I will start by saying I am trying to consume a lot less in my life, but due to circumstance I need to start again in my life. I am also trying to degoogle not use Amazon etc.
With this in mind I prefer to buy a decent value product and look at the options however I have noticed that I keep coming across comparisons and over and over it’s driven by ‘check price at Amazon’. Amazon has ruined decent reviews for me. All anyone wants to do is sell Amazon tat at me. Anyone else have this problem of too much chafe when trying to research decent products?
Depending on what you’re trying to buy, versus.com may help you narrow down your choices.
Which.co.uk do a pretty good job at reviewing stuff.
They’re not ideal, and they do seem to focus too hard on some things over others.
But in terms of finding “Can I get an X that is half decent for the money I’m willing to spend”, they work quite well.Unfortunately, they are a bit pricey.
Stiftung Warentest (at test.de) does a great job comparing products and pointing out faults. Probably not that useful if you don’t speak German, though, if the products they’re testing are even available in your country …
You really have to try hard to find genuine reviews.
HouseFresh did a good piece last year about the general state of product reviews. They’re a smaller site that focuses entirely on reviewing air purification products and noticed a large drop in traffic coming from search engines compared to giant digital media companies that can churn out tons of perfectly SEO optimized reviews of products they’ve never even tried first hand. And you know all those reviews are crammed full of Affiliate links.
It’s a hard time with so much junk information out there
I did think at first it was me being overly fussy with what I was seeing. It’s good to know it’s not just me.
It was a pretty good read. It felt like much of what I was suspecting was laid out in a nice structure, with an idea of why it was occurring. It didn’t feel like a crazy rant. I did note they themselves are an Amazon affiliate however they did take an objective view.
I was actually looking at gardening equipment which is a bit niche for there. I think I am missing the days where people tried stuff out and commented on it rather than ‘tried this from there it’s great go buy at retailer abc’ I had the same problem recently with kitchen utensils. I don’t want tons of plastic ones. I wanted a small selection of decent tools. It was frustrating wading through the crap to find good reviews and verdicts on what is/isn’t essential.
