I spent 3 hours reading Amazon reviews for shoes just trying to find ONE fucking pair that didn't have "falls apart in 3-6 months" as the most common review...
The state of everything is just absurd.
We've always had to pay for quality, buying crap on Amazon is always going to be a tossup. There's plenty of stores out there where you can buy good stuff, you just have to be willing to pay more than slave wages for it.
It's tough out there, but there's plenty of quality stuff if you look in the right place.
This is where guitars are right now.
Both Fender and Gibson are now owned by venture capitalists. Their quality of everything, from strings to picks to guitars, has plummeted across every brand they own in the last five years. It’s sad really.
You do on Reddit and people talk about the models and which one is great for this, or why they prefer it for that, but then you find some deeper dives into more recent spaces and people who know what they are talking about have moved away entirely from both brands.
If anyone is curious, you can buy a better guitar from Harley-Benton, Cort, or Jet than from Fender/Gibson and it will be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
I saw a headline on some guitar magazine "These are the most over priced guitars currently". Says a lot and it's true.
There's not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It's alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.
My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I'd need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I'm not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.
The classic "Buy a reputable brand, cut costs and coast along on the reputation until you can sell off all your shares and move on to another company". Bonus points for using ~~legalised embezzlement~~ share buyback.
This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy's hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.
Now, it's all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that's the type of page you'll be served.
I've had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don't have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.
Just get a cheap one in KMart. It’ll likely fall apart, but it still comes from the same sweatshop as your favourite brand and you didn’t pay so much for the months of wear you got.
KMart?! What is this, 1995?
They're still kicking in Australia
Gotta wait for the blue light special though.
Whether they're trustworthy or not I'm not sure, but they've not failed me yet
I tend to go for those "2024 top 10 x" lists, jabra 65t was a very good recommendation from there, my toaster, probably a bunch of other things I've now forgotten about
Very happy with my jabra headphones as well. May not be best price for performance but they are solid enough. (85h elite and 65t active)
They generally aren't trustworthy overall, but many of those lists that have decent suggestions are just stolen content from more legit sources that don't SEO farm and get buried in search engine results.
When you Google for "best whatever" and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.
You'll find many cases where the only post they've ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.
A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.
So what your saying is, the quality (of reddit) has nosedived
We all used to agree that it was the best option to go for.
And it's only going to get WAY WORSE with LLM and Gen AI...
Good suggestion.
I think the savviest of the savvy out there are both properly seeding comment histories and continuing to post other comments after they astroturf which makes it all but impossible to identify.
Big bummer and no perfect solution I’ve ever heard of but we do what we can and can always hope.
Because Reddit is infested with bot accounts at this point I tend to trust older threads over newer ones. Easy as hell to buy accs to say a competitor sucks dick
Inb4 reddit removes dates from posts/comments
Can we all just take a moment and be thankful that Lemmy exists? Because if it didn't, I don't know what I'd do.
Or it's just late stage capitalism where the product has truly gone to shit.
Por que no los dos?
It's been true 2/2 times for me.
there needs to be a crowd sourced product review and maintenance website that can see trends of enshittification.
Let’s say everyone used an identity verification service to signup, like had to send photos of their ID and their SSN (national identity number) to be vetted by a third party.
How long after the service got popular would it take for the most aggressive marketers to pay rings of fraudsters to lend their identities and/or make fake reviews?
I think it would definitely start out great until it got big enough to be super useful and then the fraud would ramp up. I think an organization like Consumer Reports has a chance at successfully maintaining a low-bias product database, but the paywall is a big obstacle, as is the fact they’ll only review the largest product catalogs.
These are the pitfalls with the "amazon reviews/yelp" model.
A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.
That's not to say these systems haven't been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can't be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).
From Wikishittia, the free enshittepedia
(it does not exist, sadly)
I wonder if they'd mind someone mirroring their content, but with the one difference that anyone can edit, any time with no restrictions, spam blocking, vetting etc
See what chaos ensues
How dare you get my hopes up.
The trick is designing the thing in such a way as to resist infiltration by astroturfing marketers.
My exact experience finding out Audacity has adware
No it doesn't?
I just googled it to be sure, but i already assumed you meant 'spyware' (which is something completely different), referring to the telemetry (which i can get is a sensitive thing, but anonymous usage statistics to know where to focus their development sounds like a decent idea, and afaik they implemented it with respect for the user)
I remember the concern years ago was: since the application was bought (acquired?) and the tool was still publically free, that the new owners had added the spyware to try and monetize the data coming from said spyware/telemetry.
After reading your comment I went back and did some cursory searches, and it looks like the general concensus is that its less of a concern than it was originally - although, there is still uncertainty around how the tool is being monetized, which is enough for some to stop using it.
Reading your comment is how I found out. That makes me sad.
That's why Tenacity is here to save the day!
After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.
In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, leading to the creation of a new fork with virtually the same intentions. Unsurpringly, this fork was named Sneedacity.
Sneedacity lmao
Did they learn nothing from the Boaty McBoatface disaster?
depending on reddit for any kind of real world advice is a crapshoot at best
I feel like here is not much better unless the advice is about technology
Even a crapshoot is better than the straight advertisements on Google.
