One market where this has always been a problem is tools. So almost 20 years ago we were told in shop class that the industry magazines and reviews were basically all paid for by manufacturers. The solution we learned was to always buy the cheapest option first. If it breaks or fails to meet your needs understand how and why and then move on to a more costly tool that you can demonstrate is better in the specific way you need it to be. Of course thats not always practical or feasible but for the majority of items it really is.

Just an aside as a former carpenter:

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

Batteries are a point of vendor lock-in and forced obsolescence. Not saying modern tech isn’t great, but young me who spent all that money tooling up with cordless has changed to older me who honestly prefers corded or hosed (or even ICE) tools when the application allows for it, not just for the longevity of the tool but the power (amps/psi), lighter weight, and availability of service (no issues with charging, temperature problems, etc) during a job.

Can anyone explain why such systems are so seemingly successful? I find it surprising. It seems great to create vendor lock-in, but they also change the form factor frequently enough that you have to replace your entire system in order to benefit from it being a system anyway; at which point you might change vendors. It feels like the first vendor that stops changing form factor wins; but they all still keep changing them.

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 major brands do not change formats often. The store brands do change formats though. By Milwaukee or Dewalt and you will have tools and parts for many years, or even Ryobi if you want to save a penny. (There are others, just the 3 that come to mind).

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.

When my SO and I were renovating our home we followed some advice like the ones in this thread. First we had relatively cheap power tools. One the one hand early on we could not easily afford to invest more and also we wanted to learn what we really needed.

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.

Never leave out Makita if mentioning electric tools :)

Milwaukee is still selling their nicad batteries, if you were in that platform before. The big brands (and this includes Ryobi, etc) do not change their batteries much at all.

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

For a lot of people "cheapest tool first" is their goto (and not for the principled reason you shared).

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.

A lot of times the price differential is such that I can buy two or three of item x for the price of a single premium version. If you seldom use the tool and it isn’t getting handled a lot (transportation, etc), this is the way. You can replace the item and still come out ahead.

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).

This strategy is smarter than it sounds at first. If you don't have any obvious criteria for comparison available, failing fast and iterating on that is a way to come up with criteria by yourself.

It requires a strong character to throw away things when they don't work well. I bought the cheapest drilling machine and it is so bad I end up borrowing one from a neighbor when I need to drill something. But I can't make myself to throw away the useless one.

I’m also unable to throw things away, but I do give things away or sell at a fraction very often. It’s also a fun past time. I don’t have anything useless at home anymore.

Where I live, Craigslist works really well for this situation - someone will take it away for free for sure and you might even be able to get something for it.

This is what I do. I just put in "first email I get gets it" people will be at your house in an house or less to grab it. I'm always honest like "The bearings seem a little wobbly to me, but if you want it, it's yours if you can show up and pick it up today"

Sometimes the cost for a quality piece of gear is incremental though, so you buy a harbor freight thingamajig then it breaks so you buy the Milwaukee thingamajigfor twice the price, for a total of 300% of the cost of the original thing. You could have saved 30% in that case by just buying the good thing in the first place.

Alternatively this thingamajig is so rarely used that you buy the harbor freight version and use it a few times a year. It becomes a life long tool and you save a fair bit of the price.

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?

The only exception to watch out for is when buying a crappy version of x will negatively color your new experiences with an activity. Tools meant for precision but the cheap versions are plastic rattle traps that get out of calibration/alignment from basic use can be extremely frustrating to someone just getting started in an activity. The user may throw their hands up and quit whereas a good quality tool would have made their new hobby more enjoyable/accessible (e.g. no, it’s not you, you’re just fighting a really crappy tool every step of the way). Again, tasks/activities that require repeatable precision come to mind here.

I'd argue then that the level of usage dictated a better one. Most people don't actually use tools to failure. I've owned edging tools, routers, sanders, even a small metal lathe from Harbor freight that have handled 10+ years of very occasional use just fine. If you're using things so much that they fail, yes, buy a more quality version. If it fails on the first use, Harbor freight happens to have a very generous return / exchange policy within the first 30 days.

