You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy.

This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins.

There's no adblocker for this problem either. Google is complacent with their fat ad revenue and monopoly on search and doesn't care.

Battery powered hand tool systems are a big cost now, especially that brushless motor have got so good. Its important to think about them as a system, like will replacement batteries still exist in 2 years, can more tools work with the same battery, etc. That makes it harder to try something and see how good it is. I agree with you re many tools though. For tools I'd recommend talking to someone who works with them daily to get a real opinion, and wouldn't trust anything I read

My best guess is that by doing this they can raise margins on some items by making them lower quality or by charging more than they could otherwise get away with. If a brand has a great tool X, you might buy their lousy tool Y just to be able to use the same chargers and batteries.

For me, anyway, as a non-carpenter, I just end up with an annoying bespoke set of chargers and batteries.

The thing about their system is the whole only works so long as they keep you locked in. Once you make a choice you are locked into that choice and won't be looking at alternatives - but if they change batteries you suddenly are faced with the loss of your entire investment and so you are likely to look at the competition and might buy something else. That makes changing battery formats less attractive to the big brands trying to get people who buy a lot of tools.

The store brands have a different motivation: they know you won't be buying them again anyway, so they don't care. Changing formats means they can come up with some tiny reason the new one is better and try to sell the next customer on how their new battery is better.

If you are not a buying a lot of tools your plan isn't bad, just throw away the tools when the batteries die in 10 years. The tiny reasons some battery is better - over 10 years might add up to something slightly better than before anyway.

After the first ones broke we asked around and received only three recommended brands. DeWalt, Makita or the Blue Bosch line (in Germany). We went for DeWalt and never looked back. The power cells haven't changed in form or fitting in the years since and we could not be happier with performance and durability.

It is like deciding on a DSLR system. Once you are invested into Canon, Nikon, Sony or the likes with lenses and accessories you are locked in but also you learn to really know your tools and imho receive a productivity boost.

For example - whenever I am with other people and need to use their tools, I have to look at them and see how they work, what buttons/knobs are where and so on. With my DeWalt tools this is already muscle memory and the work as an extension of my arm - my brain uses them as if they were a part of me. This let's me focus more on the task I want to perform, not on the tool.

The smaller brands like Craftsman and "store brands" seem to change relatively randomly.

So eventually the cheapest tool makers get enough money to buy up the differentiated quality makers for their logo with enough branding power to price discriminate, and slap it on products from the same cheap factory line.

Then, ugh.

There’s also that motto of “I’m too poor to buy it twice”, which comes into play when item y has a price like 75% of the premium version and/or you know the tool will have some rough travel and high demand, or time lost from outage isn’t acceptable. Then just spend the money on known-solid brands.

Reviews are an area where I really value specialized forums more than social media or blogs or industry publications.

In all cases with reviews even when no monetization involved, there can be a bandwagon mentality for brands and also people convincing themselves the high price they paid matters for something (even though it may not).

The second time you buy a type of tool you definitely need to go for quality, the first time though, are you certain you're actually going to be constantly using that tool?

If the tool breaks quickly, that's not usually a terrible outcome. Most companies have at least a 90 day limited warranty you could take advantage of in that case. In many cases, you can even just return the damn thing to the store where you bought it and get a refund or exchange for a better tool. This, of course, assumes that the reason you needed the thing in the first place isn't incredibly time-sensitive, but, usually, it works out fine.

Of course, if it lasts forever, then, great! But, in the intermediate scenario, where you encounter the limitation of the tool a little ways down the road, that's actually where this strategy shines, because you get a chance to upgrade to a better tool without wasting a ton of money on top of the line equipment right away. I know photographers who do this with lenses all the time: they'll rent a new lens for a week or something, go out and shoot it to see how it really works, and then determine whether they want to commit to it. $100 spent on a lens rental has saved some of my friends more than $1000 on glass they don't need. And, if they ultimately do end up buying the lens, that $100 is $100 well spent for peace of mind that they will actually get the use out of the thing that they actually bought it for. And, I think the Harbor Freight strategy makes a lot more sense if you view the initial purchase from HF as possibly a long term rental.

Now, there is that one caveat that you need to buy "the cheapest tool that could possibly work." If you're a professional machinist, for instance, don't go buying a $5 caliper and thinking that will be good. Go and spend the $150 or whatever on a Mitutoyo instrument to begin with, because you know damn well you will need it. This is just an example I pulled from personal experience, as I needed a caliper for hobby purposes a few years ago and ended up looking at things ranging from that $5 caliper on up to precision instruments. For my purposes, the low end is totally fine, because I don't need accuracy better than 0.1mm, and it's not my professional livelihood on the line. But, if you're a professional, never trust an instrument that doesn't come with a certificate of calibration.

