When you Google for "best whatever" and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.

You'll find many cases where the only post they've ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.

A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.

Because Reddit is infested with bot accounts at this point I tend to trust older threads over newer ones. Easy as hell to buy accs to say a competitor sucks dick

there needs to be a crowd sourced product review and maintenance website that can see trends of enshittification.

This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy's hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.

Now, it's all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that's the type of page you'll be served.

I've had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don't have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.

My exact experience finding out Audacity has adware

I spent 3 hours reading Amazon reviews for shoes just trying to find ONE fucking pair that didn't have "falls apart in 3-6 months" as the most common review...

The state of everything is just absurd.

This is where guitars are right now.

Both Fender and Gibson are now owned by venture capitalists. Their quality of everything, from strings to picks to guitars, has plummeted across every brand they own in the last five years. It’s sad really.

You go on Reddit and people talk about the models and which one is great for this, or why they prefer it for that, but then you find some deeper dives into more recent spaces and people who know what they are talking about have moved away entirely from both brands.

If anyone is curious, you can buy a better guitar from Harley-Benton, Cort, or Jet than from Fender/Gibson and it will be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.

Everyone replies with 'thanks', 'nailed it'. 'Holy shit that's perfect'

To a comment that's [deleted]

Just get a cheap one in KMart. It’ll likely fall apart, but it still comes from the same sweatshop as your favourite brand and you didn’t pay so much for the months of wear you got.

For something like a hoodie, I recommend you go to a thrift store. Anything you find there will be durable and quality enough to survive, and you can feel it or try it on. It's very easy to find high quality stuff while thrifting. 8 dollars for what might cost 80 new.

Try to focus on non-synthetic fibers or semi synthetic. Plastics in clothing are bad for the environment.

When I started fishing as a hobby, I couldn't believe that it was the only hobby I've ever taken up that pretty much had unanimous recommendations for beginners. Everyone seemed to suggest the Ugly Stik GX2 on every website or forum. And there were no threads about how I should buy a more expensive rod/reel, other than a few that mentioned that I might want to upgrade the reel on the GX2 after a year or so.

Even the salesperson at the Bass Pro Shops store recommended the GX2 even though I could have afforded a bit more.

It was a completely new experience for me. I am used to having to spend at least $300-400 on initial investments for new hobbies. Fishing was only CAD$120 for everything!

You buy it anyway, and it’s a great purchase. Very happy. Dog eats it a few days later and the product is discontinued. Or Is it just me?

I ran into this when I was thinking about buying some Doc Martens recently. I know there have been other examples, that's just the most recent I can remember.

depending on reddit for any kind of real world advice is a crapshoot at best

Every FOSS project I've ever looked into lol

Gerber Legend 800 Multitool

The one I got from a PX the year after it was released is epic. Have carried it for 23 years. It has seen everything and outside of scraping the knife sharpish again, has never been maintained. I misplaced it for a bit (under friends driver's seat for about a year) and couldn't find a replacement "upgrade". Did the Leatherman wave2 for a bit. Couldn't take it, hit up eBay, got 3 more Gerber L800s (later release, still in boxes)...so bad. They just felt cheaper. When we stumbled upon my old Gerber, I kept the new ones for parts. Replace my knife with a new one...it already has rust dots on it. My old one after decades of abuse and being sharpened to half it's starting width, doesn't have a spot of rust on it.

ANYWAY....yeah...what OP said.

Whether they're trustworthy or not I'm not sure, but they've not failed me yet

I tend to go for those "2024 top 10 x" lists, jabra 65t was a very good recommendation from there, my toaster, probably a bunch of other things I've now forgotten about