Testing out a new future for Consumer Reports | Hacker News Reader

Testing out a new future for Consumer Reports

cjr.org

38 pointsdanso23 comments

I subscribe to Consumer Reports. (I only use their app.) As someone who spends two weeks researching a product category so I never have to think about it again, their data are a godsend.

That said, I find Wirecutter to be a better fit for urbanites. I don’t buy heavy appliances or cars or Swanson chicken broth. I do want to know about robotic vacuums and cat scratchers and speakers.

Consumer Reports could market a premium city-focussed product at a higher price. I prefer their brand to Wirecutter's, in part because it attempts to bridge our city-dwelling echo chamber.

I don't subscribe any longer but I always found Consumer Reports' strength--in addition to cars--to be major appliances, lawn equipment, and the like. I was actually never a particular fan of them for things like cameras; they always seemed to have a different target buyer in mind than I was.

Wirecutter and its sister sites I find to be pretty good. You won't go too far wrong with their recommendations and they explain their logic well enough that you can understand if their reasoning doesn't apply to you. Cooks Illustrated is also still good for kitchen and cooking-related things.

It's random little things I've found them useful for. Pepper grinders, knives, sunscreen, cookware, et cetera.

Whatever site you use, many of those are things that no one who isn't utterly compulsive is going to spend hours researching. I need a new spray nozzle for my hose. I'm sure whatever Wirecutter (or some other test site) says is just fine.

I completely forgot about the lawn equipment side of things. I purchased a $350 self-propelled non-riding Honda lawn mower as "My First Lawn Mower" on recommendation from CR[0].

I have owned this thing for over a decade. I hate cutting the lawn. I hate maintaining things like this. In the decade I've owned it I have changed the oil once (the spring of the second year I owned it). I have never replaced the spark plug. Most years I forget to empty the gas before winter and the first gallon is a mix of gas from the previous year and new gas I've added to top it off.

Every time I start it up for the first time, in the spring, with the half-bad-gas-mixture, I fully expect the thing is not going to start. It's never failed after the second or third pull, and after that it starts after the first every single time. I abuse the hell out of this thing and it keeps on working.

My neighbor is on mower #3 this year. I laugh because I hear him running his down every fall and think in the back of my head "I should really do that" only to forget until the first snow falls. He's also there changing the oil in his driveway every spring. I'm sure he's gone through more spark plugs than me, too (the manual says to replace it yearly).

[0] Once again, it wasn't the highest rated, but it was the best rated that I could afford.

my issue with subscribing to them is the endless barrage of pleas to subscribe to their print issue and donate to their foundation. then if you are subscribed to their print issue they want you to sub to their second print product, On Health which is nothing more than than a handful of pages for twenty four dollars a month. Why is that even separate from the regular print except as a cash grab?

in other words I have no problem supporting them but stopped because they would not stop bugging me. I even tried the opt outs but it comes back months later.

good resource, shit behavior.

I would not trust Wirecutter. In the specific categories I have a lot of knowledge, they seem to ignore some of the best products, emphasize things that aren't important, and ignore things that are important. On top of that, they've engaged in pay-to-play[0].

https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

I suspect that, for any category where you have significant knowledge and strongly-held opinions, it's a fair bet that pretty much no recommendation site/pub is going to satisfy you consistently. Personally, I find Wirecutter pretty good and sufficiently transparent that I know when not to go with their exact recommendation.

I wouldn't slavishly follow their advice for, e.g., a high-end camera. But, for a lot of things, their recommendations seem very reasonable and they often match for those cases where I have done a lot of other research.

For what it's worth, WireCutter does disclose this rather prominently. They effectively make money through you buying their recommended products through their website, and often depend on receiving expensive products for free.

In general I think they're usually a decent guide, but they are sometimes not aligned to the values I'm after. I don't usually trust them for camping or hiking stuff since they tend to be overly focused on things being cheap or uselessly multi-purpose.

What are the thoughts about https://www.rtings.com?

Are there other sites that don't ignore some of the best products?

consumer reports, wirecutter, rtings, and americas test kitchen/cooksillustrated/serious eats are some of the best review sites on the web.

one of the downsites to rtings is they usually only test one model out of a store. its not testing many multiple devices for variance.

Consumer Reports does this too. I remember when they used to release their annual camera and tripod recommendations... all my photographer friends thought it was the funniest thing. Or their beer recommendations... many LOLs from my beer snob friends.

These general review sites are not really "for" people who already know a lot. The state of knowing a lot necessarily changes priorities.

I know a lot about photography--why? Because I have a motivated aesthetic sense of photography. I didn't just acquire all this knowledge by accident--I sought it out, in an opinionated way. So, my sense of what is important is going to be different from a random person's. The idea of sacrificing image quality to save a few ounces seems ridiculous to me; but most people don't want to carry a heavy tripod around. So Consumer Reports would usually recommend the lightest tripod that did an OK job.

I mean, I LOL at their laptop suggestions. They rank them on some silly things sometimes.

But then I need to buy a microwave. I know 0 about microwave. Which heats better? I have no idea. Consumer reports has a ranking. Sweet!

I really enjoy the product, at least in getting me from 0 to 50% knowledge on a topic. Not that useful for things I am an expert in...

So the basic gist is Consumer Reports is trying to find a younger audience by building a new website to compete with The Wirecutter for attention?

