[A_D_E_P_T]

Yeah, Reddit is the most astroturfed place on the internet. There's a thriving market in "high karma" accounts that are bought and sold by PR firms, SEO companies, and guerilla marketers -- and a huge fraction, if not an outright majority, of product-related posts are engineered from such sources with undisclosed interests. These days, it's one of the cheapest, and one of the "best," ways to advertise.

I don't think that Reddit was ever good. (The upvote/downvote system stifles real discussion, and even normal people treat it like a game -- exaggerating and making up stories for upvotes.) But today it's unambiguously terrible.

[dns_snek]

Finding genuine product reviews is borderline impossible these days. Search results are usually just worthless affiliate link spam, even from supposed "reputable" outlets. Are there any other places on the internet that try to solve this problem in a way that can't be easily gamed by marketers?

[medstrom]

At risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, think back to how you would've browsed the internet before Google. You probably would've grown your own web-directory of bookmarks, right? That's also how you explore the non-SEO-paved parts of the internet now.

I haven't learned to find product reviews yet, but I imagine that a trick would be to know which forums to go for certain kinds of products, e.g. maybe https://xdaforums.com/ for Android devices.

There is also the search engine https://boardreader.com/ which ONLY searches proper forums--sometimes you find neat threads, sometimes not.

[dns_snek]

Forums are a good one, but they're surprisingly hard to find these days. It really feels like we're back to word of mouth again.

This boardreader search engine sounds promising though! I'll give that a try next time I'm shopping in an unfamiliar market.

[wyclif]

I used AltaVista.

[dclowd9901]

Forums, surprisingly, are still quite good resources for product recommendations. I suspect it's because forums tend to be _slightly_ nerdier and more focused than more mainstream resources like Reddit. I do a lot of car restoration, and forums are goldmines of product recommendations and information.

[smolder]

I thought it was pretty good / relatively unexploited before diggs collapse, but I surely have rose colored nostalgia glasses.

[A_D_E_P_T]

Didn't Digg collapse in 2012 or 2011? The internet was a different place back then. Forums, in general, have gone downhill since then, mostly on account of low-effort phoneposters. (A trend heavily promoted by Reddit.)