Soatok: Checklists Are The Thief Of Joy

I just got a chance to read this blog post, and I love it so I wanted to share in case someone missed it. It really sums up what I have been saying about these sorts of sites in offhand comments myself for a while, but @soatok actually takes the time to write down his thoughts in detail which is far more useful :sweat_smile:

I literally just yesterday saw someone (on YouTube, not here) point to a useless ā€œVPN comparison tableā€ as an example of someone else supposedly taking the time to ā€œthoroughly testā€ and be ā€œobjectiveā€ about VPNs lol

It also makes me glad we (Privacy Guides) never pursued this whole making-a-checklist thing. At some point I wanted to do sort of a comparison table based on our recommendations (which to be fair is the opposite of what most people do: make a comparison table and then draw their recommendations from it), because people fucking love their comparison tables and I knew it’d be shared widely. Unfortunately, Privacy Guides is still a very small community compared to others in this space, and I always want to change that.

Ultimately, I could not come up with a way to make one that communicates our recommendations in a way that’s both accurate and doesn’t appear deceptive. If there’s one thing crappy companies are good at, it’s checking boxes (and getting people accustomed to expect certain boxes via marketing, as he alludes to with the ā€œjurisdictionā€ point in the post).


One final thing I will add. I do think there is one exception: when a comparison table compares a single metric. Here’s a beautiful example of this from @yaelwrites, where the comparison table exclusively compares ā€œwhat sites does this service remove data fromā€ and not much else:

(I know he was not really referring to lists like this with his blog post in the first place, but I wanted an excuse to share it anyways lol)

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As a somewhat related sidenote, I noticed that deceptive checklists can consist of entire websites. Like, scammy versions of our own recommendations with little to no criteria on why they should be included. Since many checklist-esque websites are essentially paid advertising to shady services, I can’t agree with this sentiment enough. Bonus points if the website has ā€œhackerā€ graphics and neon green headers :rofl:

Shady VPN services and crypto exchanges asides, these websites often take advantage of SEO to get their website spread around folks new to the community. I don’t know how much website traffic they get but it must be substantial enough.

I’m glad we avoided this reputation but it is SO difficult to gain community trust. Even minor things like not including comparison tables can help so much.

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Yeah and what they decide to include or leave out is a big area where their subjective opinion bleeds through. If you look at almost any product page they have a heavily biased checklist of cherry-picked features that their app supports and other apps don’t, which are almost always technically accurate but they don’t tell the full picture.

I think we’re pretty open that we aren’t an objective source of info and we try to show what criteria we’re going by and what we value in the different categories, hopefully we’re open enough about our biases. There’s never really going to be a way to say one thing is objectively better than something else.

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