Comment by ado__dev
9 months ago
Finding trustworthy reviews and recommendations via Google is useless. The first few pages are always littered by the lowest quality, highest SEO-spam content, and the recommendations on these pages are so shallow and inauthentic that I know the person that wrote the article has never even looked at the product they're shilling. And so often these lists are literally the same list of 20 products slightly re-arranged.
Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop.
Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
There surely must be a better option.
> Reddit is also really hit and miss
It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query and start trying to game the system there too.
I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few months old, in a small community, with very few other responses besides a strangely specific answer to the question.
Reddit is highly subjective.
In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly use them in the field.
Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations, for example. What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American" brands (but Coast is shit).
It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers seeking advice.
Hi there! I am a moderator of said subreddit and the maintainer of its recommendation guide, so I think I'll speak up on behalf of the community. Addressing the points in order...
We do, in fact recommend lots of brands that don't pay for space in retail stores and haven't been around for decades. Isn't that the point of asking an enthusiast community for advice?
A while back, lights with lots of mix-and-match bits that could be assembled without tools were pretty popular, especially the Surefire P60 system. These have fallen out of favor for a number of reasons including the increasing popularity of electronic switches over mechanical and an increase in availability of build-to-order lights. DIY stuff is still popular for hobbyists, but usually involves soldering.
Removable batteries are absolutely a consideration for most of the community. A flashlight with non-removable batteries is future e-waste and can't have spares. Lights without removable batteries only make my list when they're a weird form factor (usually very small) and low-priced without good removable battery alternatives. We almost always try to talk people out of routine use of disposable batteries, but many popular models have a disposable option as a backup.
I do not often see people steering beginners toward models with extreme outputs; the opposite is often true. We're constantly talking to people about sustained output versus peak output, color rendering, efficiency, and ultra-low modes.
As for brands that manufacture in the USA, very few people asking for advice come with the sort of budgets those brands usually require. Trying to talk someone looking to spend $60 on a light to walk their dog with into spending $300 on a Modlite or Surefire isn't helpful.
Are we looking at the same subreddit? Perhaps it's changed since I last looked, but most recommended lights use a replaceable, rechargeable cylindrical lithium battery. A common requirement/desirable feature of lights is good light output controls (such as ramp firmwares), waterproofness, etc. There's plenty of recognition that different lights are not ideal for everyone, and if anything the brightest lights are seen as too much for some (given they can literally burn holes in your pocket..)
I can't say every post is legit, and I'm sure there's a fair share of marketing posts posing as real users, but there's good reason IMO to recommend the lights they do. There's a lot of stuff that comes out of China that's just as good if not better than the American brand for half the price, if not even less.
That being said, it's an enthusiast subreddit, as all such things are, so if you're looking for a "casual" recommendation it's likely to be more than you need XD
"American business-hating lumen chasers" is an incredibly shallow portrayal of that flashlight community.
I've found flashlights to be one of the few product areas where "obscure AliExpress brands" actually outperform Western equivalents.
> Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations
That's because it's taken for granted that nearly every recommendation uses one of a few standard cylindrical battery sizes, which are trivially user replaceable. Only a few brands use non-standard or built-in batteries. Often the electronics or LED emitters can be modified or replaced, since most lights fit a simple "cylindrical tube" formula.
> What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with
I guess all those discussions about tint (subtle colours of the beam), CRI (how well colours are represented), beam shape, optics type, user interface, etc. were nothing then. ("Big number of lumens" is far from the only factor - sometimes not even the most significant one.)
Granted, not all that information is useful for a newcomer who just wants a decent light. But the buying guide on the wiki sums it up simply enough.
What is hilarious are the people selling those same AliExpress lights at huge markups (search "Goonbeam"). Quality and price are often linked, but far from the same.
> The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs
The group who designed my extremely awesome Astrolux MF-01 might be a clone of them.
I've noticed that a large portion of reviews are literally just rehashing reviews on amazon. And, if I were to guess, a good number of them are just these review sites pumping in "top 10 x reviews from amazon" into chatgpt and having it write their review for them.
> YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting their hands on the product in question and instead they are putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.
The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a paid promotional thing.
> The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product.
IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the future.
