Searching for product recommendations has become harder and harder over the years. I used to google or browse reddit for reviews, used them to create a shortlist of products and then actually dig deeper and compare them.
Lets say I’m in the market for a mechanical keyboard, but I don’t know much about them. I use whatever search engine to look for “best mechanical keyboard 2024”. The results are really bad, and I mean really bad. It’s more of a list of keyboards to avoid, to be honest. The problem is not just google. Bing, duckduckgo, Kagi, Startpage… all results suck. The results are filled with AI generated pages or outlets farming affiliate links. There are a couple of good suggestions in the middle of the garbage but if 9/10 websites recommend a random razer keyboard, I’m inclined to believe it’s an option worth considering.
Some of my friends say they resort to Youtube. I can agree that Youtube has amazing content creators that give amazing reviews and produce great quality content. But if you don’t know anything about the subject, how do you know which content creator is good and which content creator is just farming affiliate links?
One of the things I loved about Reddit was that I could just go to /r/whateversubject and talk to what I felt was real people discussing products they loved. I no longer use Reddit ,and Lemmy, unfortunately, doesn’t have a big enough userbase to have a good community for each type of product.
So, what’s your strategy to find out good products on subjects you know nothing about?
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.
I’d do that too but Bad Dragon doesn’t seem to want to expand into my neighborhood
Have you tried stroking it a little?
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 just look for the most barebones forum with complaints about the product and see if I can deal with those issues or not
Honestly, I still just google for relevant reddit threads. Lemmy’s the only place I actively participate in, but this is one of the use cases it hasn’t been able to replace reddit for for me either yet.
Reddit has been astroturfed so much the recommendations there have to be taken with a lot of salt.
Sure, but it’s still a lot more reliable than something like the amazon review section, or a lengthy AI-generated article comparing the two products you just happened to google together that somehow manages to say nothing at all.
Those ai articles are almost surely there to distribute affiliate links. Not really to be trusted. So yeah, I still append “reddit” to product recommendation searches
Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.
Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.
I haven’t found a way. I too used days of research, going to a physical store to try something when possible/applicable, YouTube reviewers, many many websites that used to be trusted, plus Reddit reviews. They all lied, or maybe I’m doing something odd to cause my own problems? Or both:-).
And even when they did not lie, about their past experiences, in one case the company itself ended up betraying its entire userbase so bad it made an international sensation and the cofounder left the company in protest - OnePlus I’m looking at you regarding the 7-series updates. I will never purchase a OnePlus product again in my life as a result, which is doubly sad bc nowadays they once again seem like good devices, and triply so bc I know of nothing else remotely like those “flagship killers” of old - that whole genre of phone is just over now, and they were merely the last hold-out.
You have to somehow be an expert in every little thing these days, and when you do find something you may want to consider purchasing more than one of the item to avoid having to go through all that again when the first one breaks, if that makes sense for the situation (for a keyboard I dunno?).
If only after doing all that you could share what you found with family+friends, to spread the love and avoid the same pain all around!? But in reverse, would you trust the reviews of your family members & friends - how sane are they, when it comes to this stuff? We want reviews from people better equipped to do so than we are ourselves, not average or below:-).
Which is why I’m saying that depending on the cost you may want to just roll the dice and see, and also expect to spend even more days of research, and also go back through historical archives of Reddit forums as much as possible. The goal of all capitalism is to take your money, period. The likes of Amazon and Google have truly enshittified the act of internet commerce:-(.
Also was a OnePlus user - now switched to Nothing Phone (2).
How is it?
Very solid, I think (except water protection, but my previous OnePlus also didn’t have good water protection anyway; and I’m careful enough).
I don’t tend to use glyphs or the default launcher (and therefore its special widgets that only work there; but the ability to have apps in folders on my main screen while being hidden from the app menu is more important for me than a handful of widgets, so Neo Launcher it is).
A recent OS update added configurable swap (up to 8GB), calling it “RAM booster”. I don’t use it, but if you want to run a local LLM (or rather a SLM), you could try making use of it? As long as you figure out how to make the model use main RAM and not the swap.
I like the battery life (or maybe it’s just because it’s the first phone where I started charging at 20% and stopping at 80% semi-consistently).
Termux still works despite the new Android versions becoming more hostile to apps executing binaries they didn’t have included already.
One thing I miss from OnePlus is the ability to deny some apps network access entirely. (I think it was removed in later versions of Oxygen OS?)
OnePlus phones no longer use Oxygen OS - it has been supplanted by Color OS, the same as used in Huawei phones.
With the cofounder having left OnePlus (to start Nothing phone!), and the demise of Oxygen OS, and the ending of the offering of “flagship killer” models, the company has entirely rebranded itself these days to be a “full flagship” along the likes of Samsung and Google and Apple, though ofc far behind all of those.
They are half-decent phones, reputedly, i.e. possibly worth replacing the OS on just to get the hardware for the specs, though the other cofounder - the one who remained behind - has a history of alternately playing nice for a few years then betraying the entire user base, then rinse & repeat with newer customers, so for someone who does not want to replace the OS with a custom ROM I would not recommend them.
