Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch t

Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5. IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint? You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit. You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better. And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).