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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

My problem is that I don’t even know where to buy _good_ stuff. I don’t want to pay $5k for a couch, but maybe I will _once_ in N years, for some large N, if I know it’s very well made and I like the design.

But I have no idea where to go for this. The overlap between junk and luxury is too large nowadays.

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As with so many goods these days, I find that buying stuff made at least a couple of decades ago works best. It's much easier to tell the garbage from the treasure if you aren't buying stuff made recently.

Aggregated reddit searches are amazing. Leads you to the gold mine that is american leather etc, which are often rebranded to more well known brands on a model by model basis. Lots of insiders on reddit with that info too.

Maybey cynicism broke me but I find it impossible to trust recommendations from Reddit. It's too easy for these companies to pay for astroturfing these days.

I've noticed a very prevalent "hail corporate" subculture on reddit that put me off believing anything anyone said.

As sibling comment says: survivorship bias as a heuristic is useful.

It's often not, because today's company is not the same as it was 10-20 years ago. The longer you want something to last, the less reliable past experience becomes.

I’ve had a consistently good experience with room and board so far and I am very anal about construction quality (as perceived by myself, anyway, I’m not a furniture expert).

I've had decent success with reddit r/BuyItForLife. Seems like mostly good recommendations and not too much shilling/advertising.

Bifl was taken over by advertisers years ago. I would not trust anything peddled there without a lot of research.

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