Harbor Freight also has lifetime warranties on many of their products.

You risk saving 100% to save 30%.

You have to expect that this will happen a certain amount of the time when you use the "buy the cheapest tool" strategy. Of course, really, it's not "buy the cheapest tool"; it's "buy the cheapest tool that could possibly work," sort of like "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" in agile.

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.

This is why I really appreciate YT channels like Project Farm.

That guy gives masterclasses on fast, efficient data presentation with every video. I really appreciate his approach.

I've noticed a problem when I try to buy tools (especially automotive tools): The only tools available locally are cheap and crappy. I know they are crappy because half the reviews state that it didn't even work once.

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.

Harbor Freight is there for you!

This is why (in the US) I buy what I can from Harbor Freight. Unless it's something that can have critical safety issues if things go bad.

This is how my sad thought me to buy tools just seems insane to go expensive cause best every time..

In the days of Amazon (aka Aliexpress) that advice has to become more nuanced though. You still need a baseline of fitness-for-purpose rather than one-click buying a GENSYM Cordless Drill and thinking it might possibly suffice. And the traditional go-to of (brick and mortar curated) Harbor Fright has become somewhat expensive thanks to Trump's inflation, as well as increasing margins due to popularity (see also: Monoprice).

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.

Buy the one from Harbor Freight, return it when it breaks.

Harbor Freight's "low quality" tools will work for a great many average home owners doing some upgrading or light work. We absolutely fall into the trap of wanting the best thing ever, but how many people actually need the top of the line Milwaukee or Makita brand biscuit joiner for the 2 tables they ever make at 200$, vs the Harbor Freight one at 60 that you can probably find a coupon for to make it 45-50?

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.

I'm sure a bunch of executives made nice bonuses selling the brand value down the river, though.

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.

I managed to get a 48" flex bit stuck in my wall when I was running ethernet last summer. Since it was the last hole I needed and it only cost me $9 at Harbor Freight, I left it in the wall and called it good. The $90 bit from Home Depot probably would have meant removing a bunch of drywall and then having to patch it.

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.

For a replacement like that, it's probably worth watching for Father's Day and other sales. With cordless tools, you're really buying into a battery accessory system, and it's good to know what tools are available for the battery you select.

100%. One of the areas I will spend more on is cordless tools. The modern Dewalt stuff has built me a deck and a campervan, and when it comes to lawn tools the E-go stuff has been fantastic. Both of those definitely locked me into a "system" as you say but both also covered just about any future use case I would have.

I have a 72 inch drill bit "stored" up in my attic amongst the rafters. There was one particular location where I really needed it at that time, so I just left it up there. I think it costs $15 off Amazon. If I never need it again, I figure I can deal with the hassle of getting it down from the attic.

For your 20 year old Craftsman, seriously look around for aftermarket replacement batteries. You might find them out there for pretty cheap. I did for my DeWalt.

Man, you said it about B&D. My family owned a small business, now bankrupt. One of the things my dad did to try to save it was start selling tools retail. He's very brand loyal, and of an older generation, so he was convinced selling B&D in the 90s was the way to go. The tools were such plastic crap. Meanwhile we had mid century era versions of the same tools in the workshop at home that were still going strong. Obviously my dad's idea didn't work. We got creamed by big box stores and the brands they hawk. And honestly rightfully so.

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

"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."

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...

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

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. :)

Well, it was ASE. It's a pretty chill airport :)

The irony of this is that Rogue's popularity is due in no small part to their close partnership with Westside Barbell, a quirky club obsessed with both high-end equipment and steroid usage in equal measure. There's a lot of bad equipment out there, but the majority of people, training at home or in a gym, do not need Rogue equipment, and I'm willing to bet that Rogue has higher margins than some of the other good equipment manufacturers.

