That part's easy. The hard part is that, as soon as it's a trusted source, somebody shows up with sacks of money.

That whole mattress review scandal with Sleepopolis and HonestMattressReviews shows exactly what happens when sites like this get big.

So they need to stay small and secret. Unfortunate.

I wish Google would add an advanced search parameter, maybe called "Unpolished discussion" for this reason (but to include forums, etc - results beyond just Reddit).

I was looking at vacation destinations recently, and considering taking a toddler, and Google searches for things like "Destination A vs Destination B" or "Destination A with toddlers" led to so much SEO junk. Ads for shiny e-books with regurgitated information, text that was clearly robot-generated, etc. Then adding "reddit" to the end of the searches does get you to helpful discussion from everyday people. Sure, you might have to read between the lines ("oh, this person seems unwilling to pay more than Motel 6 rates", "oh, this person seems like they might be afraid of black people", etc). Sure, the info might be out of date, or otherwise in need of verification. But you can quickly accumulate some useful ideas that the shinier SEO-optimized junk sites just don't seem to provide.

Well, thanks to HN's durability and Google's crawler we can count on being able to find this site as "that unbelievably ugly wet-dry vacuum database" hereafter.

Practicing that often gives me the feeling that I just need any opinion about one of the many choices. Only after that I can commit to eg. buying something but I still know that I most likely only scratched the surface. I can't just try things out, I need to conclude first that I won't be able to pick the best option. Or just trust the one random person on reddit that was satisfied with his or her choice like it's your best friend.

Any real review is like a vector basis. It establishes a universe in which you can evaluate the claims.

Take this one-star review of a wet-dry vac:

"I bought this thing specifically to suck out the ash in my fireplace. It got use with some other projects like small wood chips and sawdust before I tackled the fireplace, and it did fine. Then I put it to task. It sucked up maybe 1/5 capacity of dust and just stopped."

If the top rated one-star review for this consumer-level vacuum is that the filter immediately clogs when you *SUCK UP ASH FROM A FIREPLACE* then I know hey, this one-star reviewer doesn't understand vacuums.

So yeah, as long as you find one guy on Reddit who's really happy with the vacuum and the one-star reviews are stupid, you've got a good product.

I guess the question is how do you prevent astroturfing and how do you fund it?

Wirecutter being a prime example, they tend to exclude products they can't get an affiliate link for. So their incentives are not always aligned with yours.

I knew something had to be up with them. It’s bad when I come across a round-up or comparison that fails to even mention my top options, and that seems to be the norm over there.

Kagi (a search engine you pay for) has a feature called Lenses. One of the default lenses is for "Discussions". It's been quite helpful for me, personally, so far.

You don't. Anything large enough to be useful as a destination for that info is large enough to be gamed.

And that's assuming you can even amass useful information. For every useful bit of information you will have to filter out ten dolts who just want to hype whatever premium product they bought in order to self-justify the purchase (see for example Reddit's penchant for certain brands in certain product categories).

We're trying to build such a network of sites at https://Looria.com. We aggregate and summarize the most trusted product reviews on the web from sources like Reddit, Youtube, or Consumer Reports. Just like Rotten Tomatoes provides trustworthy ratings for movies, Looria offers ratings and reviews for all kinds of products.

We focus on keeping track of and removing the special status of sources caught getting paid to write fake reviews. Some categories are more prone to astroturfing than others, and we account for that by restricting the sources. Actively curating the sources is part of our daily work.

Good question.

I’m the meantime before such a site exists, the (imperfect) solution is to do research as well as you can, and only buy products from vendors who offer a good return policy. In the US, Costco comes to mind.

And be brutal about returning stuff that is not great.

We could revisit the ancient practice of hosting websites.

It's amazing how much more useful this site is than anything I've found on google recently

Yes, I'm looking for some quality active speakers at a good price/performance point. But it seems like the entire market is trying to con me.

Same for buying kitchens, mattresses, cars ...

Do you have a particular price point in mind? And have you looked at audiosciencereview ?