High-Quality "independent" product reviews
This question was brought on by one of danluu's posts, which linked to another post going into why benchmarking matters. In that post, I discovered a bunch of different places/people running benchmarks to determine the highest performing "thing". Over my years on the internet, I've come across other places and people doing this for other categories of things, and think it would be beneficial to get a large list down of all the high quality testers and reviewers in one place. So I'll start off with a comment below with a list of all the high quality reviewers that I've come across for anything and I would love it if you all could do the same!
Caveats:
- I'd like to try and avoid communities centered around a single niche object. First example that comes to mind for this is the mechanical keyboards subreddit. While there's some good information there, I feel that it's highly diluted from everyone else in the community "following what's popular". If there's a specific user that consistently posts high quality information from there though, I'd say that's fair game.
- If I (or someone else) posts a resource that you don't think is a high quality resource, or is untrustworthy, put a comment down explaining why! It's hard to be on guard all the time, so I'm sure I've fallen for marketing (word of mouth or otherwise) plots without realizing it.
I'll include a disclaimer for reviewers or categories that have an innate subjective aspect to them. (Audio & Video would be good examples I think)
Wirecutter (owned by the New York Times) has recommendations for seemingly everything, assuming the thing you're looking for isn't too specialized.
I’m still sad they paywalled it, ugh. I stopped going there once they did that. Were the affiliate links not enough?
This post will contain a list of all the places that I've heard of to get a good understanding of what makes good "things". Still a WIP at this point (3/15/22 @ 12:50pm)
From the Dan Luu post above:
Others I've found over the years:
Consumer Reports has been caught multiple times publishing "erroneous information, miscalculations, and systemic errors in measurement" including things like stating child safety seats don't meet crash test standards and then admitting they didn't actually use the crash test standards (they doubled the speed), stating dog food is nutritionally deficient and then admitting they didn't know how to test for the nutrients, and the Suzuki Samurai case where they purposefully exceeded all safety measures and standards for the test, for only that vehicle, until they could force it to roll over after it was already shown to be the most stable vehicle in the test, and then published that it was unacceptably prone to rolling over.
Consumer Reports may have no advertisers, but they certainly have bias and I've seen enough of their tests be outright wrong to not consider them trustworthy.
In defense of consumer reports:
They provide a 'good enough' high-level overview on damn near anything you can think of, well beyond cars and appliances. If you need something and don't wanna spend your weekend sorting your options, they are great to provide a shortlist. I've never been burned by picking something that ranks > 80 on CR. Retroactively checking old purchases I've been satisfied ot dissatisfied with generally falls in that line as well.
And whilst singling out vehicles is bad, blindly adhereing to existing safety standards is also bad, because a lot of safety features fail to provide additional safety once you start testing beyond the scope of the official test, which CR has been able to discover for numerous vehicles.
Outdoor Gear Lab is by far and away the best resource for testing outdoor equipment. It doesn't matter if I'm looking for a sleeping pad, bike helmet, or headlamp, my first stop is always OGL. There have been a few times where I feel like the have omitted real contenders (like in the case of my full squish MTB) but that has been extremely rare. They also highlight options by overall performance, best bang for your buck, and cheapest option. Their reviews also do apples to apples comparison with categories such as warmth (if you're looking at clothing) or durability (across the board) that are really tuned to each category.
This is fantastic! I'll be saving this one for sure, thank you!
While it's more cooking than gadgetry, I have found America's Test Kitchen (division of Cook's Illustrated, which is also amazing) reviews to be reliable and give transparent reasons for their ratings/recommendations that largely take into account male and female approaches (e.g. one thing works well for men that women found to require too much pressure to use or grips too large, etc).
Also a great recommendation, thank you! I'll be looking through here later tonight, I have a couple thing on my wishlist for the kitchen :)
I’m a big fan of Audioholics for the AV world. They have strong backgrounds in electrical engineering and acoustics and give you the no-BS rundown on audio and video gear. I really can't recommend their content enough. The kind of objective and realistic approach they take to product assessment and review is exactly the impartial analysis the audio community needs more of, and if you're ever thinking about investing in a home theater or some high end audio equipment, they're a great first stop.