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Comment by psadri | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, there is no business model to support this. People don't want to pay to support unbiased product review sites. And as they say - "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product"

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There is though.

Project Farm has unsponsored empirical comparative reviews of multiple products for the same use. He has affiliate links for every product tested so he makes commission no matter which one you buy. Compare this to a one-at-a-time reviewer where the reviewer is motivated to sell each product as much as possible.

The only perverse incentives are (1) he makes more if you buy the more expensive one and (2) he doesn't make money from free/DIY solutions. 1 would require knowing the market really well and faking tests on video. W.r.t. 2 he's demonstrated good faith by including DIY and vintage options.

Project Farm is selling entertainment and his tests may not be as exacting as you’d want.

But it’s better than nothing. AvE has some “destructive reviews” that can also be entertaining.

For locks specifically, LockPickingLawyer has a decent channel, even if most locks are just utter crap.

His valentine's days specials are especially entertaining.

AvE? The pro freedom truck rally guy?

So much for arduino vs. Evil.

Was that single topic enough of a reason to throw away all the good content he makes about other things? It's not like his opinion on the value of a vaccine requirement will make him off base in his knowledge of machining and tools.

My dad has garbage political opinions, and is generally what I would call a low information voter who is swayed more by advertising than vote record, but he's still a very talented general contractor who can build anything and knows his stuff.

That’s uncle bumblefuck for ya.

I pay for Consumer Reports. I used to love wirecutter - and then bought some of their recommendations that were garbage.

Consumer Reports sometimes overindexes to things I don't care about ("complicated technology"), but they usually put in the work and break it down well.

That's a new word to me, "overindex". Had to Google it, and that was kind of fun. It seems to be from economics, but nowadays a bit of a Microsoft term, maybe?

Here's Raymond Chen in 2017 explaining it [1]:

To over-index on an attribute means to give that attribute too much prominence in a discussion or analysis.

Also fun to note that Wictionary [2] does not mention this meaning at all, instead saying it means to index out of bounds in an array which given the technical usage sphere of the word is kind of amusing.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20171226-00/?p=97...

[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overindex

Same here. Disappointed by a few recommendations, never again.

i think they grew too quickly and just hired some people that were "content" makers not real reviewers, who weren't spending the time required to actually understand, nor actually have any scientific method.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of their reviewers were getting paid on the side for their recommendations (it seemed like it might've been freelanced out reading some of the reviews).

I've seen some signs that they might be getting better... let's hope.

But Consumer Reports has always been great for me.

That's a misuse of the word product

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