Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review. Sure, this didn't 1:1 translate but if a user did it would look like a legitimate review.
You've got a plethora of LLMs out there just itching to GENERATE.
Then an expensive option I was suprised happened - I bought a Dyson clone vacuum cleaner off of Amazon. A few weeks later, the company emailed me and said 'We have a new model. Buy that one, leave a review, we'll refund the purchase'. So I did it. This happened about 10 more times in 2024. My outdoor shed is entirely stick vacuums.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
I think Fakespot would have difficulty with all 3 of these scenarios.
Last year I (like a fool) purchased some chunky thru-hole MOSFETs on Amazon. Lo and behold, despite the datasheets promising a few amps with 3.3V at the gate, I only got a few milliamps. Obviously counterfeit - but no matter how hard I tried or how much indirection I employed, Amazon always took down my review warning others of this verifiable fact.
Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.
Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.
Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.
I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.
Afiact, the Main good vendors are green thorn, lemifshe and jufule currently. But if you ask the vendors detailed questions before spending money they seem pretty honest.
As for a blade steel breaking, that should be less likely with Chinese blade heat treats since they all tends to err on the side of undershooting hardness and cap out at 60hrc. So in many cases way less brittle than a western heat treat if it’s the same steel
In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.
This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.
At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.
Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."
Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."
In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.
I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)
And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".
In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with shipping it was about $900. That was back when the currency was on parity.
It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a new one at that price.
Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.
Amazon should be busted for false advertising. Millions of products filled with lies and amazon does absolutely nothing to curate (other than removing comments warning others that a product is fake).
Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.
Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.
I've had one taken down. I pointed out the deception in the naming and that the product looked nothing like the real thing, nor did it fit. Only later did I realize they were selling it as "Genuine Beam", not that it was genuine "Beam"--I thought they were just making clear that it wasn't a knockoff. (Beam is the actual company name.)
They have so many flavors of fraud that it’s very hard to get it right consistently at scale.
Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate.
Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.
But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.
Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate
They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.
I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.
Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes
And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.
Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.
Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.
That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.
It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.
There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors
If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times.
The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.
Much cheaper to just buy out the governments (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/summary?id=D0000...) that could make legal trouble for you.
I have an entire category of items I will never buy from Amazon. They don’t look out for customers ahead of time, only on the backend when you complain.
The crazy thing is these $100-250 products ship with instructions on getting 100% of your purchase back if you leave a 5-star review and email them proof you did.
Some Amazon seller included some US postage stamps as a gift, along with a glossy full-color printed offer to pay me cash or more stamps for a positive review.
So I took the stamps to a post office, some kind of manager looked at them, said they'd almost guarantee that the stamps were counterfeit. So I left the stamps and the glossy offer (with the sellers's contact info) with them, to refer higher up to some kind of investigation.
I'd guess probably it will only lead back to some overseas seller who is untraceable, and who just pops back up under 10 new different names. But maybe someday Amazon will be under some kind of KYC-like obligation, to only permit sellers and other supply chain that can be held accountable for illegal/counterfeit/dangerous/stolen/etc. products.
It also reminds me of one of the biggest apartment complex management companies, Graystar using a similar method by bribing applicants with $500 off the security deposit for a 5 star review on Google maps.
Plus side looks like the product doesn’t exist on Amazon so guess there’s a victory there somewhere.
Having too many things is just abstract unless you had that problem maybe
The OP is effectively taking thousands of dollars in bribes to erode public trust. I think even a child would see that this is wrong.
I know every man has their price, but I hope when the time comes my price will be higher than "a bunch of vacuums I don't need and I can't even be bothered to sell".
I often buy products from Amazon based on how fast they can deliver, with the soonest being approximately five days where I live. They routinely advertise one delivery time and deliver three or four days later, which essentially is false advertising and harmful to local businesses who could easily compete on delivery time. And this is Amazon fulfillment.
I’m not sure how to take your comment other than uncharitably so I’ll just concede that you obviously have smaller dust collection needs than I do.
The plan was to flip them on FB market place but I've just hoarded them.
why continue racking up more vacuum cleaners after that?
This guy took bribes to leave fake reviews. He obviously sucks. /s
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
It doesnt even need to be that complicated. I worked reputation management for an ecommerce place for a while a few years back. I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review, and significantly more actually did than I would ever have expected, with no reward or value in it for them doing so.
I got 100s of reviews this way in the span of a month or two. Enough on a geographically important centralised reviews location to raise the average rating signficantly.
I literally asked very politely against a random sampling of all orders if they would consider leaving us a review
Uh, this is how it's supposed to work? Make a good product, get good reviews for free.
"Make a crappy / mediocre product and pay people to write good reviews" is completely different.
Note: I did not last long in this business before hitting the eject button.
