You can get a subscription to Consumer Reports. They do thorough and reliable ratings of a lot of things. Not sure about thermal cameras, though. I mean it as more general advice.

For whatever thing you’re into, there are dedicated hobby communities for it. If you can find an old school forum, subreddit, Lemmy community for that specialised thing you’ll find people who genuinely want to recommend products for you, not because they want to get paid but because they’re passionate about it. That’s where you find honest reviews.

One thing I do is read 3 star reviews. Generally, five star reviews are bots/shills or just people trying to affirm a bad decision; One star reviews are people that had shipping problems or didn’t understand what they were buying. Three star reviews tend to be people that actually bought the thing, and are capable of rational thought.

Yet another reason to be skeptical of reviews is that they are heavily weighed towards first impressions. So if someone gets a product and it works great, they might go and immediately leave a glowing review for it. But if it breaks 6 months later due to poor manufacturing quality, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and update their review.

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.

2-3 star reviews. This will help color in which 1 star reviews to believe.

Sadly, the 5 star review is the most questionable.

Aside about Amazon. What didn’t work. I do woodworking so I wear a respirator. 3M, dual cartridge. I found a carton of 30 pairs of P100 for $85 on Amazon. It was through the 3M store on Amazon. Legit, right? The filters that came appeared legit, and nowhere near expiration. The issue is, they sent a box of 6 pairs not a carton of 30 pairs. Customer service fixed it, or so they said. Again, my carton of 30 pairs was a single box of 6 pairs (5 to a carton, probably). Amazon did issue a refund but would not order a replacement. I couldn’t order a replacement, I didn’t trust it.

So, I went to 3M. There is no way to contact their customer service unless you’re a large contractor or seller. 3M store? I guess it’s just a pretty frame on Amazon. The 3M site itself links back to Amazon and 2 others for purchase. The two others: one has no availability and the other wants $100+ for that box of 6 pairs of P100 filters.

This isn’t uncommon. You try to buy direct, and may end up on Amazon anyway.

I never did get my carton of 30 pairs of P100 filters.

Flir makes one that connects to your phone to use as a screen. Worked well for me to look for leaks in my insulation.

I stick to known vendors, brands, and shipment agents.

I look for online stores with actual brick and mortar shops. Here in Finland they aren’t the cheapest, but I’ll also buy from German or other European stores depending on the item.

I just feel safer knowing there’s a shop somewhere I can return to.

Know good review sites

Rtings and Tom’s Hardware are usually all you need, but for niche things you need to branch out

My main strategy is to avoid needing to buy things online as much as possible. Failing that, what you described is all I know. It sucks. Every purchase feels like a gamble.

When possible, go to the manufacturers site. In this case, someone like Flir.

I follow a few general checks, the more “checks”, the less likely it is to be a sham.

• does the brand have their own website/exist outside of the store (Amazon, Walmart, etc).
• • Also does it exist on more than one store.
• • Avoid alphabet soup brands. However, sometimes an alphabet soup brand is real, it’s just unfamiliar yo you. Generrly if you can’t attempt to pronounce it, don’t bother.
• Price - consider what it is and what a “cheaper” version would be.
• • What is the average price of the item on amazon? Say the brand-name expensive options are around $40. The knockoffs under $25 are probably junk. But the stuff in the $25+ range might be legimate budget options.
• Reviews - looking for a healthy mix of 4-2 stars.
• • Read the 1 star reviews and see if the reviewers applied any critical thinking. If they ordered a 50 button mouse that says it only works on windows and they complain it doesn’t work on their Mac you know its a user problem. Othertimes they complain about shipping problems outside the sellers control like the box got wet and disintegrated.
• • Every manufactured product has a few duds, the question is will it be returned with out issue and the frequencies of the duds.
• • Do the reviews line up with the product or talk about something random (keep in mind some products have variants that are actually different products). If the speaker reviews start talking about how great the socks are… run.
• YouTube/video reviews
• • Look for multiple independent reviews, if all of them seem to follow the same “talking points”, its a sign they’re paid reviews…or they’re just reading the description page.
• • Also the more independent reviews either means the company cares about marketing which is good and/or the reviews actually liked or hated the thing enough to dedicate time to a review.
• • what else is on the channel, is a bunch of mass-produced “slide show” reviews or do they actually seem to use and test a variety of product for a period of time. Or is this one thing the only review they’ve ever done?
• reddit
• • It’s still one of the best places to get reviews. You’ll see the types of problems people are having, if there’s solutions and sometimes get an idea of what ths customer support is like.

Which one did you end up with? I bought a VEVOR thermal camera. They seem like one step up from the seemingly random AXLGOFN type brands in that I had heard of them before and they sell other tools and equipment. I have heard that some of their products are junk but I’m not disappointed with the thermal camera. The price was right.

I sort the reviews by recent on the assumption that when these companies pay for fake reviews they sort of come all at once and the recent reviews will be humans who’re actually reviewing it since then.