Hacker News Reader

The best place to find reviews it seems is through subscription paid independent reviewers.

Consumer reports is one that comes to mind (they are also non-profit), as well as rtings. If you are looking for reviews for more niche products though, your pretty much on your own when it comes to finding out if its good or not.

"non-profit" just means there are no investors. It doesn't mean management isn't taking home money for running the operation.

It also means their finances are public so you can see exactly how much management is taking home.

A decent free option for reviews is Wirecutter from the New York Times. I've yet to buy anything that they recommended that was outright bad, and they have a surprising breadth of categories that they review.

They make money through affiliate links, but they claim that the writers/reviewers have no knowledge of which companies have affiliate relationships with the Wirecutter so it doesn't bias their picks.

I've bought USB cables on their recommendation only to find their top pick had quality issues. The most frustrating part was the way they ignored feedback in the review's comment section. My critical (but calm and reasoned) comment was even deleted. I do look at their reviews, but they are not decisive for me.

I do not trust their reviews for a second. I'm sure sometimes they do recommend the best thing. But can you find a single recommendation that isn't part of a major affiliate program? And just monitor any major rec page for a while and you'll see plenty of comments that are critical just vanish.

Yep and it seems rtings is finding that out too. It’s very expensive to buy retail products so you end up funneling people into amazon links, and of course there’s some bias to push the more expensive yet “reasonable” option.

That said rtings at least standardizes their tests so you can ignore the editorialized part of the review.

I used to think Wirecutter was useful, until I saw their recommendation for "the best bike rack" (for carrying bikes on the back of a car). They insisted that the best kind of bike rack is the type that is attached to the trunk lid using nylon straps and hooks. That's the cheapest kind, but also the worst by far, from my own experience and also just common sense. If $100 bike racks that scratch your car and have the bikes wobbling back and forth are really the best kind, why would anyone spend $500-$700 for high quality hitch-mounted and roof-mounted racks (that are easy to use and don't risk scratching your car or your bike) ?

It convinced me that the people writing these "reviews" have no idea what they're talking about and cannot be trusted. When the recommendations are for categories that I'm not an expert in, they can recommend whatever they want and I can't dispute it. When it's for a category that I know something about, and the recommendation is for the very worst kind of cheap junk product, it does raise a lot of doubt in my mind.

FWIW, I have a nylon strap-mounted rack (name withheld to avoid accusations of ninja advertising!) which hooks onto the trunk seam. 6 hooks and it's brilliant. Much cheaper than a hitch mounted version, much more compact so I've been able to hang it in a little storage closet in the last few apartments I've lived in and goes on a wide variety of cars without any damage. Rock solid with 3 chunky mtbs on it too. I've even had people come up to me in car parks asking me for details!

Not wanting to derail the discussion but if it was that that put you of the review site you mention, it could be worth reconsidering..

Interesting perspective. I'm glad to hear that some of the trunk-mounted racks are good.

I just checked and it looks like they now recommend hitch-mounted ones as their top picks. And they have a whole section about the pros and cons of different types of racks. So it looks like they revisited the category and improved their reviews.

Consumer Reports is notorious for just bad reviews - checking the wrong things, etc. They’re big on standardizing the test but not great on testing useful aspects.

https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/consumer-repo... is an example.

You used to be able to find forums and similar for almost anything; now you’re left with Reddit threads and half-remembered comments. Anything under $50 is just a crapshoot.

> You used to be able to find forums and similar for almost anything;

When google removed the option to search discussion boards I knew the internet was changing and the changes were going to be bad. Google discussion search was the most powerful tool to find real world information. You could put in the model number of some product you knew nothing about (e.g. a camera or boat motor) and discussion search results would reveal many different forum threads where professionals and aficionados had discussed the product in detail; those same forums were already hard to find and a search for "boat motor forum" wouldn't necessarily bring you to the same forums and even if so, requires many extra steps to arrive at the same thread.

I have a very few left (like the one linked above) that I consider very precious to me. The biggest loss has been car forums for me - they still exist but the posting volume is way down

And all the Photobucket images that are now gone, because the person hosting the forum was too cheap to self-host. RIP amazing, archived, sorted, searchable information.

Unfortunately all of these become trash, in time. Too many lawyers and $s.

I wonder if there is a way to fund and scale a service that uses a browser addon and separate database for reviews. People already use Honey for discounts, Keepa for historic pricing, and fakespot for fake reviews.

Having written several browser extensions, I have been thinking on building another one for people to comment on any website. Which ends up being useful for reviews.

And, while I like the idea, there are two main details preventing me from pursuing it:

- Moderating content provided by users is exhausting/costly. - I see no other way than ads to fund it, while it can potentially work as a paid app, it won't work until there is enough content (the chicken-egg problem).

I think a similar add-on went to court and was deemed illegal. Sorry, can't cite my source. I think it's a pretty common idea but falls flat quickly once you realize there isn't a reliable way to mass vet reviews

We really need a source on that. Why is it illegal for software on my computer to show me information I want? I happen to want comments related to the site I'm viewing to be shown in a side pane.

That doesn't make any sense, why would you be responsible for comments left by other people - unless you had editorial control?

Sounds like the next one needs to be built on top of censorship resistant platforms like IPFS and/or Dat.

There was a similar add-on called Dissenter written by people associated with the American right-wing social network Gab, and it was banned from the Mozilla and Chrome add-on stores, citing policy violations.[1]

1. https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...

> When asked for more clarity on which policies Dissenter did not comply with, Mozilla said that they received abuse reports for this extension. It further added that the platform is being used for promoting violence, hate speech, and discrimination, but they failed to show any examples to add any credibility to their claims.

Wow, thanks for sharing the post.

But then people can still install that plugin, can't they?

I think the scope of that is too large to work well (based on seeing previous attempts at similar extensions).

Limiting the scope to just product reviews could make the idea a lot more feasible. Since you would be putting yourself directly in the purchasing path it might be easier to monetize the extension too.

How would you prevent review fraud?

> Then I discovered a reddit subgroup where hosts tell each other tips to easily get reviews removed.

What subreddit is that?

AirBNB! Do a search for Review and along those lines.

Does Amazon notify you when they remove one of your reviews?

I've done numerous reviews over the years and have never got such a notication, but your comment has me wondering if my reviews are still there!

No, and they'll remove your ability to leave reviews at all if they keep getting taken down.

They do. It’s always a catch all “violation of our policies” and very rarely a real reason.

That's the other nefarious thing. I would never had known the Airbnb review was removed if I didn't go back and check. And I started to doubt my own memory!

Amazon did notify me my review got yanked.

> The trick is to remove negative reviews that violate guidelines, but for positive reviews that violate common sense and ethics, nyet.

I've heard it described as "malicious compliance."

> Fakespot helps somewhat it seems...

Which is unfortunately still Chrome-only...