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?

  • Gork@lemm.ee
    5·
    6 months ago

    This is a difficult question these days to answer. There are a few categories where I always stick to established brand names, these are typically electronics or anything electrical like portable battery packs or wall chargers. Poorly made items in those categories can start fires. And when it comes to silicon, there’s only a few to trust anyway since there are only a few major fabs out there.

    I usually follow the site:reddit.com search method but I’ve had to further filter my criteria by only looking in enthusiast subreddits instead of the bigger ones like /r/AskReddit.

    It gets difficult though for general goods that don’t really need well known brands and whose performance doesn’t matter as much but it’s hard to tell the quality online. Lawn chairs, pizza cutters, sushi kits, clothes hangers, rope, and shower curtain rods are good examples. These usually come down to luck of the draw.