[ygra]

In Germany there's an independent organisation, Stiftung Warentest [−4], that anonymously buys various products in stores and tests them quite rigorously. Some may say perhaps a bit too well (including things like the manual, how easy it is to set up a large appliance, or whether toxic chemicals are used in parts that are handled), but overall they seem to do a very good job. Testing and scoring methodology is published as well. I trust them a lot more than Amazon or YouTube reviews or some random blog that got the product sent by its manufacturer.

[−4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest – the article also has a few pointers to international, similar organisations near the bottom.

[Gurgler]

There is a similar organization in the USA: Consumer Reports. It used to be a magazine, now I believe it's just a website. Entirely funded by subscription - and not advertisement or other sponsorship - they tackle entire categories of consumer goods in the USA, rigorously testing and ranking competing products across many metrics.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

They are also incorruptible.

If they give your product good marks, you are not allowed to mention it in your marketing (Not sure how they enforce it; maybe they stop reviewing your stuff).

I worked at a company that regularly got top marks from them, and our Marketing folks would have fits, because they couldn't mention it.

[alamortsubite]

Sounds great, but Consumer Reports definitely has a checkered past. Read about the Suzuki Samurai debacle, in which they methodically manipulated their tests (strictly for that vehicle, and not any of the others in its class that they were simultaneously evaluating), with the goal of destroying the vehicle's reputation.

https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-a-black-eye-for-co...

[mapt]

I'm not sure what the point is of linking to a reference that also features pieces titled:

'The media lied to you about COVID-19 – TAKE ACTION NOW'

'Critical Race Theory in schools, take action now!'

'Gender activists are politicizing the dictionary: TAKE ACTION NOW'

'Stand up for Rush – TAKE ACTION NOW'

'VOX buries the truth'

'CNN admits Hunter Biden ‘a real problem’ for Joe Biden, not ‘a right-wing media story’'

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Accuracy_in_Media

I am less confident about either your contention or about the position you are attacking than about the idea that this particular website is going to lie to me about it.

[midoridensha]

Why does anyone need to stand up for Rush? It was a great band and not really controversial, plus they disbanded years ago because the drummer died. They don't exist any more, just like Led Zeppelin no longer really exists (also because the drummer died, coincidentally).

[AlchemistCamp]

Just four days ago they played at Red Rocks with Matt Stone on drums for South Park's 25th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lel5JGJfwqQ

RIP Neil Peart

[dreamcompiler]

Spock: Captain we need to send down a landing party to investigate the radiation leak.

Kirk: Send some red shirts.

Spock: They're all in Agile training today.

Kirk: Do we have any rock drummers?

[chiefalchemist]

She's Buying the Stairway to Heaven TAKE ACTION NOW

[justin66]

Led Zeppelin should reunite with the deceased drummer’s son playing drums - TAKE ACTION NOW

[philwelch]

It was ridiculous how long it took for them to be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but that finally happened a few years back.

[sideshowb]

That was a bizarre gardening accident.

[tablespoon]

Who cares, it's easy? I did my part: I just stood up and went to the bathroom.

[switchbak]

I'm still not sure why I'm standing up for Rush, I don't even like the band, but I took action. Immediately!

[ConceptJunkie]

Hey, I love Rush! "Hemispheres" is my favorite album by them!

[dijonman2]

All sound like accurate headlines in today’s political landscape.

[safety1st]

So the website also publishes right wing propaganda. Does that invalidate the claims in the article he linked? Did you read the article before formulating your opinion?

This is basic critical thinking, you don't have to be as shallow as many readers of that website probably are, you're just choosing to be.

[mapt]

If somebody writes for you a long piece featuring many pages of text and references, quoting lawsuits and making numerous reasonable-seeming inferences throughout...

The opportunity they have to lie to somebody who is unfamiliar with the subject is immense. Falsehood could be hiding in any of a thousand places, and it could easily require you to hire a team of experts for weeks to find it and conclusively debunk it, line by line. It may well require decompiling what is functionally or literally the source code behind the piece to dismiss one's suspicions. "Basic critical thinking" is not trivial against a determined adversary.

Whether to take the claims within on face value depends on your purpose and on what you know of the writer. In this case, it is very easy to become quite familiar with this motivation and ethics of the writer in under a minute by clicking around the website, and come to the reasonable conclusion that this is a place that generally attempts to deceive their reader to secure material gain for their patrons & movement, and there are likely deliberate lies somewhere in the body of the piece. You don't even need to read the body.

