[DizzyDoo]

Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this has happened plenty in the past, I wonder if Amazon has cracked down on that behaviour? Even so, that it has happened so frequently in the past doesn't help since we're talking about 'losing trust'.) These practices have hurt much more than their affiliate program has, in my view.

My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?

[Ao7bei3s]

In Germany, there's Stiftung Warentest ("Product Test Foundation"), with the best domain: https://www.test.de :-D

They are a non-profit with a 55-year history, a stellar reputation and a track record of calling out any issues found. Their test results are broken down in a detailed way, and they have useful graphs like price vs rating. They actually buy their products instead of taking prototypes or commerical samples. They report the real-world, online consumer prices. Their own prices are reasonable (8€/month for all access, incl. PDF downloads).

Washing machine tests are actually one of their staples. See https://youtu.be/6Oke76VZiRw?t=48 (0:48 long term testing, 1:04: standardized lab prepared detergent, 1:56 standardized test clothing and loading schema, 2:15 waste water analysis, 2:36 analysis of cleaned cloth via light reflection, 2:49 power/water usage, 3:31 acoustic test lab, 4:05 useability)

[doglet]

> If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?

The Which magazine sounds like Consumer Reports, who purports to have no interest outside of the consumer's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports#Editorial_ind... I wonder if the HN community has had positive / negative experiences with CR relating to this topic

[impostervt]

I purchased a subscription to CR. I trust their reviews, but they’re very limited. I want a new lawn mower, but their top rated mower isn’t available any more.