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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

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Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#221

Post by rexf »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #204

For kitchen devices, ATK or SeriousEats. Anything else: if you don't have a site you trust, then the only recourse is to look at LOTS of sites and read between the lines. By "sites" I also include "user forums." This also applies to movie reviews, btw. Rotten Tomatoes is trash. You can't average Trash opinions and end up with anything other than Trash. What you want to learn is "what is this movie like, and will I en…

> Anything else: if you don't have a site you trust, then the only recourse is to look at LOTS of sites and read between the lines. By "sites" I also include "user forums."

That's why Wirecutter is useful: convenience. They might not have the best product recommendations, but for items they "review", they provide an easy to click button to buy the product.

No offense, but reading random review sites, reddit, yelp, forums, misc google SEO landing pages with affiliate links, etc to try to find the best product is a huge pain. If I can go to 1 review site that is good enough and just buy the thing, the convenience often wins out.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#222

Post by idoh »

KoftaBob wrote: post #185
kettleballroll wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It regularly gets gamed very hard. You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things. It's also a thin line between astroturfing and fill on spamming products. But I have no doubts that some reviews on Reddit are payed for.

> You can sell old high karma accounts for quite a lot of money, because those are best for such things. Why is the accounts karma important for something like that? Does the Reddit algorithm favor high karma accounts when deciding what posts to rank higher?

Just speculating, but if you create a new account and then spam some positive reviews people will notice and downvote / get you banned from the sub-reddit. If you have some built up history it looks more legit to the other community members.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#223

Post by rkagerer »

jfim wrote: post #149
rkagerer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For air purifiers, if cost is no constraint, my IQAir GC has worked like a champ. The lower three speeds are reasonably quiet, and speed 6 cleans out the room in no time when my partner burns the cooking. Comes with a 10 year warranty.

Keep in mind air purifiers are just a fan with filters in front of it. A box fan with a furnace filter strapped to it, while ugly, will do similarly for reducing the amount of particles in the room. What you're paying for is basically three things: a design that looks acceptable in a room, a fan that's reasonably quiet, and ability to source filters in the future.

Check, check and check. And also a filter quality and seal design that's been tested and proven to work (they do a QA particulate test on each individual unit before it ships https://imgur.com/a/exTrjU7).

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#224

Post by ethbr0 »

msbarnett wrote: post #61
astura wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Tom's Hardware still around? Personally, I don't trust reviews unless I personally know the reviewer. Too much garbage out there.

Yeah but it’s little more than an SEO farm these days.

They sold the property in 2007. It's not the worst now, but it's certainly no longer the most editorially-independent.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#225

Post by ajolly »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #82
mrkwse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).

I'm hopeful for LMG's lab too. It's still a bit of a gamble, but from the sound of it the company is set up such that they can review products in an objective, data-backed way and tank any blowback from manufacturers that occurs as a result. It's much more focused on enthusiast computer hardware, but Gamers Nexus[0] is doing good things in this space too. Their style is much more dry and data-dense than LMG's though,…

For detailed tech reviews with lots of data of really been enjoying Igor'slab from Germany lately

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#226

Post by ethbr0 »

bayindirh wrote: post #198
hypersoar wrote: post #51

The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the e…

There is also Rtings ( https://www.rtings.com ).

On the topic of displays, and specifically monitors, also the excellent TFT Central ( http://tftcentral.co.uk/ ).

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#227

Post by permo-w »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #130
callahad wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, https://www.which.co.uk/ fills a similar niche to Consumer Reports.

I used to subscribe and they were generally good, but they made no account of cost. So you might have (made up example) an Electrolux vacuum getting a score of 73, but a Dyson gets a score of 74 and wins their "recommended buy" then you see the Dyson is, like, twice the price. I can see they might do the review price-blind, but it does make one suspicious that they get some sort of financial benefit from having top p…

It is good to be sceptical, but Which? is a charity that doesn't take advertising money, and keeps afloat with paid subscriptions. If it got out that they were taking kickbacks, even setting aside the probable illegality, they'd never sell a subscription again.

It's one thing for some shady website with little to no reputation to lie about these things, but Which is an old company whose model is entirely based on trust.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#228

Post by tobylane »

wgjordan wrote: post #211
aiisjustanif wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references. I personally feel the quality of Wirecutter has gone down since NY Times just a bit. However, after almost a decade of reading Wirecutter they have overwhelming provided a decent “why you should trust us” section for staple consumer items. There is a good example from just today. [1] You can always say they should do more, but honestly th…

>> They didn't actually try any of the products themselves (they admitted as much in the article). > I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references. OK, here's one such reference in "The Best Baby Formula" [1]: > We didn’t do any testing for this guide, because babies have minds of their own, and it would be impossible to control for all of the variables that might make a baby prefer o…

That seems justified. (IMO I’d want a review of the ingredients, then it’s up to my kid to prefer flavours.) That choice isn’t related to the choices for products for adults, which is what we care about.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#229

Post by dusted »

excellent write.. I bought multiple of these airfilters after reading that review, because, honestly, I didn't believe it anyway, and my particle sensors clearly show when the filter is running.

Unfortunately, the build quality is not exceptional, so there is a bit of noise from the unit, even at the low settings, but placed far enough from the bed, it's hard to notice. The particle count is higher during the night, but not as high as with the filter completely turned off. I can even see when my sleep is interrupted, and when I go to bed and wake up from the particle count graph.

I must admit that I capture the data with the ikea "VINDRIKTNING" sensor, it has a TX pin exposed and that is easily hooked to RX on an ESP8265, which simply runs a TCP socket server that streams the reading via wifi.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#230

Post by SmellTheGlove »

bayindirh wrote: post #198
hypersoar wrote: post #51

The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the e…

There is also Rtings ( https://www.rtings.com ).

I wish rtings had a Boolean on tvs so we could search explicitly for non smart models. That is basically the only thing else I’d want from that site, it’s really good.
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