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.

  • serpineslair@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    6 hours ago

    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.