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Comment by smachiz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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