[rsynnott]

In general, if someone cites a wacky propaganda website as evidence for something, I'm going to assume that they're doing this because there's no proper evidence. I suppose occasionally this isn't the case, and they've just made a bizarre choice on what to link, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Indeed, the real story would appear to be rather more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....

[emsixteen]

Are you really wondering why someone is skeptical of an article on a website which is already clearly willing to publish falsehoods?

[groby_b]

Basic critical thinking is "if the publication lies in every other article, the expected value of this one additional article is close to zero".

Critical thinking does not require you to carefully parse every bit of garbage on the planet.

[hn_go_brrrrr]

I hadn't heard about this, thanks for the link. I did a little digging and it doesn't appear be quite as clean cut as that article says. For instance, check out https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... (a CR press release), where they mention internal Suzuki documents acknowledging the rollover issue.

[alamortsubite]

I've read the text of the lawsuit. As you mention, this is a press release, so I'm highly skeptical of it. Video documentation of CR's manipulation of the tests is on YouTube. It's wild stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Bv9WL3vpY

[hn_go_brrrrr]

Best guess? CR fabricated their test results because they couldn't figure out how to replicate the real-life problems on their test course. Which is to say, both sides are in the wrong.

[Spooky23]

I think Consumer Reports has an opinionated editorial voice. But I think that’s inevitable in that line of work.

SUVs evolved to address the risks pointed out by CR and other entities. They mostly have wider wheelbases and lower centers of gravity.

[crotchrocketeer]

Well, at least this wasn’t in the “pretend it’s better direction” so it’s a at least still reliable in helping pick good quality.

[alamortsubite]

Not if you were trying to decide between the Samurai and the other vehicles CR was "evaluating" (a Wrangler and the Bronco II). Internally, CR's testers praised the Samurai as having the best handling of the bunch, but their editor made sure the public never heard this.

[delusional]

What are you talking about? The original review literally mentioned: "Under the touch of our drivers, all four utility vehicles got through the course at 52 mph or better. The Suzuki Samurai was actually more maneuverable than the others, since it's so much smaller and lighter"

Tell me again how it was some cover up. They literally published your argument along with the review.

[TheRealDunkirk]

They might be ethical, but they don't "live" with appliances to really figure out what they're dealing with, either. I used Consumer Reports' recommendation to buy a full set of appliances for a new house about 18 years ago. I bought "GE Gold" washer, dryer, fridge, stove, microwave, and dishwasher.

Within 2 years, every single one had failures. For instance, the oven's convection fan failed in a month. The washer AND dryer completely failed within 3 years. I bought refurbished units from a local guy, and when I told him what I had, he didn't even want them to flip again.

I, too, resigned myself to the fact that, unless you pay for commercial-grade appliances, it's all crap, and you may as well just buy the cheapest thing at Lowe's, and replace it when it fails. The industry deserves all the loss of trust they have earned.

[grepfru_it]

I’ve had great success with them, my vacuum is going strong after 13+ years, washer and dryer great after 9 years. But I’m still harboring negative feelings about their car reviews. They marked the 2013 Ford Edge as a great vehicle with minimal flaws, but when they reviewed the 2014 Ford Edge they found an array of problems and lowered the score. While I was researching and shopping for my Ford Edge I found the 2013 and 2014 were exactly the same cars. I think they enhanced the weld points for ANCHOR points to support 60lbs instead of 45lbs, but that was the extent of changes.. small and incremental. Yet CR faulted them for excess road noise, stiff suspension, and reliability. I test drove both mode years and they both performed and sounded exactly the same. Major parts including suspension were interchangeable as well. We went with the 2013 to save money before the CR reviews for 2014 came out. It made me realize their reviews are not consistent, especially when Tesla Model S went from having top marks to all of a sudden being scored very low. These are not cars that drastically changed between the years, so just buyer beware YMMV

FWIW, I do love my Ford Edge and it is still the daily driver for our household

[Tagbert]

You do need to distinguish between their reviews (which are done by CR internal people and reflect their values and judgement) and the ratings which are done by surveying CR subscribers who are owners of the products.

[tomohawk]

I'm a member of CR, but they obviously have their biases and blind spots.

Sometimes they start with a premise they want to prove instead of just providing a straight review of the products. They may do this by selecting the criteria (key performance metrics), for example.

