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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've found useful is following specific reviewers. For example, Peter Norvig reviews many, many programming and CS texts.

He has both glowing reviews such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1r...

And scathing ones such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1r...

By following several reviewers I respect in each domain I care about, it's not hard to find quality texts (or products) that I'd never have found by typing words into Amazon's search box and looking at average review scores.

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A Googler reviewing every USB Type C cable (and leaving scathing reviews for ones that suck) comes to mind.

http://gizmodo.com/a-google-engineer-is-publicly-shaming-cra...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A25GROL6KJV3QG/ref=cm_c...

That's a great example too, because Amazon actually ended up following up and banning cables that were found to be non-compliant with the spec, largely based on his reviews: http://lifehacker.com/amazon-bans-non-compliant-usb-c-cables...

He recently fried a Chromebook with one of those bad cables. Can't find the source right now but it was posted here on Hacker News.

I like that they've said they'll start banning the cables, but I'm disappointed that - from my reading of the article - Amazon isn't doing any testing to detect these bad cables and are instead relying on customer reviews to report bad cables. That means for most cables someone's going to have to buy a cable and have it damage their device or have the equipment and know-how to detect it ahead of time.

Having Amazon test every cable obviously doesn't scale either but couldn't they require the vendors to provide test results showing that the cable is spec compliant? Of course the vendor could forge the results, but that's intentionally malicious and this would at least catch non-malicious accidents.

Are these bad cables UL listed? That seems like it would be an easy enough filter for someone like Amazon to employ.

Electricity goes through it. Check. UL listed? Check. Okay, goes on the suggestions page.

This sort of thing is very hard to catch because the products themselves can change without a SKU changing which means you have to constantly test them. It's not Amazon's model, but from the customer's point of view it's probably better to severely limit the number of vendors for something commoditized like a USB cable.

Here's another one that comes to mind. He does GPS watches geared toward activity and fitness use cases: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/blog

Agreed, the best thing you can do is Google "_____ product review" and look for credible reviewers, someone with a reputation to protect. I worked with a product company where v1 had some product flaws and started receiving negative reviews, but it was very easy to overwhelm those with fake positive reviews across the web. Then when we came out with a much better v2, we got a scientist in our field with some following to do a short positive video review. That is difficult to get (I'm not talking about YouTube/Instagram/mommy blogger reviewers who give positive reviews to anyone who will send them free product) and there's no way he would have put his name on the line unless he had tried out the product on his own extensively. Any product company worth its salt should know this and get a few of these expert reviews posted to the web.

Great idea - This sounds like an idea for an app as finding and following reviewers you can trust manually sounds like a chore.

How do you know you can trust the app, though?

Maybe somebody can write-up a review.

We could have an app to follow the ones we trust.

It's turtles all the way down.

Transparency. The app would need to be open enough about how it found and vetted trusted reviewers for people to take it seriously.

The app would need to have its own reputation to protect (i.e. a brand). I think the best approach for this is an app with a large community behind it. For a while, that seemed to be Epinions. I'm not really sure why it didn't work out for them.

No problem. They will find vendors to review the app to bump it up in the app store.

Funny thing, the site linked in the OP is sort of an attempt at that. They look at a type of product, look at reviews, narrow down to a few different models, and test them out, and basically say "get this one."

I actually use their sister site the Sweethome more than the Wirecutter. I tend to be an obsessive prepurchase researcher, and so far I've been happy with their recommendations.

The wirecutter is great for finding the best product. It's less focused on deals though.

This has been my approach to following the news as well. Bias can be subtle and poor reporting isn't always easy to spot until you see another piece. But if I follow a couple specific people, though, I know how to place what they say in context. It helps.

What I find interesting is that the Internet has been long acclaimed for it's ability to give anyone an equal voice and to remove focus from authority and context put the focus on just the here-and-now content. But here we are lamenting the fact that context and credibility of the source are actually incredibly useful.

Amusingly, there is an obviously-fake review for exactly the same product as your scathing example.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UCB6JLZ6TRTN/

I own Java How to Code by Deitel, which he references in the review of the Python one by same company. It's terrible. I actually literally, not figuratively, used it to sleep at one occasion. It's huge, which is a bad thing. It only deals with language features, which is worse. It has lots of examples, which would be a good thing if they weren't so verbose and boring and can't fucking get to the point.

If you read this, not only should you not buy a Deitel programming book, but you should tell all your friends not to buy one as well.

This is what I try do. I review website builders at sitebuilderreport.com— but I actually in-depth reviews (for example: I pay for each website builder with my own credit card to test their cancellation policies).

The hard part (I think) can be establishing that trust— getting the reader to understand that hey, I'm a real guy, who's really spent a lot of time looking at website builders.

Does anyone know how to find good reviewers on Amazon?

This is essentially the idea behind The Wirecutter.

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