My own phone’s update (7T) was so buggy (it made a minor but noticeable international news sensation) that - I kid you not - I thought that the device might literally explode. I quickly turned it off and it did not, but it got REALLY hot for awhile. After researching, the solution was simple: boot the device into recovery mode and wipe the temporary cache. But WTF OnePlus, you couldn’t have had the update do that automatically rather than scare people like that? And I think that melted some internal shielding component b/c even after replacing the OS the phone has never behaved the same - I can no longer hold it in my hands anymore for more than a few minutes at a time b/c it literally hurts and even makes red marks on my skin. My device went from buttery-smooth scrolling - a phone I LOVED, and raved about to anyone who would listen, proudly showing it off - to a piece of crap in less than ten minutes, due to a buggy update rollout. :-(
My update experience seems worse than most, but I am far from the only one, when the company decided that their most popular model - the 7-series - simply was not worth maintaining anymore, as they dropped support for Oxygen OS from the 6-series and older models, and switched to the Color OS for the 8-series and newer models, leaving the 7-series delayed for a long time whether the company would do anything at all for us.
i.e. Carl Pie left for good, solid reasons - not just to start a new thing but to leave the old bad thing behind:-|.
I see!
And it was a stable OS version, not a beta or something? That’s the worst kind of bugs. Hopefully manufacturers start formally verifying hardware and firmware as a standard practice in the future.
Yes, echoing the other commenter: how is it?
I live in the USA so getting one would be problematic but I hear perhaps not entirely impossible for me.
Do you know how it compares to e.g. Fairphone?
Other than what I said in the other reply:
I live in the USA so getting one would be problematic but I hear perhaps not entirely impossible for me.
Looks like it has a US release? If you’re unsure or getting a European version, double-check it’s compatible with American wireless network frequencies &c. Specific operators might also have their own shenanigans.
Do you know how it compares to e.g. Fairphone?
Nope, never tried Fairphone.
I’m afraid there is no quick way to get an honest recommendation. I usually resort to YouTube and spend 2-3 days watching some related content. It sorta filters itself out, there will be a creator or few that you vibe with, and you trust their choice.
Happened to me with audio gear (I trusted crinacle, for example.)
Weeding out the spon-con is very difficult depending on the product. I was looking at solar generators a year ago and gave up with youtube because every single reviewer was provided the product they were using for free to review.
Honestly, you just need to find whatever forum the enthusiasts of <topic> are using and see what people write there.
This is just one of the cases where search engines are useless
It is sadly no longer possible. The reason is simple: if your goal is to make a real review site, either you’re taking in money for reviews, or someone else is and posting it to your site. The insurmountable costs associated with not doing either means every site out there is going to be garbage.
If you’re not yet into very good mechanical keyboards, my personal suggestion is to go shopping on AliExpress with $40 and spend half of it on a cheap mechanical (my daily driver is a 17€ skylion) and the other half on a set of key caps.
Sure it’s not gonna be great, but unless you’re accustomed to very high end boards, it’ll suit you just fine without breaking the bank and it’ll still better than anything razer has produced ever. If you have the time for it, you could also oil the switches when you get the board, that usually has a very good effect on feel.
The mechanical keyboard topic was just an example. Because I’m kinda into mechanical keyboards, I can instantly spot the obviously bad recommendations. If the topic was something like microphones or washing machines, I’d be toast.
10 years ago you could get honest product recommendations in Reddit. These days reddit is overrung with corporate trolls.
Honestly, I still just post here. You may not get the same amount of answers as you would’ve on reddit, but it’s still worth a shot. Besides, somebody’s got to start populating this place with good info. Why not be the one who starts it?
That being said, pretty much every time I’ve asked about something here I’ve got excellent feedback.
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
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. 🤷🏻♂️
They built an entire industry dedicated to gaming the search results, so I feel your frustration. Nowadays, if it’s not some influencer telling you to try something, it usually a bunch of topic snobs who need the latest and best (read: most expensive) version of anything - completely unusable for a casual query. If you have friends or local communities with the same hobbies, I’d start there. Or start in the shops - you find out real fast of they’re trying to push product on you, versus genuinely trying to help you find what you need.
Don’t search for reviews. Search for forum posts where users are having issues. “[Product] + [not working/failed/broken]” gets you an idea of what the product is like to live with, and now quickly issues get resolved.
What you don’t get is a feeling for how common these failures occur though.
The problem is most people only post when they do have issues or they give everything 5 stars if it’s as expected.
I find ignoring 1 and 5 star reviews helps with this issue.
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.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work in Portugal. Most sales people don’t have any sort of training in the products they sell and they are heavily pressured into selling services rather than products. Your budget is 200 euros? They’re going to try to suggest you a 100 euros product and then try to get you to buy extended warranty and/or insurance.
Source: I did sales to pay for my college