Sometimes, they just don't competently evaluate the products because they fail to take into account real world consumer needs.

The quality of reviews in CR these days doesn't hold a candle to what CR used to provide, but I remain a member because even a weak signal is better than the other random stuff out there like Amazon reviews.

[nobodyofnote]

They actually do allow you to mention it in marketing; I've worked with them for a consumer product. What you can't do is use it in "paid" marketing.

Emails, social media posts, website landing pages, collateral in-store/retail is all fully acceptable. You can also pay additional fees to them for additional materials to use in communications.

[pandaman]

It is apparently allowed to put a link to the review, saying "Check out how CR reviewed us" e.g. https://www.lg.com/us/laundry

[game-of-throws]

Another similar site is https://www.rtings.com/. They do very scientific, thorough quality tests. I've only used them to buy monitors so far, but it looks like they're starting to branch out from tech -- they have new categories for blenders and vacuums.

[ghostpepper]

Hopefully they don't go the same path as the Wirecutter. Started out great and small and independent and slowly started watering down reviews as they branched into more and more areas. They are now owned by the NYTimes and the quality of the reviews is much more hit and miss.

[squeaky-clean]

rtings is trying to push a subscription now. I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.

rtings does good work, I'd pay a flat fee for it. But a subscription for a website I check every 2-3 years when I'm upgrading some tech? I'll just clear my cookies.

[nordsieck]

> I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.

If you're specifically looking at mice, you might want to check out RocketJumpNinja. The reviews are pretty biased towards suitability for FPS, but they are quite in depth, and the reviewer is pretty knowledgeable.

[driverdan]

Wirecutter has always been hit or miss.

[TylerE]

Their conclusions are somewhat suspect sometimes though… with weird qualifications for “best” that often barely effect actual functioning. Like, heavily weighting quietness over power.

[wtallis]

Are you referring specifically to their car reviews? Those seem to regularly attract criticism for not being more like traditional car enthusiast-oriented reviews.

I think that's largely due to car enthusiasts having insufficient self-awareness about the degree to which their priorities differ from those of mainstream consumers. PC gamers and PC building enthusiasts are also frustratingly prone to this kind of thing. (I spent several years reviewing PC hardware for a living, which included constantly fielding comments from readers who seemed to be genuinely unable to understand how their could be a market for low-end components.)

[throwaway09223]

I remember reading their computer reviews a few decades ago and being gobsmacked at how ignorant their process and conclusions were.

I assume that other articles have similar issues, and that I'm just unaware because they're not within my area of expertise.

[thaeli]

CR's core failing is, on the surface, their greatest strength: they refuse to have any "special" contact with any manufacturers. Unfortunately, this also means that they don't ask, or listen, when their test procedures are nonsensical.

[41b696ef1113]

Last year, I was looking to upgrade my desktop. Found a review that was bemoaning a motherboard because it only had two M.2 slots. How many consumers use two, let alone would benefit from a third?

[fomine3]

I have opposite bemoaning for recent motherboards: only one PCIe slot (x16) is directly connected to CPU (not via chipset). It's useless to have PCIe 5.0 x16 slot even for average consumer because 4.0 x8 is still enough for modern GPU for gaming and even if it become not enough, 5.0 x8 should be enough for foreseeable future. Lack of high bandwidth dedicated PCIe slots for other than GPU makes the PC less expandable, e.g. video capture, another GPU (not for SLI), 10GbE, HBA, etc...

[ziml77]

I hate it too. The allocation of PCIe lanes is garbage unless you spend $500 on a motherboard. We should have had the lanes divided better once we hit 4.0 speeds. At 5.0 speeds, it's absurd that 16 full-speed lanes would go to a single slot except for very specialist scenarios.

[nfriedly]

I suspect that AMD & Intel push the motherboard manufactures in that direction. You can certainly get more high-speed PCIe slots if you get one of the higher-end product lines (Threadripper, Xeon, etc.)

[formerly_proven]

Flexible I/O is one of those things Motherboard manufacturers reserve for the upper price ranges, unfortunately.

[NathanielK]

Since the only thing consumers use full size PCIe slots for now is for a single GPU, extra M.2 slots isn't that big of an ask. One M.2 keyed for an interchangeable wifi card, one for NVMe storage, and then an extra one if you want to upgrade to more storage later. If you only have one keyed for storage, you're SoL when you buy a bigger one later and it's very inconvenient to move data over.

