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Comment by UIUC_06 | Hacker News Reader

For kitchen devices, ATK or SeriousEats.

Anything else: if you don't have a site you trust, then the only recourse is to look at LOTS of sites and read between the lines. By "sites" I also include "user forums."

This also applies to movie reviews, btw. Rotten Tomatoes is trash. You can't average Trash opinions and end up with anything other than Trash. What you want to learn is "what is this movie like, and will I enjoy it?" So you should find some critics whom you think are intelligent, and just read them.

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> You can't average Trash opinions and end up with anything other than Trash

But Rotten Tomatoes doesn't take averages. The reason so many people take issue with Rotten Tomatoes is they don't know how to read the data.

Rotten Tomatoes shows you the (number of promoters) / (number of detractors). In other words, it tells you what percent of the people like the movie. Not how much they like it. A score of 95% on RT doesn't mean it's a nearly flawless movie. It means that 95% of people/critics think it is, at the very least, good.

Taken directly from the RT About page[1]:

> The Audience Score, denoted by a popcorn bucket, represents the percentage of users who have rated a movie or TV show positively

and

> The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show

If you understand that, RT is a very useful review site.

[1]: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/about

The "percent of the people like the movie" still doesn't tell you anything about WHO those people are. Nor does (number of promoters) / (number of detractors).

"professional critic reviews" ?? Please.

I'll stick with what I said: get to know a few critics, and read those.

> Anything else: if you don't have a site you trust, then the only recourse is to look at LOTS of sites and read between the lines. By "sites" I also include "user forums."

That's why Wirecutter is useful: convenience. They might not have the best product recommendations, but for items they "review", they provide an easy to click button to buy the product.

No offense, but reading random review sites, reddit, yelp, forums, misc google SEO landing pages with affiliate links, etc to try to find the best product is a huge pain. If I can go to 1 review site that is good enough and just buy the thing, the convenience often wins out.

No offense taken. You do have a site you trust, so you're all good.

I find that if I read a whole lot of stuff, I start to get the gist.

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