This is a difficult question these days to answer. There are a few categories where I always stick to established brand names, these are typically electronics or anything electrical like portable battery packs or wall chargers. Poorly made items in those categories can start fires. And when it comes to silicon, there’s only a few to trust anyway since there are only a few major fabs out there.

I usually follow the site:reddit.com search method but I’ve had to further filter my criteria by only looking in enthusiast subreddits instead of the bigger ones like /r/AskReddit.

It gets difficult though for general goods that don’t really need well known brands and whose performance doesn’t matter as much but it’s hard to tell the quality online. Lawn chairs, pizza cutters, sushi kits, clothes hangers, rope, and shower curtain rods are good examples. These usually come down to luck of the draw.

I like to use the Wirecutter from the New York Times as a starting point, though I often ignore the products recommended because the links are typically to American online retailers that I’m unlikely to use. I pay more attention to the various aspects used to recommend their choices, then check other reviews from specialized hobbyist forums when available. Finally, if I find the product in a store I will ask to demo it before buying.

YouTube can be helpful if you can cut through the clutter or need to see head to head testing between your short list items. Don’t blindly search there though because the algorithm is shit.

Many subreddits have a lot of useful resources on their wikis that you can use without really interacting with reddit (you could use the web archive version if you really don’t want to give reddit traffic).

There’s also this website which (among other things) scrapes subreddits for (positive) mentions of products. I don’t really like how they integrated AI in it so agressively, but if you can gloss over that, you might find some useful information in it.

I generally only ever read the negative reviews.

You’ve already searched for a product that has the features you want, so you’re probably already looking at the right things for you in the features and aesthetic department.

The negative reviews will tell me things like if the product or parts of it failed or broke. If it doesn’t do the job very well, lacks power, accuracy, etc. If a keyboard, is it loud? Fatiguing? Are the keys replaceable? Do they keycaps wear and become illegible? How “sloppy” are they? If it does fail, is there customer service? How many people get DOA items? How many bad reviews are for dumb things like color or buying the wrong product for the job?

So see what people disliked about the product you think looks shiny and pretty before buying.

It is sadly no longer possible. The reason is simple: if your goal is to make a real review site, either you’re taking in money for reviews, or someone else is and posting it to your site. The insurmountable costs associated with not doing either means every site out there is going to be garbage.

If you’re not yet into very good mechanical keyboards, my personal suggestion is to go shopping on AliExpress with $40 and spend half of it on a cheap mechanical (my daily driver is a 17€ skylion) and the other half on a set of key caps.

Sure it’s not gonna be great, but unless you’re accustomed to very high end boards, it’ll suit you just fine without breaking the bank and it’ll still better than anything razer has produced ever. If you have the time for it, you could also oil the switches when you get the board, that usually has a very good effect on feel.

I use Vetted (previously lustre) to get information. Then find the reviews on YouTube.

I also use WireCutter and Rtings.com for information collection.

They built an entire industry dedicated to gaming the search results, so I feel your frustration. Nowadays, if it’s not some influencer telling you to try something, it usually a bunch of topic snobs who need the latest and best (read: most expensive) version of anything - completely unusable for a casual query. If you have friends or local communities with the same hobbies, I’d start there. Or start in the shops - you find out real fast of they’re trying to push product on you, versus genuinely trying to help you find what you need.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is a membership-based non-profit that has been around since 1936. They are funded by membership dues, donations, and some corporate partnerships (mostly for research projects, I think). Their mission is to create unbiased reviews.

They do well reviewing large purchases like appliances. They also review consumer electronics and some software, though not in the highly technical way of a site like Tom’s Hardware.

Anyway, Consumer Reports isn’t perfect or entirely comprehensive, but the $40 per year membership pays for itself if you are a homeowner. Just in the last couple of months, they saved me $500 by directing me to a less expensive dishwasher than I otherwise would have bought.

I don’t focus on recommendations specifically. My typical process is:

• spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks figuring out which technical characteristics are important for this kind of product, which aren’t, why and when &c. This kind of information is usually available (and even obvious SEO garbage can give you new keywords to consider when searching);
• based on these alone, determine what’s acceptable and what’s desirable for you;
• if you haven’t already, find some kind of community around the topic and see which brands/manufacturers people commonly complain about and why; also see if there’re popular manufacturers only selling things via their own websites;
• open your preferred store (or several) and filter the entire category based on what you’ve learned. Pick a few candidates and examine them closely;
• go back to the community again and look up anything mentioning these candidates - including comparisons with other ones you haven’t considered. Perhaps consider them;
• make the final choice.

Skip some of these if irrelevant or if you don’t care enough. Spend extra time if you care a lot.

It works well enough for every new phone (the market there is changing fast, so you start anew every time), it worked for my first PC I’ve decided to assemble with 0 prior knowledge, the mechanical keyboard and the vertical mouse, and pretty much every piece of tech I’m buying.

And I’d say it’s reasonable to use Reddit without an account even if you disagree with what the platform owners are doing. The data is still valuable for such use cases.

Call me old fashioned, but I still go to bricks-and-mortar stores to compare a few options when I’m making an important or expensive purchase.

Yes, that is getting increasingly difficult these days.

I’m afraid there is no quick way to get an honest recommendation. I usually resort to YouTube and spend 2-3 days watching some related content. It sorta filters itself out, there will be a creator or few that you vibe with, and you trust their choice.

Happened to me with audio gear (I trusted crinacle, for example.)

Honestly, I still just post here. You may not get the same amount of answers as you would’ve on reddit, but it’s still worth a shot. Besides, somebody’s got to start populating this place with good info. Why not be the one who starts it?

That being said, pretty much every time I’ve asked about something here I’ve got excellent feedback.

I look at negative reviews. If they are all dumb stuff like “FedEx lost my package, 0 stars” instead of actual complaints I know the product is good

While Lemmy doesn’t have enough people for each product category yet, have you checked out the community !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net?

There’s also !recommendations@lemmy.world for broader discussion, but it’s not gained much traction yet.

Find a hobby that would use the product type in question. Find a community for said hobby then look for discussions comparing the options that are out there.

This tends to work better for certain things more than others. I doubt many hobby groups get excited about dishwashers or clothing dryers. I’m these cases, the Buy it For Life communities tend to have decent comparisons.