[wtallis]

PC motherboard marketing and reviews usually don't count the WiFi card slot when tallying up the number of M.2 slots (since approximately zero motherboards are sold with an empty WiFi-type M.2 slot), so the complaint was most likely about not having more than two storage-type M.2 slots.

[Dylan16807]

It's not a big ask, but it's also quite unimportant. Adapter cards to put one M.2 card into a PCIe slot are in the $5 range, and better adapters will do four.

[linkdink]

At least they're open about how they weighed their values. And they give you enough information to draw your own conclusions from your own values. Some people want to be told what's "best", and they've found a way to make everyone (minus one) happy.

[abawany]

Consumers Report still has a magazine - I subscribe to it for a lower cost than the online access.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I had a problem with them where their rating methodology for carpet cleaners was not adequate. So the cleaner with strongest cleaning capability was like 10th in the list, instead of first

[cptnapalm]

It's still a magazine. Source: I work at a library and put the September 2022 issue on the shelf last week.

[mcphage]

My dad always used Consumer Reports to pick products, and... I dunno, they didn't seem to be super great.

[switchbak]

I've seen some reviews for which I know a fair amount, and often the testing and rating rubric are ... Bewildering and unsophisticated. I love the idea of Consumer Reports a lot more than the actual thing itself.

[mcphage]

> I love the idea of Consumer Reports a lot more than the actual thing itself

Yeah, exactly. I really love the idea, but not the results.

[Semaphor]

My issue with them is twofold: a) The "testing too much" part, specifically things like how well translated the manual is, for example. I don’t care. And b), it’s a blackbox. There are no real details for how they arrived at the rating of some subsection.

ETM [0] is subscription funded and their tests are far more detailed, and they even show the data (e. g. power usage curves for a toaster, measured air replacement curves for a fan, etc.).

[0]: https://etm-testmagazin.de/

[ant6n]

Perhaps the magazine is good, but the website doesn’t leave a good impression: I search for dehumidifier, and all I get is the info about one particular model being released, an article that reads more like an ad, without any testing done.

[Semaphor]

They recently (about a year ago) redesigned their website, and it’s a disaster. I have absolutely NO idea what they were thinking. Links aren’t working properly, and as usual for an SPA, it’s slower now. It’s even hard to actually navigate anywhere now.

Anyway, in this case, they simply have not tested any dehumidifiers.

[grog454]

Do they do tear-downs and rate the engineering? That's pretty much the only way to determine how likey something is to last without using it for ten years.

[mschild]

I don't think they do tear-downs but they do stress test them extensively. Their reports also include their testing methods in detail. For washing machine testing, for example, they independently bought 3 of each model and ran each through 1840 cycles. That's equivalent to 3.5 cycles per week for 10 years. They checked how the machine held up in comparison to the beginning and if any repairs were needed.

[sneak]

AvE does this on his YT channel, though only for hand tools and adjacent stuff (he did a Juicero once and it was utterly hilarious).

[somewhat_drunk]

Juicero teardown is one of the best youtube videos ever made.

[stevage]

The Australia Choice magazine does pretty hefty stress tests. No tear downs though.

[Cthulhu_]

> I trust them a lot more than Amazon or YouTube reviews or some random blog that got the product sent by its manufacturer.

Yeah same, those reviews are either bought, or made on a whim by people who aren't critical of what they buy - especially if the company or seller goad them into reviewing with giveaways or whatever. There will be good reviews, but they will be buried in the thousand+ mediocre ones.

[drekipus]

We have the same in australia too, called choice magazine. https://www.choice.com.au/

[nuker]

And even better, OzBargain.com.au crowdsourced one liner reviews, surprisingly valid :)

[floydnoel]

Thanks for sharing, this is great information. I definitely think that independent testing organizations are important for quality so it’s always great to hear of more of them

[foobiekr]

In the US, the closest example is Consumer Reports ( https://www.consumerreports.org/ ); there actually are a lot of these orgs worldwide. It's pretty cool.

They often are somewhat marginal at the edges - e.g., for computers. But otherwise they are useful for consumer products.

[rahen]

It seems common all across Europe, maybe the whole western world.

Here for France: https://www.60millions-mag.com/tests-comparatifs

(I just laughed as I see they even review fries brands, and sex toys...)

[dopidopHN]

Same stuff in France : 60 million de consommateurs.

They also provide help to launch class action. ( that exists differently than a US class action )