I've also used this strategy with good success on photography equipment, myself. I wanted a DSLR camera I could use to take pictures for hobby purposes, mostly intended for web use. I did a little research and decided that a used Nikon D3400 was for me. So, I went to eBay, found one that only had about 1200 clicks on the shutter that came with the 18-55 kit lens and the original box for $325 (tax and shipping included), and I bought it. I augmented that with a used 90mm Tamron macro lens for under $150 and I was good to go.

It has one or two small limitations that either only come into play outside of the original use case I had in mind, or which aren't really annoying enough to mention, but, for the most part, it's been a spectacular camera that I spent under $500 on, as opposed to spending $1000 on a Z50 (or, you know, gone really crazy and gotten a D850 or a Z9), and then another $900 on a new Nikon 105mm macro lens, but, for my purposes, I can take photos that are 95% as good as what I could ultimately produce with the more expensive equipment, but, I can legitimately say this strategy has saved me over $1000.

I did exactly the same thing when I started learning to play the cello. A new, carved wooden cello suitable for a student probably runs around $2000-2500, and that doesn't necessarily include a decent bow. This is also an instrument one will certainly grow out of if one continues playing. I did my research and went out and bought a Yamaha electric for $3000 and went to a cello shop to try out bows, ending up with a nice $1200 bow. I ended up with an instrument I'll never outplay and a bow that will last me years. The alternative would have probably been a much less playable bow and instrument, or a lot more money expended.

But I can't pay more to get a higher quality version of the tool, because the store doesn't even bother stocking a higher quality version.

If I plan ahead, I can shop online and find a quality tool. But what I really want is the option to buy a quality tool during a weekend project.

There's also just quality of life. As a DIYer I'm not particularly concerned about wearing out tools. But still I might want to pay more for better ergonomics, ecosystem compatibility, power, tolerances, or other non-longevity qualities, rather than being stuck with an adequate but suboptimal tool that gets the job done while bothering me.

On that note though, an even worse practice is when a brand achieves notoriety for quality and starts making "light" versions of their tools. One example of this before they went belly up was Craftsman making nearly identical looking "Sears" brand that weren't covered by the craftsman warranty. Bosch also did this with pimping out their brand name to extend to rather crappy home appliances here in the EU. Black and Decker was synonymous with reliability in the early 80s, and I still have some jigsaws and circular saws from my dad that work great from that era, but anything from them now is arguably worse than the cheapest things you can buy at Harbor Freight.

It's an incentive problem. It's extremely difficult to get incentives aligned over a timeline longer than a few years that it might take for options or stock to vest or clawbacks to expire.

The batteries on my ~20 year old Craftsman cordless drill are finally getting to the point where they won't hold a charge. I'll probably have to bite the bullet and wade into the mess of "brand-name" tools the next time I have a significant project.

But anyhow, what happened with B&D has happened to so many previous quality brands. It's really frustrating to me.

I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry.

Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loaded machines and Rogue frames/racks.

Cooking: Look in the commercial kitchen of a high end restaurant - that's where I first saw my commercial microwave being used.[1]

TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport.

[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/microwaves-and-m...

Huh. Trying to imagine someone doing that and not getting detained. "I just wanted to read the model number, officer, I swear!"

Other than that, good advice. :)

“You…treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you’d made. And now it’s full and overflowing, and you’re fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich. Goodbye!”

Adblocking isn’t simply convenience it’s life-preserving.

Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get downvoted and replies saying "don't buy this"

Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.

The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog

So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.

By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?

Would you know if it did?

I think Google dropped the ball on their search objectives in this department. Why is it so bad at helping us search products? If I specify something with 2-3 conditionals why can't it match all the clauses, filter out fake reviews, out of stock, not shipped to my region and such?

They don't want to help us find what we want to buy, they want to sell us what the advertisers have to sell, and the two don't match. They want to sell us things we don't need, this is the reason we never buy anything from the ads and their whole industry is a scam.

And no, their service is not supported by ads - You have to pay for a subscription. Consumer Reports needs to be mentioned more IMO. Because even on reddit, there are companies that offer advanced stealth-like astroturfing campaigns for products/services.

The counterargument is that Consumer Reports could be intruded by corporate shills, but their reputation is solid and they've been around for a long time.

Link: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/index.htm

We can do better than CR - but right now, afaict they're the best we have.

My go-tos are sites like Wirecutter, where it seems like the hit to their reputation would be too high to be blatantly bought-out, even if they'll generally only hawk products that can be bought on Amazon or other sites that give them affiliate money. They're not always perfect, but I trust that they're trying to do what they set out to do.

The main issue with most review sites is that they're kids. Companies like NYT/Wirecutter don't want to pay old men that are experts in manufacturing. They hire kids with little life experience to review something like a washing machine. They haven't had 2 or even 1 washing machine in their entire lives. They wouldn't even be capable of doing a teardown. Let alone identifying which parts are quality vs not.

