Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guest10928391 | Hacker News Reader

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links.

I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of course, they don't even consider products outside of Amazon because they wouldn't receive commission on sales. So, no one is talking about the small companies producing high quality, handmade umbrellas throughout the country, but instead every source funnels traffic to the same made in China Amazon clones.

View on HN

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question.

If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching.

Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community.

To go along with your umbrella example:

Unfortunately /r/umbrellas isn't a thing, but I did find this thread[1]. Sprinkled throughout the comments are links to sites that seem to be on the up-and-up.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/a4afrg/guys_d...

This is a good idea. I'll do it from now on

Reddit is so useful in that regard. So many niches with honest and detailed reviews that I usually don't buy something online without checking a relevant subreddit first.

That statement itself seems like astroturfing.

How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?

When you have a popular post that reaches the Reddit front page, you may receive messages from people asking if you'd like to promote their products.

You can't be sure of anything. All you can do is use multiple sources and aggregate the data.

> How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?

My guess is that they eventually will (and I'm sure some already do). However, one thing that kind of helps weed out the fake reviews is the fact that you can inspect a user's post history.

You can see a reviewers review history on Amazon.

Yeah, but that's just reviews.

On reddit or other more general sites, you can see their entire comment history. Hopefully you'll notice that a tiny tiny portion of their comments are related to products or reviews.

In other words, you can get a feel for if the person is genuine or not.

Of course, that doesn't 100% rule out paid shilling by (otherwise) honest people, but you do get a much better sense of the veracity of reviews on a site like reddit than you could ever get from Amazon.

This is what I do as well. I append the word “reddit” at the end of all my google product searches if I want to get an honest, high quality review.

The other thing I do, in the hardware realm, is to see what open source and hacker efforts have been done.

If the thing is open and understood, then I will have a much better time. If not, it will probably soon go on the abandoned trash heap.

An example, for flashlights: https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/

This worked great for a while, but in the last few years reddit has become corporately dominated, regardless of moderation attempts (admins have removed moderators of certain subreddits to accomplish this, would guess based on the spend).

> but in the last few years reddit has become corporately dominated

This is always the way: once something has a large enough audience it will become a target for exploitation. This is why ad networks are juicy targets for hacks (wide spread of potential victims) and popular sites, or specific areas on those sites, like reddit can quickly become overrun by shills.

Seconded. I do the same. I also do this whenever I have to explore a new domain of interest, to quickly find my bearings and some high-quality sources to continue with.

This works especially well if the domain is not niche, but has wide general-population applicability. Say, dieting. The amount of content-marketing bullshit on the general Internet makes general topical searches near useless. Whereas just browsing the collected knowledge (pinned posts, wikis) of various dieting subreddits let me quickly find one appropriate regime for me, and then its specific subreddit taught me how to apply it safely.

(Yes, it was /r/keto, and yes, it worked.)

I don't mind the affiliate links, but I mind dishonest or low quality churned reviews.

When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/

They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equivalent to consumer reports. We obviously have demand, the question is how to finance it.

I think consistent, ethical, non-conflicted third party quality reviews can be a solid lifestyle business. Won't be a unicorn, but it'll keep a few people gainfully employed and make the world a bit better.

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done.

Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today.

s/internet/web/

I have a problem with being nickeled and dimed with every subscription service.

The whole reason it's subscription is to avoid advertisers. CR doesn't have to answer to manufacturers so their reviews are very reliable.

CR is $7.95 a month. Sign up for a month when you're making a major purchase. If it saves even 10 minutes of research time, that's value enough for me.

Subscription fees are literally the only source of income for Consumer’s Union, the parent company of Consumer Reports. They don’t take ads, they don’t take payments for reviews, and they don’t sell rights to use their ratings in advertising (they sue companies who reference their CR ratings in any kind of marketing material).

Most people are only going to ever buy one or two things that are important enough to them to need to be thoroughly comparison-shopped. If there was a Consumer Reports-alike where I could pay "per report" (like paying for investment news "per report"), I'd pay. But I wouldn't subscribe.

> If there was a Consumer Reports-alike where I could pay "per report" (like paying for investment news "per report"), I'd pay. But I wouldn't subscribe.

I subscribed to CR for a month when I was shopping for a new dishwasher. After I found what I wanted, I unsubscribed. That seems functionally equivalent to what you want, at least when applied to large ticket items where the cost of a month of subscription is a small percentage of the total cost of the purchase being made.

> If there was a Consumer Reports-alike where I could pay "per report" (like paying for investment news "per report"), I'd pay. But I wouldn't subscribe.