This was a very long and convoluted article to get to that conclusion.

I believe they just need to hang in there and don't do anything to sully their reputation. Most people still trust Amazon reviews, Yelp, tripadvisor, et cetera. But people are starting to realize just how manipulated those sites are and will start searching for reviews they can trust implicitly.

Wirecutter is better, but they're still affiliate revenue driven and of course their parent the NYT is advertising driven.

I love Consumer Reports. It's the best way to decide which car, tires, appliances, etc. to buy.

Good luck to them.

I think they made a huge mistake in closing Consumerist. They lost a great marketing tool.

Counterpoint: I had no idea the two were related and have perused both for many years.

I had the same thought. I'm a CR subscriber, I occasionally stumbled across Consumerist articles via google search, and I had no idea CR and Consumerist had a relationship.

Consumer Reports purchased Consumerist from Gawker in late 2008, and migrated off of Gawker's infra in 2009. They used to make frequent mention of the association with Consumer Reports back then, but perhaps stopped after a few years?

I worked on a piece of their migration from Gawker's custom platform to Movable Type, although they switched to WordPress a few years after that, as Movable Type lost momentum in the US.

I haven't read CR in a long time, but in my youth I fondly remember CR basically being pornography for test engineers.

Pick a product category, define measurands, develop physical test methods, and report results. You could often nitpick the measurands (do I really care about heat ramp time for a hair dryer?) but it was always fun to see the distribution and outliers.

Somewhere in the early 2000's it felt like they changed their model from test engineering to customer surveys, I presume for cost reasons. They had relied on surveys for truly subjective stuff like food, but it really started to proliferate beyond. I know they kept their much-lauded test track for car evaluations but almost everything other category started to feel survey based.

If they brought the test engineering back I'd resubscribe in a heartbeat. Break out the bowling ball dropper for mattress testing!

I'd hate to see CR go. While it's not the be-all end-all, they've been fairly transparent about their testing methods and experiments.

In order to stay away from ads, I wonder if they can do something like give free copies to coffee shops that younger people frequent to attract a different demographic.

I've been a CR subscriber in the past (usually signing up for a year when I am looking for a car or buying large appliances).

I signed up after I had blown $800 on a dish washer on the recommendation of a friend who had purchased (what I thought was) the same model and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, I purchased almost the same model; it was the following year's updated one and had I gone out and plopped down the money for a subscription, I would have learned that the model that followed received a very poor rating. I replaced it with a less expensive Bosch model, which also had a model immediately preceding it with a poor review and I'm going on 10 years and very happy. My washing machine and dryer had a mixed review but ticked the right boxes for what I was looking for[0] and I've had those for 15 years with the washer failing about a month ago. CR didn't give it a stellar review -- actually, the review was pretty poor IIRC, but I needed a small front-loader due to constraints with where it was being put and I had a limited budget, so I had to pick between about 3 different bad choices and out of the three, this one scored high in getting clothes clean[0].

After that I haven't purchased a major appliance without paying for access. If it's not reviewed, I don't even consider it. The one that receives the best review that I can afford ends up being the one I buy. The only problem I ran into is that I frequently found that the model I was looking for was already discontinued. And because of how badly I was burned on the dish washer, it's not a foregone conclusion that its replacement is "better". This, however, worked out in my favor in the end. Yeah, it takes a bit longer to locate the specific model, but if I can find it new, it's on closeout and usually 20-30% less expensive. I just have to avoid the temptation to look at the new model or I'll end up wishing mine had the touch-screen with Twitter integration or whatever new, odd, feature they put in to justify updating the models every 4 months.

The thing that I don't understand is why they're so hesitant to let companies advertise "Consumer Reports #1" on their products. I understand the conflicts they're trying to avoid by not accepting advertising revenue, and by buying products at retail[1], but I think a lot of people aren't even aware of how great Consumer Reports really is. Some may not even be aware that they exist. So allowing a company to indicate that they've been rated highly in the publication serves a couple of good purposes -- it brings awareness to CR, and it tells consumers that the manufacturer thinks that being rated highly by CR is a valuable thing. That last bit might encourage a subscription more-so than the risk that someone would skip subscribing if they could just go to the store and see who's number 1. In my case, I've never purchased the "#1" product -- it's often out of my price range -- I've purchased the #1 that happens to fall in line with what I can afford. They could strike a happy medium by allowing manufacturers who rank at the top to publicize that fact.

And while I commend them for their idealism in this area (it's, frankly, rare to see an organization be so idealistic[2]), and it's entirely possible there's a reason for this which I am unaware, it'd be a lot worse, for me, if they disappeared or lacked the money to keep up the quality of the reviews that they perform.

[0] And to this day, I joke that my 4 kids can do whatever they want to their clothes. As long as I toss some Tide and Oxy in the load, it comes out. Yeah, it occasionally rips a T-Shirt, and the delicate cycle is ... anything but ... but it works a thousand times better than what it replaces and uses almost no water.

[1] Accepting "loaners" or "discounted review" products is less of a concern for me, it's the issue that some companies have been caught giving reviewers "fixed" versions of products. By buying retail, there's the added assurance that they picked up the product that you'd get off the shelf.

[2] Though the whole bit about selling subscriber information strikes me as a whole lot more anti-consumer than merely allowing companies to specify a ranking on a product, but I digress...

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