I wonder if reviews should have a field for "how long have I owned it" (or even "about when did I buy it", to track changes in manufacturing quality). Places like TrustPilot would probably benefit from coming back to people and saying, "Here's a review you wrote a year ago; anything you want to add?"
Manufacturers could even submit an "expected lifespan", and reviews could be marked where they were made within that lifespan. A bad review after 7 years of owning a 5-year product shouldn't count as much as a bad review 7 years after owning a 10-year product.
I mean, that's a different issue. When you asked them, they were happy, they gave good feedback.
The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
Why pay for what you can get for free?
1. The whitelabeled junk is getting very good. In some categories, the brand name stuff has degraded to the point that the aliexpress version is better and cheaper.
2. The IoTification of everything means that a lot of traditionally long lasting items are as durable as their WiFi board - i.e. not very. This also plays into number (1) - where cheap, Chinese, items either lack IoT features or provide them only locally instead of requiring an online account.
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
All it takes to lose civilisation is for everyone to think as selfishly as this.
There's never been a magical golden age where people were any different than they are.
I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
Why would you want 12 vacuums? What are you going to do with them? Isn't that a senseless amount of redundant objects to horde? Don't you want room for other things in your shed?
That said, thanks for sharing the emails/headers.
It's curious that Amazon hasn't flagged you for purchasing & reviewing multiple similar items in such a short span of time. I would imagine it would be quite easy to spot someone who's bought and reviewed 12 vacuum cleaners in a 2 or 3 year window.
You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.
I had a tool manufacturer read a bad review on one of the big box home improvement stores in the US, they contacted me within a day (the store must have gave them my email address?) and offered to send me my choice of replacement tool, for free, in exchange for taking my review down.
Helps me learn which companies not to trust.
anyway, I can imagine some small territory in time where fakespot can accurately deal with the flood. But then..
Feel a bit dirty doing it but that's ok I've got 12 vacuums that can clean my conscience.
Thank you for the laugh.
But why keep them all? Why not give some away to friends or neighbours, or even sell them?
Does the job. I'm no vacuum connoisseur (Which you think I'd be after all of these) but none were scammy products.
Would you happen to have a link to the model you got (or one of the similar models), to get an idea of which clone could be worth considering next time?
This sheds (no pun intended) some light on why they think there are avid vacuum collectors.
Mozilla couldn't find a sustainable business model for Fakespot despite its popularity
I don't know if it's fair for me to armchair quarterback, but still - what was their business model when they decided to do the acquisition? From the outside looking in barely did anything whatsoever.
I browse Amazon using Firefox extremely often and I don't recall seeing any helper UI pop up. Even so, what would have been their strategy to monetize me? User data? Commissions? Some kind of Mozilla+ subscription?
I love FF and cheer Mozilla on where I can, but honestly these decisions are inscrutable.
Brendan Eich was fired for opposing gay marriage
This gets really tiresome to rebuke. He supported a proposition that was supported by the MAJORITY of the citizens at the time and that was already six years old when we became Mozilla CEO. Some people wrote hit pieces even though he even distanced himself from it. He was not fired, he stepped back voluntarily.
Why do a relative few on HN insist on this false claim? It seems to make them feel better about Mozilla (one reply nearby in this page says so explicitly). Reaction to a guilty conscience?
Why do you think VPs love new projects / products so much?
It's a move straight out of Google's playbook, with the glaring flaw of them not being Google, and their user base likes them for not being Google.
Honestly, Mozilla gives me gnome vibes. They're so caught up believing their own spiel that they don't understand why they keep missing the mark.
Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
Mozilla wants to be the "web you can trust" brand, which involves not just shipping a browser but protecting people from the rougher sides of the internet.
And also, apparently, selling your data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612, and particularly move-on's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213945.
This is more or less taken directly from Thunderbird's website (which I think is a fair comparison): "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."
Just relying on consumer judgement has certainly proven to be inadequate in combating fake reviews, and without incentive, we're not going to get many legitimate reviews.
I dismissed it quickly because fake reviews is not a problem I have. Maybe I'm not the target market? I do buy a lot on Amazon but can't recall ever thinking I felt burned by fake reviews.
TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.
SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for
Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs
There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/
On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...
If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!
I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.
I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.
I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.
It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.
The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.
I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.
In my experience the problem it proposes to solve isn’t something I consider so problematic that a subscription would improve things. My experience may not be the norm, and that’s definitely a consideration I’m aware of. Still, I can’t see a reason to subscribe as such.
IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.
I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon
I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.
