I recently had need to buy a thermal camera. I wanted to buy a good quality one that would last a long time without spending £1000’s on some overkill industrial device. I looked for online stores that aren’t amazon, but I couldn’t really find any named stores/brands that I’d heard of selling decent ones. So I tried to search for reviews, but literally every review either had affiliate links trying to get me to buy the expensive ones on amazon, or was a literal ad on youtube disguised as an indie review with sub-10k views from some nobody channel. So I reluctantly looked on Amazon, and as usual a load of the reviews there are ai-generated and I have no real idea which products are actually good, and there are a thousand knock-off cheapo products from alphabet-soup companies with names like AXLGOFN, which I’m not remotely interested in.
I eventually managed to find and buy a decent camera, and it was the same price on amazon versus some other site I hadn’t previously heard of, so I bought it on the other random electronics site.
But, my question is more broad: how do you navigate the online hellscape? Do you have a philosohpy or strategy about how to navigate a market you know nothing about and pay a sensible price for a good product without getting scammed? This experience just seems to be normal now, and it’s exhausting. I’m sick of ai-generated reviews, I’m sick of “paid reviews” and youtube videos of “this company sent me this product for free with these 12 talking points which I will now read to you”, and I’m sick of companies called AXLGOFN trying to sell me cheap tat that will last 14 minutes.
Oftentimes, and I hate to say it, I look on reddit, for all the reasons you just described. I’m not saying it’s a perfect method, but these days I find myself looking on there for anything based around opinion - such as the quality of certain devices. It seems the fastest route to find opinions of real people. And besides with how pretentious most reddit users are, they have a tendency to OVER recommend (for example suggesting anything less then the best is dog water and shouldn’t even be considered, a rare benefit).
You just have to learn to see through the occasional bot post but it is usually pretty obvious, at least moreso then the endless crap on the, as you put it, hellscape.
You gotta make do with what you got
One thing I do is read 3 star reviews. Generally, five star reviews are bots/shills or just people trying to affirm a bad decision; One star reviews are people that had shipping problems or didn’t understand what they were buying. Three star reviews tend to be people that actually bought the thing, and are capable of rational thought.
5stars: looks okay but haven’t tested yet.
I do this! I sort by recent and critical if they have the category. IDC about the people who loved the product, I want to see why people didn’t like the product.
For whatever thing you’re into, there are dedicated hobby communities for it. If you can find an old school forum, subreddit, Lemmy community for that specialised thing you’ll find people who genuinely want to recommend products for you, not because they want to get paid but because they’re passionate about it. That’s where you find honest reviews.
Definitely, forums and reddits are where I get my purchasing decisions. Reviews are bots so I don’t trust them
Know good review sites
Rtings and Tom’s Hardware are usually all you need, but for niche things you need to branch out
Yet another reason to be skeptical of reviews is that they are heavily weighed towards first impressions. So if someone gets a product and it works great, they might go and immediately leave a glowing review for it. But if it breaks 6 months later due to poor manufacturing quality, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and update their review.
Buy with a credit or debit card that has purchase proetection: If it’s a scam, issue a chargeback.
When possible, go to the manufacturers site. In this case, someone like Flir.
Flir is absolute dogshit overpriced Chinese junk. Don’t get me started on how bad the industrial software is.
Today I learned.
Regardless, go to the manufacturer site, whoever you pick.
If I’m getting into a new hobby or something and am suspicious about the listings I’m seeing on Amazon or Etsy or wherever, I check Temu. If the same thing I’m seeing on one of those sites is on Temu, it confirms that it’s just cheap Chinese stuff with an high markup and I move on to a different seller/maker of the product.
I like to hit Amazon before I look anywhere else since there will be a lot of the knockoff products and I can get in my head what they look like before looking elsewhere for the real deal. If I go to a different site and they have one of the Amazon/Temu products I’ve seen, I leave that site and find another.
I tend to avoid amazon in the first place.
