who want to find the type of ASMR I like (slow and minimalistic). I'm not a content creator, I'm not looking to make a career out of this but I already spend time looking for the content I like because the algorithm sucks. It doesn't take a lot of additional effort for me to just post what I find to the Mastodon feed (https://mastodon.social/@slowasmrpicks if you're interested). Now if i see someone on social media bemoan the difficulty of finding this particular kind of ASMR, I can give them the link to my list - conveniently also directing people to Mastodon. AND if I actually get followers, I'll also have a way of pushing Peertube or Dailymotion if people start posting there more.

So here's an idea for you, if you have some niche interest that you look up stuff on naturally, because it's your hobby... why not do what I'm doing? Make an account on Mastodon or Lemmy for that specific thing and just post the link to what you found.

To people who are of my generation (and Reddit users in general since this is kinda how Reddit works), maybe I'm being a bit obvious but it seems to me the younger generation isn't even used to thinking like this. Sure they get reviews for big media like games and movies, but not meta-content online. If you post on social media, it's supposed to be "your stuff" and then you beg for likes and reposts to get the algorithm to pick you up etc. Curated lists don't make as much sense in modern social media environments but I think on fediverse it could work AND it would help generate a reason to be there, which they currently need as very few actual content creators have migrated. Also note that I'm NOT telling you to copy the content and post it, just link to it so the creator gets the engagement as they should.

TL:DR: Find something cool online that pertains to your very specific interest that you already spend time looking for? Make a dedicated account for it on Fediverse and post the link.

Bonus Tip: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-links-webext/ (or similar for other browsers ) to strip URLs from any annoying tracking tokens.

Edit: As a side note, of course you can just post about some very general topic, why not. Just then you are competing with algorithms that are far more efficient at it than you are.

Tämä nyt kyllä vähän harmittaa. Just haluan enemmän eroon jenkkien palveluista.