I am talking about, if I need a shampoo, or a vacuum cleaner, or an office chair, how do I find out what to buy without reading articles or watching videos which might be paid ads hidden as reviews?
Do you guys know any website or community where you can find reviews / rankings of common products?
I want fact-based choices not just preferences.
Like any other signal, the options have been found out and probably, mostly, reduced to noise. But Wirecutter and Consumer Reports claim to test things and recommend. The latter needs a subscription, but you may have one through your local library.
For electronics, rtings was quite good last I used it. Some categories are free, but they are (or were) quite open about letting you sub, find what you want, then cancel after the month. It was nice that most of the data was objective stuff presented in tables you can filter by. But many data points are definitely subjective ratings.
Rtngs used to be good, now the way they simp for big companies is crazy bad now.
they changed their scoring system to favor big companies ( burn in tv issue hidden, adware in tv are not ranked) reliability is not a factor anymore as Samsung garbage tv are ranked 9 while they literally last 6 months.
Good to know. I remember them being decent a few years ago when I picked up my most recent monitor. Reliability, burn in, and adware are actually some of my biggest concerns, especially in the era of OLED and surveillance advertising.
consumer reports used to be the best but now companies come in and out and are bought out and change hands so often its less so.