All of the google results are articles that were obviously written by a machine and recommend the same ten most popular products. There are communities for every conceivable type of product on reddit, but they are all full of people saying things like "this $ 500 toaster is a pretty good starter, but you'll soon want to upgrade to this $ 1200 one, it has a much fuller set of features." I've had to resort to watching youtube videos, but even those are unreliable because they benefit from calling each product the best or worst ever.
I feel like it wasn't like this just five or ten years ago. Did things actually change, or am I just misremembering?
The internet as a tool for information in general is barely functional. Ratings astroturfed into meaninglessness, articles entirely obscured by advertising to the point of site non-functionality, search engine optimization bending toward ad sales, destructive social media algorithms, automated IP and copyright systems designed to be abused, and on and on.
If anyone needs me I'll be in the woods growing my beard and writing manifestos.
I didn't know we had that emoji. Maybe the internet isn't completely worthless after all.
Which is why both the capital and political classes have been trying to eradicate public libraries entirely for almost 50 years and the internet was the final great excuse - who needs a local library when they can just go on line!?
You are completely right, and it feels like it's happening with everything. Late Capitalism is running out of monopolies and avenues of profit, which is making things more condensed, weirder and more artificial, while also still completely failing to produce anything new.
Numa numa and hamster dance are popular memes on TikTok right now. Hauntology is real.
Top ten lists have been replaced by lists of winners of bespoke categories. No more “these are the best laptops, ranked”, instead you get “best convertible laptop”, “best gaming laptop”, “best budget laptop”, “best productivity laptop”.
It’s like they’re so afraid of offending the brands by actually comparing products that they’ve resorted to this as a way to give everyone a trophy.
https://www.rtings.com/ has in-depth reviews, categorised reviews, overall reviews etc. All while explaining what ratings mean and why they are important. Pretty good imo, but then again there's also just so many products out there that being this in-depth means they could be missing a load of good stuff
Wirecutter, Ratings, and Amazon Returns
I feel like it wasn’t like this just five or ten years ago. Did things actually change, or am I just misremembering?
Asfroturfing became peofessionalized and then became standard industry practices
the winemoms who write interchangeable pastry recipes put the "leftist meme format" to shame with their SEO-induced walls of text
You have to do your own research with buying anything with regards to electronics and computers on niche enthusiast websites like notebookcheck and gsmarena before buying anything these days.
For example, did you know that both the Western Digital (WD) Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D 2.5 inch SATA solid state drives are literally identical with regards to the hardware inside, but the WD blue blue model is significantly more expensive? And that Western Digital also owns SanDisk? Literally paying more for a blue sticker on an SSD for no reason, capitalism folks.
https://www.thessdreview.com/featured/wd-blue-3d-ssd-sandisk-ultra-3d-ssd-review-1tb-twins-at-their-finest/
Honestly even low reviews can be sketch too, especially for things like restaraunts. How many bad yelp reviews are just from middle-aged people who got angry that their every whim wasn't catered to by some underpaid teen waitress? Sucks all around.
Or reviews generated/promoted by the Yelp site itself, as a form of extortion.
I feel like searching on Reddit gives you honest feedback, although I might be wrong.
I append "reddit" to my search query if I ever want to read about what real people think. This has mixed results because real people can be real dumb, but it's better than reading advertising disguised as information.
same. I usually click 3 or 4 threads to get a decent spread. And I always check the account age and posting habits when they recommend something that costs money (not foolproof, but a 6 year old redditor who has lots of posts about DnD and overwatch is more likely to be real)
You can always check their history to see what kind of dumb they are. That's why I like to ask questions here, at most people are smarter and at least they share a similar worldview to me
yeah it's definitely helpful for a lot of stuff
however I was looking for electric toothbrushes and all the comments are
"oral b good, sonicare bad"
"no sonicare bad, oral b good"
so Idk. Also it's purposely unclear what the difference between them are at the different price levels, so even more idk
just resign yourself to paying 35 bucks for something that'll break in 6 months
Why wait for it to break when Wamlart has a 90 day we-don't-give-a-fuck return policy?
The things you own end up owning you.
Only own what you can find on the side of the road and eliminate the frustration. Take what jah provides and nothing more. Relax.
If you're looking for a good tech review site that does good reviews and even allows for the direct comparison of GPUs, CPUs, phone SOCs, etc without even having to read the reviews notebookcheck is good. Though the reviews are basically Google translated from German, they're still better than almost anything out there.
The Wirecutter, owned by NYT, along with the print edition of Popular Mechanics before them, only show reviews for a very limited subset of products. I'm sure there's many more examples, but this only hides their bias to the credulous.
Consumer Reports seems to review a much larger sample size of products, but they focus on cars, appliances, and other big purchases IIRC. And it costs money, but I have the login info from a boomer relative that pays for it.
Honestly, even though r#ddit has a big problem with astroturfing, if a comment thread is popular enough it usually gives good insight into whether something is worth buying or not. Don't get me started on how entire subr*ddits like buyitforlife have become co-opted, though.
And all the reviews are either the 1% of people who got a broken product, are stupid, or bots to boost the rating up.