This is a strange comparison. I'm amazed there are any worthwhile investment news items available to purchase for less than the cost of an annual CR Digital subscription ($35). It's so cheap it's hardly worth worrying about if you're going to use it at all.

I don't have an issue with consumer reports. I used to browse their material occasionally.

However, most of the time, I spend very little and make few purchases. The ones that are low-value - lets say vegetable peelers and compressed air canisters - I don't need ratings for. The large ones (Appliances, Misc Electronics, Suits, Cars, etc.) I research online anyways.

So if I'm not using their product 95% of the time, their subscription business model doesn't line up with my expected use-case. So I don't use it. I would love to pay for better rating data and don't mind shelling out for information, but I do need to pay for it when I'm consuming it, not in a prophylactic manner.

Does Consumer Reports provide any value over Wirecutter? The latter is free and has negligible display advertising.

I stopped trusting the wire cutter after they shifted from recommending a $40 knife to a $145 as their best chefs knife for most people

As a layman in the space of knives, why did that cause you to stop trusting them?

In other areas, I found that up until a point, the price is generally correlated with quality. I had great success in avoiding frustration and waste by following the saw "I'm too poor to buy cheap".

Sure, up until a point. If you read a review of the best SUVs and it said the $200k Bentley Bentayga was better than the $27k Toyota RAV4 you would probably say "Well, I'm sure it has its benefits, but I doubt it's better value for money"

As someone who uses a $20 knife, I feel the same way about a $145 knife.

One of the most dangerous things in a kitchen is a dull knife. (And mandolins without guards!)

Dull knives require multiple times of stress, and sawing motion to abrade through the thing. And with more power means accidents are easier and more damaging.

A proper chefs knife (I prefer santokus) should be professionally sharpened, honed before each use, and will be razor sharp. I only need to lay the knife on a steak and pull, and it cuts right through. The cheap $20 knives are usually serrated (nigh unsharpenable) and double as hacksaws.

I agree with the GP in that the average at home chef doesn't need anything more expensive than a $45 Victorinox 8" chef knife. With moderate to proper care, you can keep a cheaper knife very sharp.

While you may be statistically correct, anecdotally my family has hurt themselves way more often with sharp knives than we have with dull knives. It's probably due to being used to a dull knife before switching to a sharp one, but I still can't stand by that adage from our history of personal use at home!

> you can keep a cheaper knife very sharp.

As demonstrated perfectly by Kiwami Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P6klz6BTek

I think AmazonBasic sells a set for $30ish and its more than adequate for most home users or beginners. Does it compare to my Wusthof set? No but paired with a good knife sharpener it will last you a very long time. Unless cooking is a passion of yours, I wouldn't recommend anyone go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a set of high end knifes --- the knives won't turn you into a Michelin starred chef.

After nearly 20 hours of research, checking reviews across two years, and consulting with numerous culinary professionals and chefs, I agree with you.

Their electronic reviews are fine but their other categories leave a lot to be desired. The whole point of a good review site is to find the low/medium priced item that is more than adequate for the task. Recommending a Mac or Wusthof knife is a safe bet that most won't challenge - I want them to find me the needle in the hay stack.

"Shifting" from cheap to expensive could be nefarious for sure... that said, I have a $150 Global chef knife and don't regret it one bit! (Bought on a recommendation from a culinary friend, not Wirecutter...)

There are claims [1] that Wirecutter prefers things they can get kickbacks/affiliate links for [1].

Of course, wirecutter claims that's not the case.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729408

Consumer reports is good; the problem is even the people on HN don't want to pay for any content anywhere.

Consumer Reports tends to rate heavily on things I don't much care about, like initial reliability (which for most modern products is more than fine) while almost ignoring things like ACTUAL performance and ergonomics.

They're also biased. If they generally give the winning nod to brand X, even if brand Y comes ou with a superior product, they'll still give brand X the nod.

It works the same way when brand X has sub-par releases.

Many libraries subscribe to Consumer Reports and even offer free access via their portal to it. I've used it countless of times to find reviews online.

> Maybe we need a reputable internet equivalent to consumer reports.

We have one. It's cr.org

Why don't they ever show up in search engine results?

Not sure. I assume because they're paywalled and won't allow clicks from a search engine to view the content?

I don't know what the rules are around that.

Their headphone reviews are top notch too. They do actual measurements on them to determine how they actually perform rather than some reviewer spewing garbage about how the sound stage is so warm.

Yup, and since you can generate those pages algorithmically it's easy money for a clever coder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com