> Personally I often find sorting the actually-good from the faux-good on the (lower end of the) luxury side, then catching it used or on sale, easier than trying to find then assess the quality of mid-level products (if they exist at all—often they do not) or suss out unusually good cheap products.
There was a time when I trusted Amazon reviews, but the 5-star bots, and now the 1-star griefers, have totally eradicated any trust I have in that system. Amazon's crowdsourced methodology has been corrupted by greed.
Reddit works for now, but I also question the long-term sustainability of Reddit. Popular Reddits are clearly becoming more-and-more visited by shills and marketing teams. This is useful in some Reddits (ex: /r/AMD) for now, since it provides a communication channel to the company. But there's this feeling of astroturfing that I can't shake... a more "malicious" company could very well ruin the careful balance we have.
In the long term, its clear to me that marketing shills will too ruin the Reddit / community methodology. Its impossible to tell who is, or who isn't, a shill. After all, shills simply pretend to be fanboys posting from normal accounts, and they're getting better at it.
In the longer term, I think something old-school, like Consumer Reports, is best. What we really need is a team of trusted 3rd party reviewers, who are independently funded __outside__ of the advertisement system.
Yes, OUTSIDE the advertisement system. So that kills YouTube (yeah, Gamer's Nexus is good but... Steve constantly has to worry about pissing off his advertisers. Same with Linus Tech Tips: they're subservient to the ads whether they like it or not). It also kills most websites, which are reliant upon ad revenue. Its absolutely imperative that your 3rd party review site has the financial independence to be able to issue "negative reviews".
Even newspapers of old are clearly a poor model: as its basically impossible to tell the difference between an "advertisement-article" and an "actual investigative article" upon publishing. And since most old-school newspapers got money from advertisers, there is still a conflict of interest when you start to follow the money.
Consumer Reports is unfortunately stuck in an age-old era. There needs to be a more modernized version, with more recent hardware reviews, better discussion forums, better community engagement, etc. etc. A combination of Reddit-like discussions, but with a core set of trusted reviewers who can lead the community (and who can be trusted to be "non-shills").
Shills and marketers should be welcome to a site: Marketing is not bad in of itself. But they need to be carefully moderated and probably should be publicly noted as an official representative of a company. Policing shills is probably impossible to enforce in the long run, but the prevalence of trusted writers independent of outside finances is the core issue of trust that needs to be built.