[coolso]

I’ve been “burned” by Wirecutter many a time. While they have the best presentation of any product review site, and I’m a huge fan of the quality of the NYT’s work in general despite being on the opposite end of their bias spectrum, the reality is the site is little more than a prettified Amazon referral link aggregator.

The expensive house fan I bought (and exchanged for a new one with the same issue) made a constant rumble noise that made it difficult to fall asleep to - my $15 Honeywell had no issues.

The router I bought started dropping connections within a year.

The wireless extender I tried was terrible and also constantly dropped connections and was overall poorly made (Wirecutter made no mention of the loud coil whine).

The air purifier I bought on their recommendation makes a loud noise any time the house gets below a certain temperature.

The surge protector I bought reeked of that cheap chemically plastic smell that was especially common about 10 years ago but still apparently exists today. No mention on WC.

All of these issues, by the way, are corroborated by various Amazon reviewers, as much as I hate to give them much credence.

After that I stopped visiting the site. If you look at any review category it’s glaringly obvious they appear to either be receiving kickbacks or are just entirely ignoring extremely common products for whatever reason (Armandhammer detergent not tested? P&G/Tide is thrilled at not having to have the extra competition, I’m sure)

So yeah, they have a very hip presentation geared towards a very particular demo, but everything is not as it seems.

So I encourage this boycott as well. Both for Wirecutter and Amazon.

[freediver]

> the reality is the site is little more than a prettified Amazon referral link aggregator.

Well said. The entire business model is in conflict interest with the best interest of the user. And if a product does not exist on Amazon they don't review it all.

[cakeface]

Any recommendations for taming the sea of options? I'm going to buy something and I am not able to research every purchase myself. How can I get a better result than random choice?

[coolso]

Well, my personal process usually starts with finding the top rated items related to what I’m looking for on Walmart/Target/Amazon/Home Depot/Lowes/B&H. Then I do a bit of DDGing to cull the herd. When I get to my top 2 choices I’ll check Reddit for some final opinions, eg “x vs y site:Reddit.com”

It sounds like a lot, but for a big purchase this might take me all of half an hour.

I’ll take this any day over blindly taking Wirecutter’s word for it, then having to return/exchange/put up with/research an alternative when I find out the recommendation was not really any better, in fact probably worse than random choice of a highly customer reviewed item within a price range, while they take a cut for my inconvenience. Which I’ve done more times than I should’ve, really.

If you must, consider using Wirecutter as a “going in blind” option to find a rough price class for the item in question. E.g., if you know nothing about routers, see what the price is of the one(s) they recommend. If it’s say an average of $100, stick to something along those lines (or more).

I realize this is probably all quite obvious but… sometimes there’s no substitute for traditional search-engining.