This combined with Amazon’s commingling of inventory of Amazon corporate sourced items and third party seller items results in a status quo in which, when purchasing an item on a page operated by the first party manufacturer and/or first party supply chain, the Amazon item picking system may still fulfill that order via inventory sourced by third party Fulfilled by Amazon sellers who knowingly and unknowingly are selling counterfeit products. You never know what you’re going to get with Amazon, and neither does Amazon or the third party sellers. It’s insane.
Scammers are somehow using Amazon itself as an A/B test for if your fakes pass muster, from what I can tell, and everyone loses but Amazon and the bad guys. How long must this continue?
Is this something you've actually done?
I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.
In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.
You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha
It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.
Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!
If it does end up being a bad buy, Amazon typically has a 30 day return policy for most items. Use that and get something else.
Musk is that which smells by itself, not what the perfumer says (about it).
This line is from Saadi Shirazi, the classical Persian poet which has become a proverb in Persian speaking world. Reviews are at this point what the seller wants you to read.
As long as Amazon is the seller, and host of the reviews there is no way to trust Amazon would be fair in hosting those reviews.
The only way to know about a product is to read about it elsewhere like New York Times which is not selling the product themselves.
I take a Wirecutter top pick as meaning something very different from Bobby123's glowing review. Wirecutter may have been influenced by ad money a bit. Bobby123 may not even exist or may be entirely driven by seller compensation. And I'll never see Bobby123 again.
https://johnnydecimal.com/20-29-communication/22-blog/22.00....
So you know what we do now? Ignore the overall rating: it's worthless. Instead, go directly to the 1*. They're the only true indicator of a product/place/service.
I'm not saying take them all at face value. You still have to put in some work. But all the data is in the one-stars.
I'm sure detection is getting harder as LLMs' writing patterns become less predictable, but I frequently come across reviews on Amazon that are so blatantly written by ChatGPT. A lot of these fake reviewers aren't particularly sneaky about it.
One issue is that seller warnings would appear on Prime delivered products, which meant that the risk is then pretty much zero for the buyer.
The ratings gradings system wasn't very reliable either. I bought a few things that were rated "F" but were fine.
Today I go for a combination of sales + ratings. Amazon also has a warning for some things that are "frequently returned items" or a notice that "customers usually keep this item." And then I buy Prime delivered items, and a return is not an issue for me then.
It's pretty easy to spot obviously unrelated reviews that talk about or include pictures of completely different products. What's hard to spot is similar reviews written by bots or people paid to write as many reviews as possible using similar language, especially when there are thousands of reviews.
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Look at Section 2B
B. Personal Information Collected Automatically
We may collect personal information automatically when you use our Services.
Automatic Collection of Personal Information.
We may collect the following information automatically when you use our Services:
Contact Information:
Your email address
Identifiers:
User ID: Such as screen name, handle, account ID, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. This information could be provided via your Fakespot account, Apple ID, Google Account, or other accounts you may use on the Services. User ID also includes your account password, other credentials, security questions, and confirmation codes.
Device ID: Your device information which includes, but is not limited to, information about your web browser, IP address, time zone, and some of the cookies that are installed on your device.
Usage Data:
Product Interaction: How you interact with our Services and what features you use within the Services, including Fakespot’s sort bar, highlights, review grade, seller ratings, alternative sellers, settings and popups.
Other Usage Data: Individual web pages or products that you view, what websites or search terms referred you to the Service, and other information about how you interact with the Service.
Browser Information: Information your internet browser provides when you access and use our Services.
Application Search History: Information you provide when you perform searches in our Services.
Purchase Information: Your purchase history or purchase tendencies which we may use to recommend better products and sellers.
Location Information. We may collect your location information, such as geolocation based on your IP address in connection with your use of our Services.
Publicly Available Information. In providing our Services we may collect data (including personal information such as profile names of reviewers) that is made publicly available via the internet on the websites analyzed and crawled by our Services.Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable. Also can combine this with marketplace reviews considering reliability.
If there is no review than have to trust the brand and if there is no brand then it is a gamble
Reading reviews for the thing you are buying on the platform that you are buying it sounds a bit sketchy anyway
Although at least the platform can know if the reviewer actually purchased the product(?)
Searching the product and reading about it from different review sites seems more reliable
Unless they use affiliate links, which is a great big red flag that the incentives are already stacked against you.
I also got offered some money over telegram to review a hotel from a large chain and leave a positive review.
I've seen ads selling fake clothes, real clothes but with a fake store, money exchange scams, and a few others.
Unfortunately, they haven't really countered the "keep creating new accounts" drop-shippers. Some categories are especially bad about this- if you find a back massager that you like, buy it in bulk right away, because the model and probably seller won't be around by the time you want another.
Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
They are good at objectively evaluating consumer products, they simply buy all the main models of a thing and review them all. I trust them (which is very important in this space). I happily pay for this service.
(62 points, 27 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44184974