As I wrote the Tell post, I was pondering this. I think curated shopping could be a solution, but as evidenced by some of the current popular "curated" sites,

As I wrote the Tell post, I was pondering this. I think curated shopping could be a solution, but as evidenced by some of the current popular "curated" sites, they tend also to race to a less-than-optimal level as well. There are old companies like Consumer Reports which were sort of doing this, but I suspect they have some intentional or unintentional biases. In the tech world we have sites which maybe started out trying to bring light to the best products, but it seems every site gets gamed or just sells out. Then you can't trust it. True word of mouth is reliable, but when none of the mouths can get their hands on the actual good product, there's nobody to recommend it. Or maybe it no longer even exists because the manufacturer couldn't compete with the garbage on Amazon.