I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a new food processor). Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should.

I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!

I used to be a subscriber. Theoretically I like CR's approach better than Wirecutters; CR purchases their products anonymous and therefore should be quite impartial and totally independent, receiving no special treatment or assistance from manufacturers.

But I found that they simply didn't update their guides nearly often enough to be useful.

Wirecutter's modern twist on CR's formula -- maintaining a frequently updated leaderboard in popular product categories, plus information on deals -- just winds up being more useful to me.

It also seems like Wirecutter has more relevant experts writing their articles. Maybe that's because they're actually better experts; maybe it just seems that way because WC articles begin with the author/authors stating their credentials and experience.

The appliances I bought using their advice has been hit/miss - ranges are decent but the fridges and dishwasher I bought are noisy and required service barely outside warranty period. These are big name brands too.

I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to keep track of.

I wouldn't count the appliance reliability against CR as this great article shows appliance industry is doing it on purpose:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365

Typical cartel-like, profit-boosting activity of oligopolies which appliance market seems to be with a handful of companies owning most brands.

Consumer Reports is top nouch and very thorough.

It can be a bit behind on the far changing stuff like electronics, and it can be pricey.

But I've never found them lacking in quality and detail.

Good trick

Also, with bad reviews, you can keep in mind if the bad reviews seem to be legitimate complaints, or whether they're just written by either someone with an axe to grind or someone who doesn't understand the purpose of the product. For example, some negative reviews of textbooks on Amazon seem to be people who are reviewing a course they took using the textbook. And some negative reviews of restaurants on Yelp seem to have wanted the restaurant to serve a different kind of food than they do.

Also also, regarding restaurant reviews: Always consider that a negative review that only calls out bad service is quite possibly a review of the reviewer more than the restaurant. Anecdotally, I've seen my share of notes of bad service for restaurants that I frequent and have never had issues. I suspect that the reviewer had at least some part to play in such issues, but conveniently leave out or drastically underplay their own contributions.

> annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one.

Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.

That's also good heuristic for 1. - if you're looking for a community about $obscure_topic, there's a good chance there exists reddit.com/r/$obscure_topic. Personally, I always search for a related subreddit as a first order of business when researching an unfamiliar area.

Yeaaaaaaaaahhhhhh hmmmm.

I have very mixed feelings about that. I have some serious experience there; I moderate a subreddit dedicated to audio hardware in which people often ask for and receive purchasing advice.

So on the plus side, you have some fairly knowledgeable people offering advice.

However, even your average "enthusiast" is pretty lacking. No enthusiast has experience with enough relevant speakers to really give informed recommendations. There are thousands of speakers on the market. I've used... dozens? And owned... half a dozen? I mean, nobody has direct experience with even one percent of what's on the market. We try to supplement that direct experience by staying on top of reviews and things, so we have a sense for what's popular and seems to have garnered a lot of happy owners, but it's still very conjectural.

And speakers are a product category where it is somewhat possible to own multiple products, and there is a semblance of objective measurement possible. So we have it easy.

What if you want to buy a fridge? Or silverware? Or socks? Or blankets? There probably aren't fridge enthusiasts and if there are, it's doubtful they own many fridges each. So, you wind up with users just giving anecdotal stories, tainted with heavy doses of confirmation bias, because of course people want to like the fridge they spent their cash on.

Or, worse, you get the opposite effect: brands that sell lots of volume will appear to have the highest failure rate, even if their failure rate is low. If you knew nothing about cars, or the sales volumes for various brands, combing the internets would give the impression that Corollas fail much more often than Lamborghinis. Because tales of mechanical problems for Corollas probably outnumber those for Lambos by a factor of 1,000:1. (My wife owns a Corolla! It's had a problem or two) Which would seem really damning if you didn't know that Corollas outsell Lambos probably 100,000:1 and in reality are probably an order of magnitude more reliable.

You get this effect with Apple products: any Apple-related forum has countless horror stories of failures from Apple owners. But, Apple products are actually generally reliable compared to the competition. It just so happens that they're the Corolla in this analogy, not the Lambo.

Do you mean this [Cool Tools](http://kk.org/cooltools/) (http://kk.org/cooltools/)?

Yeah! It's pretty good IMO, are you a fan? The links are Amazon referral links (same with Wirecutter) so I still try to be heathily skeptical but I've found both to be reliable...

I just googled it. Can't say I'm a fan, I didn't even know about it. It seems very focused on home-maintenance and tools, which I know nothing about, but I'll certainly check it out in greater depth ;)

Good trick on the #2, reading the negative reviews. Of course, now that you've mentioned it here - soon enough that'll be gamed, too.

Not OP, but tbh, I thought that was more or less common practice. Many people I know do that already.

I tend to only look at 1-star reviews and 5-star reviews in passing. The first ones are obviously pissed with the product and that will colour their opinions. The latter are either enthusiasts that will love everything about it or people that heve just received it and/or are still on the honeymoon phase. I think ignoring them outright is as bad as focusing only on them, but I don't pay them too much attention.

I find that focusing on the reviews around the middle (and, of course, the number of those compared to the total number of reviews) usually gives me a better idea of the pros and cons of a product.