Searching for product recommendations has become harder and harder over the years. I used to google or browse reddit for reviews, used them to create a shortlist of products and then actually dig deeper and compare them.

Lets say I’m in the market for a mechanical keyboard, but I don’t know much about them. I use whatever search engine to look for “best mechanical keyboard 2024”. The results are really bad, and I mean really bad. It’s more of a list of keyboards to avoid, to be honest. The problem is not just google. Bing, duckduckgo, Kagi, Startpage… all results suck. The results are filled with AI generated pages or outlets farming affiliate links. There are a couple of good suggestions in the middle of the garbage but if 9/10 websites recommend a random razer keyboard, I’m inclined to believe it’s an option worth considering.

Some of my friends say they resort to Youtube. I can agree that Youtube has amazing content creators that give amazing reviews and produce great quality content. But if you don’t know anything about the subject, how do you know which content creator is good and which content creator is just farming affiliate links?

One of the things I loved about Reddit was that I could just go to /r/whateversubject and talk to what I felt was real people discussing products they loved. I no longer use Reddit ,and Lemmy, unfortunately, doesn’t have a big enough userbase to have a good community for each type of product.

So, what’s your strategy to find out good products on subjects you know nothing about?

  • Audalin@lemmy.world
    14·
    6 months ago

    I don’t focus on recommendations specifically. My typical process is:

    • spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks figuring out which technical characteristics are important for this kind of product, which aren’t, why and when &c. This kind of information is usually available (and even obvious SEO garbage can give you new keywords to consider when searching);
    • based on these alone, determine what’s acceptable and what’s desirable for you;
    • if you haven’t already, find some kind of community around the topic and see which brands/manufacturers people commonly complain about and why; also see if there’re popular manufacturers only selling things via their own websites;
    • open your preferred store (or several) and filter the entire category based on what you’ve learned. Pick a few candidates and examine them closely;
    • go back to the community again and look up anything mentioning these candidates - including comparisons with other ones you haven’t considered. Perhaps consider them;
    • make the final choice.

    Skip some of these if irrelevant or if you don’t care enough. Spend extra time if you care a lot.

    It works well enough for every new phone (the market there is changing fast, so you start anew every time), it worked for my first PC I’ve decided to assemble with 0 prior knowledge, the mechanical keyboard and the vertical mouse, and pretty much every piece of tech I’m buying.

    And I’d say it’s reasonable to use Reddit without an account even if you disagree with what the platform owners are doing. The data is still valuable for such use cases.