Currently I only trust reddit for "genuine" reviews. Seems like Amazon reviews these days are gamed to the max. Once companies figure this out and reddit has a high degree of astroturf it will be impossible to find out what normal, unbiased (as in don't have an agenda) humans think about a product.

I suspect that once that fails, the next step is going to be having to join the Discord server or whatever chat-group exists for that niche. Then asking for a recommendation from some weirdo whose super obsessed with gloves or whatever. The future is weird.

Super niche forums have existed for this need for many years and cover everything from multi-tools and flashlights to makeup and perfume. It's just that they require more effort to use and many are disappearing due to social media.

I used to drive down those ratholes but found the superniche items of choice tended to be dated, hard to find, expensive & suffered from hyper-optimization. Worst of all due to being dated, I found mainstream products were actually comparable to superior in nearly all measures.

Gloves Reviews Discord Server, I actually lol'd

Proper glovemaking actually requires a surprising amount of skill. Even crappy gloves do.

one of my private slacks started a collab spreadsheet of products we have found and now swear by.

But reddit is flawed in a different way - it's extremely biased towards the trendy and the fashionable.

For example if you search reddit for what computer mouse to buy, you'll be told that unless it weighs less than 70g and has holes, it's utter shit and not worth your money.

Bleh. I see those honeycombed mice and I automatically mentally fill all the holes with finger-crud and dust. No ty.

That's when you hit up r/builtForLifeMice... That's one of the strengths of Reddit: you can get ever increasingly niche with your community.

I was expecting a real sub ha! It wouldn't surprise me

I suspect reviews have been gamed for some time. Now it seems like all reviews are always gamed. I even have a conspiracy theory that Amazon is gaming Costco products. A number of their household products have had sub-3 star reviews; seems suspicious. I still feel somewhat confident in products with over 1k reviews. The same goes for reading a few reviews and "trusting" the helpful ones to some extent.

Reddit works in many (not all) cases for reviews because if there's something falsey enough, you can often count on the hive mind to provide many points as to why that is fake, links to reliable sources on better info, or alternative experiences and documentation (photos/vids) to back it up. Unlike retailer sites or Amazon, where the platform has a vested interest in just getting you to hit Buy, Reddit has no such issues, and there's no real policing of dissenting reviews.

It is self-policing in some ways. But again, some review categories are better for this than others, and the hive mind can be susceptible to hype and astroturf.

I used to work for on of those "review" websites and it completely ruined my trust in most online product review sites. It's all just affiliate links, optimized for which offer pays out the highest conversion fee, with little to zero regard for the actual product.

I would pay a decent amount of money for a tool that just filtered out any sites in Google search that promote products using affiliate links.

What about something like The Wirecutter? Would you trust them?

Any time money is involved I have to believe there will always be a motive, however small, to alter results for financial benefit. It's common for other "trusted" media companies to be impacted by their advertisers - why would the NYT be immune?