Agree with others, great advice. I suggested this once for my partner - she needed a laptop and loved her work laptop, so I suggested she look for a refurbished version of her work laptop for personal use, as business laptops often are fairly cheap after their warranty expires and the original owner returns it. She still uses it to this day.

This is great advice. This is what I did when I was looking for a heavy bag and other equipment. I looked at what the dojo had and bought those.

But how the industry pulls that off? They do open calls for equipment and buy in bulk?

It's the market for lemons problem. If it's your job, it's worth it to learn all you need to know to differentiate between junk and quality. If you're buying one of the 75 different appliances in your home, you'll probably just look at a review site, which can easily be gamed by companies selling junk.

The industry has large, potentially repeating customers, who use the equipment until it fails and who often have the resources to sue if a supplier screws then over too badly. This moves the risk/reward sweet spot for vendors towards the “provide good product for fair price” end and away from the “build shoddy malicious crap and spend your money on advertising.”

And I learn that Google is actually upset that its search results are suffering degradation by rampant, runaway SEO—they reap what they sow, and at everyone’s expense. Such brought to mind The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner as the web faces its own environmental collapse:

“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.

I type "reddit" after the query and Reddit usually has good recommendations.

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"

I used to type “reddit” after my searches to look for genuine and real reviews, but even that is now being gamed.

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.

For me the problem with Reddit is not even the astroturfing. It's that, similarly to SEO and Google, people have figured out the kind of posts and replies that get upvotes. So, on niche subreddits, you get a lot of folklore and second-hand advice repeated by people addicted to internet points, or, like other poster put it better below, "well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level". The Geil-Mann Amnesia Effect is strong in that site.

yeah, the other day I ran afoul of that practice

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

This is 100% the case when I was looking for a VPN recommendation.

So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.

Another think you'll see a lot of is bots looking for "listical" and blog info so some side hustle person can piece together an article on something they know next to nothing about.

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

Most of the VPN discussion/coupon subs are literally run by the VPN companies themselves. r/VPNCoupons and r/VPN are run by Surfshark, for example. Nord and CyberGhost also run astroturf rings for themselves too.

This is one downside I will agree is a consequence of tracking technology on the web. There is no way for "genuine" discoverability to hide on the internet anymore. After a while, sites will start noticing that their purchase traffic is coming from Reddit so they'll start targeting it and before you know it, even the bad producers/products are being spammed there.

Meh if you put a little effort into it by checking the post & comment history of the person doing the review it should give you a clue. Sure some companies have bought accounts with lots of Karma and "good will" in the past but I think that's pretty rare.

I do this too, but that behaviour has zero way of noticing false negatives.

> 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

Would you know if it did?

so far all of the products i’ve bought have been decent. Also i see products i know are good recommended, and ones i know are bad people say to avoid

> 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.

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.

The only solution I found to that is to bypass google completely and directly go search on Reddit, where real humans have human opinions (sometimes HN, too).

Consumer Reports does a great job at giving honest reviews. They go through multiple steps to ensure manufacturers don't know they're purchasing their products as well (to avoid getting beefed up 'review units').

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

I use CR, but they do miss the target sometimes. They extrapolate a lot between models, sometimes farther than I think is justified by saying they are 'similar'. And occasionally they make really boneheaded recommendations that I just don't understand. On their recommendation I bought a Samsung washer and dryer pair, which both broke within the first 12 months. A bit of research on the appliance forum, and it turns out that all the repair guys say pretty much the same thing -- don't buy Samsung appliances, they're unreliable crap. As someone who owns three Samsung appliances (the third being a refrigerator), I wholeheartedly agree. Never again. Refrigerators are notoriously unreliable regardless of manufacturer, but Samsung really sets the bar pretty low.

So they're definitely not perfect - but it seems like they do far, far more research than the average online source, and are far more reliable, more consistently reliable, and have a much wider array of tested devices (as opposed to a blogger who might test a bunch of products in one specific category).

