https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/ https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/ and https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ are two more awesome review sites for outdo

https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/ https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/ and https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ are two more awesome review sites for outdoor gear and electronics, specifically TVs and monitors but now also things like cameras and headphones. I love that REI largely doesn’t sell any junk — even the cheapest thing in a category that they sell probably still works fine. Backcountry and MooseJaw are similar. We’re lucky to have so many good outdoor brands in the US. The same cannot be said for home goods and things like appliances. Most of the market is disposable single-use junk. Reddit has r/BIFL (“Buy It For Life”) but there are some things, eg electric toothbrushes, where the best-functioning brand (Sonicare) do things like plastic weld their handles shut, so when the li-ion cell in there dies after 2 years, you’re meant to buy a new handle. Replacement battery kits can be found, though typically they use low-quality cells, require soldering, and have a high likelihood of damaging the case and waterproof seal due to the design of the thing. This is just one example, but I’ve found that more likely than not, “home electronics” fall into this category of unfortunately low-quality and hard-to-repair, so I try to avoid them entirely wherever I can. Still other good are problematic to shop for and own. Trying to buy any durable goods (and even consumables) on Amazon these days requires a good deal of research. It’s pretty obvious which brands are the “WEKAPO” or “POPCHOSE” or other combination of gibberish (see https://youtu.be/4UrqlMfwUC4 https://youtu.be/4UrqlMfwUC4 on why), but there’s just SO MANY of these products flooding Amazon that it feels like digging through racks in a thrift shop or something. I wish they had a filter for something like “established brands only” but I know that a ton of their business these days is selling these low-quality products that are typically copies of other products. The most frustrating result of all the SHNITPWR and VANLEONET for me is probably the impact on rwview sites. If you Google things like “best SUP 2023” you’ll get endless “review” sites that are just Amazon affiliate links with articles that are reworded (likely automated) product descriptions or pathetic paragraphs from pay-per-word authors that have obviously never used any of the products, showing you what amounts to 10 random products in a category from whatever from junk brands. I hope Google finds a way to PageRank these into the ground, and I wish Amazon would likewise do something to combat this behavior, as it’s making the modern shopping experience and the internet in general pretty awful.