No Stupid Questions

I use Vetted (previously lustre) to get information. Then find the reviews on YouTube.

I also use WireCutter and Rtings.com for information collection.

The thing people need to remind themselves is that - it's subjective. You don't really know how good a product is, unless it's in your hands or you've got hands-on experience. It sucks, because we can't demo everything and it forces us to sometimes take financial risks.

It just comes down to what you're looking for out of a product. Is it X-free from Y chemicals? Does it meet a specific standard you're looking for?

What pisses me off with reviews sometimes is how vague and scarce a review can be. Most of the time it's people just going "It works! Thanks!" or "It sucks. Don't buy!". Like, I can't evaluate a product on that alone, I need a little more to work with. And a lot of the time too is that people will just complain in a review of something that isn't even about the product like "it didn't arrive on time...0 stars". How is that relevant to the product? Sounds more like a problem with the shipping service, two different things.

You don't need to always write reviews spanning 10 paragraphs. But christ, just write more than "it sucks, don't buy". Why does it suck? What makes it suck? Come on, details.

I just look for the most barebones forum with complaints about the product and see if I can deal with those issues or not

I ask real people on social media what they think. Sure, there may not be a niche community for every little thing on Lemmy; but there's also not the same level of rules limiting what can be posted where so I could make a post asking everyone what they recommend for whatever in NoStupidQuestions or AskLemmy or whatever and still reach a respectable number of people who could give a response. 🤷🏻‍♂️

One I've started using is typing before:2021 at the start of Google searches, it does a good job of removing the obvious gaming the algorithm sites and AI generated content that steal the first few pages. Obviously doesn't work if you're looking for the latest products that came out before the year you specify

While Lemmy doesn't have enough people for each product category yet, have you checked out the community [email protected]?

There's also [email protected] for broader discussion, but it's not gained much traction yet.

Beyond the other good recommendations here, go on amazon and do your search for "mechanical keyboard" armed with a bit of information first, like knowing that you won't find a good mechanical keyboard for under $40.

Then click on one you're interested in that has at least 50 reviews and check that it's been for sale for at least 6 months. If anything hasn't been for sale very long, or hasn't gotten many reviews, it's likely a poor product.

Now for the other important bit. Go to the reviews and sort them by NEWEST. Every scam product in existence gets the initial ball rolling with fake/paid reviews, but then stops after a couple months. So when you sort by newest and look at the most recent 20 reviews, those are almost always mostly real people. Those are what you want to look at. If a product is rated 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but the most recent 20 don't average out anywhere close to 4.5, you know the product is a lie.

I really like project farm on YouTube. He tests different brands side by side

I live in a big city. I go to the store and talk to the salespeople. Most of the time, they know the products and are willing to explain the assests of each brand. The caveat is to ask other people about the good stores. In my area, BestBuy is terrible for overselling, while Staples gives great service.

I have found enthusiast forums and believe it or not YouTube videos to be helpful.

Now with YouTube reviews, you gotta be a bit discerning. Try to follow personalities who have a lot of experience reviewing or have pretty stringent review measures. For example:

For any kind of home entertainment information I usually go to Chris Majestic and anyone he works with because he has pretty helpful measurements of how he qualifies products features.

Reddit has become a wasteland. It’s getting more difficult to find human content on the internet.

Find a hobby that would use the product type in question. Find a community for said hobby then look for discussions comparing the options that are out there.

This tends to work better for certain things more than others. I doubt many hobby groups get excited about dishwashers or clothing dryers. I'm these cases, the Buy it For Life communities tend to have decent comparisons.

Many subreddits have a lot of useful resources on their wikis that you can use without really interacting with reddit (you could use the web archive version if you really don't want to give reddit traffic).

There's also this website which (among other things) scrapes subreddits for (positive) mentions of products. I don't really like how they integrated AI in it so agressively, but if you can gloss over that, you might find some useful information in it.

It's a bit vague, but if you're in the UK, or EU too, which.co.uk is a paid consumer recommendation service. Really good, honest, impartial reviews on products

But nobody wants to pay for that kind of thing, so they're quite limited in the stuff they review, it's mostly household

I look at negative reviews. If they are all dumb stuff like "FedEx lost my package, 0 stars" instead of actual complaints I know the product is good

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is a membership-based non-profit that has been around since 1936. They are funded by membership dues, donations, and some corporate partnerships (mostly for research projects, I think). Their mission is to create unbiased reviews.

They do well reviewing large purchases like appliances. They also review consumer electronics and some software, though not in the highly technical way of a site like Tom's Hardware.

Anyway, Consumer Reports isn't perfect or entirely comprehensive, but the $40 per year membership pays for itself if you are a homeowner. Just in the last couple of months, they saved me $500 by directing me to a less expensive dishwasher than I otherwise would have bought.

Someone you know that has the product.. Or ProjectFarm on YouTube.

Call me old fashioned, but I still go to bricks-and-mortar stores to compare a few options when I'm making an important or expensive purchase.

Yes, that is getting increasingly difficult these days.

Make my own opinion or ask someone I trust

I generally only ever read the negative reviews.

You've already searched for a product that has the features you want, so you’re probably already looking at the right things for you in the features and aesthetic department.

The negative reviews will tell me things like if the product or parts of it failed or broke. If it doesn’t do the job very well, lacks power, accuracy, etc. If a keyboard, is it loud? Fatiguing? Are the keys replaceable? Do they keycaps wear and become illegible? How “sloppy” are they? If it does fail, is there customer service? How many people get DOA items? How many bad reviews are for dumb things like color or buying the wrong product for the job?

So see what people disliked about the product you think looks shiny and pretty before buying.

This is a difficult question these days to answer. There are a few categories where I always stick to established brand names, these are typically electronics or anything electrical like portable battery packs or wall chargers. Poorly made items in those categories can start fires. And when it comes to silicon, there's only a few to trust anyway since there are only a few major fabs out there.

I usually follow the site:reddit.com search method but I've had to further filter my criteria by only looking in enthusiast subreddits instead of the bigger ones like /r/AskReddit.

It gets difficult though for general goods that don't really need well known brands and whose performance doesn't matter as much but it's hard to tell the quality online. Lawn chairs, pizza cutters, sushi kits, clothes hangers, rope, and shower curtain rods are good examples. These usually come down to luck of the draw.

I like to use the Wirecutter from the New York Times as a starting point, though I often ignore the products recommended because the links are typically to American online retailers that I'm unlikely to use. I pay more attention to the various aspects used to recommend their choices, then check other reviews from specialized hobbyist forums when available. Finally, if I find the product in a store I will ask to demo it before buying.

YouTube can be helpful if you can cut through the clutter or need to see head to head testing between your short list items. Don't blindly search there though because the algorithm is shit.