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.
Generally, you need to use specific sources.
For DYI stuff, Project Farm on youtube is great.
For PC, GamersNexus is your guy.
For auto detailing, Forensic Detailing Channel.
I don’t know a single general purpose channel or publication that does actual proper reviews and doesn’t just shill for X company.
Project Farm is awesome
Project Farm is highly reliable on YouTube. If the exact model Todd tested is no longer available, use your best judgement.
NYT Wirecutter is good, though they don’t fully respect money and like to recommend stuff with crazy pricetags. Consumer reports has limited products but deep data. For kitchenware, cult flav and prudent reviews rock. America’s test kitchen is decent too.
For random crap not listed on any of the above I just Google “best X”. Click the top few articles and reddit threads. Specialty subreddits (like for vacuums) where they exist and buy it for life are especially valuable. Look for the things that get recommended by multiple sources and good reviews on online storefronts. For some product categories video reviews can reveal things written ones can’t.
Also remember the rule on how many things you look at. I’m sure I’m butchering the details, but a study was done a while back that showed people got the most valuable ratio of time invested to quality of purchase when they researched something like 60% of options. By this point you typically have a decent idea of what is and isn’t good and can make an educated decision without digging deep on every possible option. I typically narrow down to a top few options pretty quickly and only dig deep on those.
Edit: Also, consider your friend group. If you have a friend who you know often does deep research in their shopping and/or is deep in the specific world you’re shopping for, shoot them a text. I’ve saved many hours of research consulting with friends who already did the research. And if the product category is a hobby of theirs they are often ecstatic to spend time with you teaching and offering personalized recommendations.
Easy if you live in Germany! I go to test.de, search for what I‘m interested in, and pay them 4,90€ to access the test results.
They‘re a foundation, originally founded by the German federal state, and the only way they make money is by selling access to test results.
Why are you germans always amazing? Is there like a genius bacteria in your water?
I don’t take any credit for this, but the people who set this up were indeed amazing! Roland Johannes Hüttenrauch specifically lead the organization for 27 years (!) and built the institution that it is today. Pretty great people!
Similar in Australia
Uses to work at a shop that sold garden tools, and some of the older guys working there had a pretty good idea what fits your needs. However when a test for lawnmowers came out pretty much everyone agreed that the test methods where rubbish, and they did not agree with the results. I think they did not consider maintenance costs, repairability and where wrong about the size of the lawnmower to cut your lawn in the optimal time.
I always wonder how the test methods are on other topics I don’t know anything about.
I agree that they sometimes tend to weigh the wrong things as important.
However, I don’t expect to buy the absolute best product if I buy the products they score high. I just expect that whatever I buy will be de-risked: It‘ll be pretty good and there’s basically no chance that I buy rubbish.
you know the option that’s 1.5x the price of the other options and has the most bland, grown up branding imaginable? yeah it survives because it’s better quality than everything else.
First i determine what quality of product i really need so I can shop in that range. Do i need a modern high performance mountain bike, an entry level quality bike, or just a cheap mass produced bike thats good enough for my needs?
Then i do extensive research often reading multiple reviews and articles. I look for whats mentioned most frequently and what isn’t mentioned, also for how consistent things are between reviews. I’m sure some of what i encounter is marketing or bot comments but some may be still legitimate as well.
I also look for guides on what to consider if its something I’m new to so i can compare any stats included with the product. The material and quality of the product can be a big factor as well, generally the better the product the more likely they are to brag about its construction. Are they bragging about a certain reinforcement, weight reduction, or power level?
Looking at the reputation of the retailer can be useful as well. A shoe store with 4.8 star reviews is likely to have better quality and selection of shoes than wal-mart. Sometimes you can sniff out the quality brands this way then find those brands for a better price somewhere online.
Going to a brands website can sometimes give you a hint. Are they proud of their products, have easy to access support and lots of details/downloads available or is all the information vague or poorly translated? A quality brand is more likely to have a quality website but this isn’t always the case, especially for niche products that are being produced by small time businesses like specialty equipment.
I ask someone who might have an objective opinion on the matter. When buying a 3d printer, I asked the 3d printing community, when buying a car I asked someone who used to own the model I was considering, and when it comes to tools I ask my brother (he’s used them all, both professionally and privately).
In other words, I ask people with first hand experience, and try to avoid the ones who might still be biased. Once getting a solid opinion from someone I trust, I go online to gauge the general impression of the public as a whole, and see if the align with my trusted source.
Unfortunately all of the most reliable places for that are either dead or co-opted. Those that still exist are buried under an avalanche of AI best of lists. I don’t think there is a simple way to find the best of really any product.
Consumer Reports
America’s Test Kitchen
America’s Test Kitchen
Best general purpose cookbook we own.
There’s also a recommendations community here [email protected]
It’s not active enough to be all that useful. But hey, the more people that subscribe, the closer that is to changing.
Just subscribed.
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.
For UK, Which.
I think rtings buys their own test units, though they only do a few categories: tvs, monitors, etc.
Consumer reports is okay for non-tech items, though companies have caught on and once they’re on top of the list, they make revision that makes the product much cheaper and shittier and sell it under the original name. You can see it in the comments when people buy the same thing after it has been the best for a bit. Once a company is #1, they enshittify so it’s better, in my opinion, to buy rising stars rather than the soon-to-enshittify incumbent.
