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Comment by thrashh | Hacker News Reader

I used to think they were good but I think they were only good on paper, even before they were bought by NYT.

I checked out a lot of their top picks and a lot of them had like 2/5 ratings after a few years and it turns out a lot of their picks weren’t really reliable or weren’t that good once you used it a lot.

I feel like Wirecutter just bought a bunch of stuff and compared things superficially.

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I only read Wirecutter when Ars Technica would host their occasional article, and came to the same conclusion as you. Any time they covered something that I had experience with, it was painfully obvious that they had barely used the damn thing. If you were in to their house style, they picked things that fit in that sense, but a solid meh for the review side of things.

> I checked out a lot of their top picks and a lot of them had like 2/5 ratings after a few years and it turns out a lot of their picks weren’t really reliable or weren’t that good once you used it a lot.

The other thing that happened more than few times is once the product got reviewed the producer would cut corners and start shipping a vastly inferior product since they knew they could coast on the WC recommendation and increase their profit margin even further. I'm sure some of the corner-cutting was due to increased sales (not necessarily malicious) but a lot of it seemed to come 100% from greed.

It's very hard to test durability.

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