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

wirecutter on samsung refridgerators seems like one the fairest assessments i've seen: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-refriger...

And unfortunately, you're never really sure on Reddit, either. I found I was too willing to put those, what, 5-10 voices telling me to pick a certain brand up on a high pedestal, because they seemed like real people. They didn't sound like advertisers. But, honestly, how hard is it to fake 5-10 accounts to push your product, or buy high-karma accounts?

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.

I'm a Consumer Reports + self-investigation guy (using all sources). I do use Wirecutter but I put low weight on their ultimate recommendations. I use them to find what else is out there.

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

To be fair(er) to WC, most of their review introductions typically mention interaction with people with longer histories in whatever the relevant business is, so it's clear that they recognize their outsider status. How much interaction they really have with these niche experts and what impact it has on their reviews, I don't know.

Let me share a resource with you, where an experienced community with skin in the game review products under the context of bargain hunting! www.ozbargain.com.au

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

I find the best results on reddit when I look for the same company selling only that type of thing. They often moderate the sub on that topic and are very open about being a seller of it, and know their product. Note this is actually selling the product - not to be confused with amazon links. They need to have a real business, and while they moderate the sub they never have links to their store (instead it is search my profile to buy from me).

4chan's /g/ for tech gear and /diy/ for bigger gear is great for that sort of thing. There's "generals" for common subjects like headphones, PC building etc, and "stupid questions thread" where you can ask about anything. Do note that 4chan can be very offensive and politically incorrect, you need a bit of a thick skin to get along there.

Try:

  Best dishwashers 2022 -amazon

All websites with affiliated links disappear.

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

I have yet to find a question Reddit has a good answer for, so I also add `-site:reddit.com` if my query has been SEO'd into a page full of their spam.

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.

Pretty much my approach too. The one channel became too horrible so switch back.

I feel like "scale" on the Internet has gone completely off the rails and has become just worthless "noise." Sure, anyone can post and sell whatever they want, but you lose all notions of reputation and trust. It all becomes a shouting match among those who can ad-spam and SEO their way to the top. Those shitty fly-by-night randomly-named Chinese brands on Amazon come to mind.

See also Youtube/Spotify/etc view/listen/impression farms. It really does make it so much noise, you can pretty much guarantee any large scale account is using these too and bot followers because it's an arms race for attention.

This was my experience when trying to buy a new fridge. Due to the design of my kitchen, there is a very narrow choke point leading into it. There is no door. As a result I have to very careful when shopping for fridges. Mostly simply will not fit.

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.

The answer to deceptive online reviews is Consumer Reports. While the web initially made CR not worthwhile, as time progressed it's once again very valuable. I would never buy any appliances without paying for a subscription first.

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.

I love the 'best of' sites that only have Amazon links. If its not on Amazon it must not exist and could not possibly be the best, right? But some brand from China you've never heard of will be on the list.

Speaking of which, anyone know what happened at The Verge? It may not ever have been a bastion of great journalism, but these days 30-50% of the content is (occasionally well-targeted) product advertising or "you can now buy the Xbox here for the best price ever" or "Walmart has this promo right now". It's such a noticeable and abrupt change to the content mix.

This is something I had to teach my dad. But he believed it thoroughly until he had a few high purchase items fail outside of warranty. My advice to him has been look for customer reviews and he suspicious of the positive ones and aware of all the negative ones. My other advise is buy from a reputable distributor like Costco who makes returning something incredibly easy.

YouTube is pretty good here. The algorithm does a pretty good job at providing results that aren't the equivalent of blog spam and it is immediately obvious when you are watching a low quality video.

consumerreports.org does exactly what you want, but you have to pay for it. if you don't want to pay for it, then you get what you pay for. google isn't complacent. google has a large number of paying customers that aren't you. you don't live in a socialist utopia. you live in a world where things cost money. you can pay for the information you want, or someone else can pay for you to have the information they want you to have.