Yeah if they have no negative reviews, that's a bad sign. A particularly scrupled YouTuber I follow typically won't do a paid video if the product isn't good and instead does an unpaid tear down video. That probably limits his opportunities to brave marketing teams with high quality products, but it also makes his reviews quite valuable.
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It depends on what you are looking for. I found looking at the BIFL subreddit, sites that cater more towards industry (McMaster Carr as an example), and companies based in Europe (Fjallraven as an example) can help find higher quality products faster (or finding items on there and then searching reddit/forums for "alternatives").
Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
> trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.
Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by comparison.
+1 on buying from commercial suppliers for even home kitchen stuff. I’m a fan of webstaurantstore.com . Prices are good, and you can buy stuff that will last you forever in a home kitchen which usually isn’t available in normal stores (eg Cambro containers).
Do you happen to know a McMaster-Carr equivalent based in Europe?
I do not but if you have a STEM club at a local school or a nearby university with a mechanical engineering program they would be able to tell you (assuming one exists).
Every review on youtube is paid placement for the most part. The exception is if you find a real user who will post some crappily shot video and never step in frame themselves, those are always the highest quality reviews yet its rare and below the fold because people do it out of their own freetime and goodwill and aren’t trying to make a hustle out of it (which means accepting paid review offers).
Yeah, YouTube is absolutely dominated by paid product placement, especially for stuff like power tools. That said, YouTube reviews at least tend to be real in the sense that at least the reviewer is actually using and demonstrating the product, which is a huge step up from the "we summarized some Amazon reviews for you" SEO spam.
They will “demo” the product for the half hour it takes to film the review, then they will ship it back or keep it themselves and not say a word if it falls apart three weeks later. This is still a marketing world. You want work. People only give you work if they feel theres a case for a return on investment, and they’d rather work with people who are liable to review that favorably than critically.
> Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight.
Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them.
Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
It's called "Consumer Reports" / Consumers Union.
That's what it look like.
The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.
But people need to use it.
Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school, like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord, YouTube, Facebook or whatever.
I know I buy sort of expensive products, but most of the things I've bought recently like my christiania bike all have youtube channels detailing their products. I think that is frankly the only real way for brands to advertise to people like me who'll maybe look at reddit threads or similar, but these days you can barely even trust many of those. We bought a Baby Brezza based on recomendations, they have a semi decent youtube with a mix of useful information and advertisement.
A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.
Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.
Reddit is 99% schill bots. Heaven help you if you're researching baby products. The entire scandalous baby product market has commandeered Reddit with accounts like this one that I found just because I kept seeing the name pop up relentlessly hawking the same products:
https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/
99,9% of the time, a username in the format NameNameNumber is a bot. The probability goes up as the value of Number increases.
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>There surely must be a better option.
Maybe Consumer Reports?
Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who knows, they could also be compromised.
Or rtings for any categories they review.
rtings is really good and in-depth. I have used them as a gut check many times and they haven't let me down yet.
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I did actually buy a year long subscription of CR when I moved into my new house a few years ago and I found their reviews to be generally more helpful and have bought a few products based on their recommendations.
People like to shit on Nextdoor but once I embraced it as a homeowner it's my go-to for everything. Fuck Google/Yelp for reviews. It's refreshing getting local first-hand reviews and recommendations from neighbors about plumbers, roofers, electricians, solar panel experiences, tax stuff, home security camera questions, etc. Having a local authenticated community is so refreshing compared to the corporate bot infested internet.
Just don't ask for realtor suggestions. Your inbox will never be the same again. And everyone is a realtor or related to the one that does the best job...
It blows my mind why sellers would even need a realtor in hot markets. Your home will get a dozen offers in a week as soon as its put up for sale, you don’t need to burn 5% and do all the bullshit ritualism like staging or aerial photography that people are paying for.
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Ah and there's the example of a service that's local, organic, home-grown, small business, crunchy, and also thoroughly paid-off. To complement my sibling comment that "local" is not the deciding factor
Knowing there's an unpaid human writing the review is about the only thing that matters. I guess for repair services it has to be local, but the real point is, if I get a recommendation from friends or family, I can trust that they aren't affiliates, because they're staking the relationship on their review.
<https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads>
> in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars. I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do.
There's a couple Facebook groups for residents for the city I live in and I've found them useful for the same reason. I should also start checking NextDoor more, thanks for the mention.