Unless of course your main qualification is not trying to find something that is built to last. Which is the hardest thing to get these days. Finding garbage like electronics and software is easy. Everyone wants to sell you software rather than high quality manufactured goods. And I want the least software possible as I'm very anti-technology for a software developer.

My research sources would be roughly in this order:

1. Consumer Reports (teardowns, can't beat this method. You pay them directly, if interested in least conflict of interest)

2. Wirecutter (good for a free source, but puts near-zero weight on reliability)

3. Amazon reviews (can find some old timers reviewing there but always keep in mind that most people aren't very intelligent. They maintain nothing and won't skim a manual)

4. Reddit (a lot of zero life experience kids on that, meaning generally anyone under 40)

5. Then whatever else you can find on the web

Looking past the bargain and location aspects, this site is super useful for understanding products in greater detail

  Best dishwashers 2022 -amazon

You’ll most likely end up on Reddit but sometimes make some good discoveries.

The net-net of all of this is that I buy a lot more stuff from brick and mortar stores now, where they've done the curation, and will only carry the stuff that sells best per square foot, and minimizes their returns.

Almost everything about fridges nowadays wants to promote the virtues of the amazing new features associated with them.

After hours of searching, I narrowed it down to 3 models. All were the most basic fridge & freezer combo I could find. Exactly one of them was in stock, so I got that one.

I'm doing this myself before I buy a treadmill. I want the most reliable one, not the most tech features, and while my hunch is Sole is the one for me based on their warranty, I'm going to confirm with CR before dropping $1,600 on one.

The problem is that people plug their ears and put blinders on to avoid spending $30 for teardown advice from an outfit like Consumer Reports. Too cheap for their own good.

This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.

There's quite a lot of HN readers who work for businesses that derive most of their revenue from ads (Google, Facebook, content companies, etc) so there's always going to be people here who are willing to stand up for ads. The famous Upton Sinclair quote is quite appropriate - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mLxyIXpSY

I get what you're trying to say, but here's a counter example. I have a hobby of astrophography. I live in a rural area without many other people nearby interested in the stars, much less a highly technical hobby like astrophography.

Asking on message boards like cloudynights, or reddit gets you a lot of well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level.

I'm currently building an observatory and I need input on which mount to use in my observatory. I don't have a good concept of what to buy for it as I've only dealt with really beginner mounts and I'm not a beginner anymore, and there's no astrophography retail stores within travel distance. Online advice is poor and hard to weed out those who are beginners meaning well and those who actually know what they're talking about.

However, to pull us back to what we're talking about here, I get a magazine for the industry called Sky and Telescope and it has ads. To me, ads are one of the best things about that magazine because it lets me know what options I have that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, or have any way to compare.

Though to be fair, ads in a magazine don't spy on you, don't infect your computer, don't move and steal attention and don't follow you around. But I think there is a place for targeted, well behaved ads.

I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.

And occasionally I still get those but lately almost all ads I see are some interesting headline that then takes me to a page with an for nonsense products every paragraph and an extremely fluffy article to tell me that dinosaurs had feathers / the Romans had steam engines or something similar.

I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.

On the other side of the spectrum: using the Instagram app was the first time in my life I felt positive about the ads I was being shown. I was shown ads for microdosing psilocybin (it's legal here) which blew my mind hahah. It's almost like I got through the uncanny valley and into the other side where ads are actually relevant!

Pretty weird since I almost never use Facebook. But I use Google, GMail and YouTube all the time ... and yet, the YouTube and Google Ads really suck! (They seem to be based on IP address rather than identity: I keep getting shown stuff that's obviously based on my housemate's browsing.)

To be clear there was still the gross undercurrent of "okay, why the hell do they know that?" but it was nice to see it actually working as intended for once.

For a lot of consumer tech companies, it's less about providing value to consumers and more about extracting value from them. Between vendor lock-in, privacy violations, and arbitrary one-sided changes in service, it's straight out of an abusive partner's playbook.

In the case of electronics and photography gear it takes a huge amount of reading between the lines to interpret reviews even assuming the reviews are honest.

For instance at the Best Buy website there is a review for a photo printer where the user posted photographs of utterly ruined prints they made on this printer. Well, I've made prints like that too when I put the paper in upside down. That's what happens when you put the wrong side of the paper in.

A decade ago the story about Sigma lenses on Canon bodies was that 90% of them were OK but 10% were defective in subtle ways (like the autofocus doesn't quite lock on) Sigma on Sony today seems to be better. When you're reading reviews though you have to guess "did this person get a bad instance of the product or did this person have the wrong expectations for how this was supposed to perform."

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvbusjDOspQ

Oh this heinous shit is not just limited to cheap tat. Samsung will happily sell you their highest end TVs for four figures with unremovable banner ads in the source menu.