I recently had need to buy a thermal camera. I wanted to buy a good quality one that would last a long time without spending £1000’s on some overkill industrial device. I looked for online stores that aren’t amazon, but I couldn’t really find any named stores/brands that I’d heard of selling decent ones. So I tried to search for reviews, but literally every review either had affiliate links trying to get me to buy the expensive ones on amazon, or was a literal ad on youtube disguised as an indie review with sub-10k views from some nobody channel. So I reluctantly looked on Amazon, and as usual a load of the reviews there are ai-generated and I have no real idea which products are actually good, and there are a thousand knock-off cheapo products from alphabet-soup companies with names like AXLGOFN, which I’m not remotely interested in.
I eventually managed to find and buy a decent camera, and it was the same price on amazon versus some other site I hadn’t previously heard of, so I bought it on the other random electronics site.
But, my question is more broad: how do you navigate the online hellscape? Do you have a philosohpy or strategy about how to navigate a market you know nothing about and pay a sensible price for a good product without getting scammed? This experience just seems to be normal now, and it’s exhausting. I’m sick of ai-generated reviews, I’m sick of “paid reviews” and youtube videos of “this company sent me this product for free with these 12 talking points which I will now read to you”, and I’m sick of companies called AXLGOFN trying to sell me cheap tat that will last 14 minutes.
I ironically check Reddit and similar places. Basically I look for street-level reviews from people who have actually tried things. I can’t rely on actual reviews on products online because people use the reviews like venting journal entries, always bitching about things that don’t matter. Usually people bitch about shipping time and whatnot, that has nothing to do with the product’s quality.
Reddit has not been reliable for at least 3 years now. If you’re looking at reviews from older posts, sure, still a good source.
If you’re looking for product reviews for recent items though? It’s all bots. Bots asking the question, bots replying to the question, bots replying to the replies. You can tell because they usually state the full product name and then give generic praise that could be applied to literally anything.
If I’m getting into a new hobby or something and am suspicious about the listings I’m seeing on Amazon or Etsy or wherever, I check Temu. If the same thing I’m seeing on one of those sites is on Temu, it confirms that it’s just cheap Chinese stuff with an high markup and I move on to a different seller/maker of the product.
I like to hit Amazon before I look anywhere else since there will be a lot of the knockoff products and I can get in my head what they look like before looking elsewhere for the real deal. If I go to a different site and they have one of the Amazon/Temu products I’ve seen, I leave that site and find another.
One thing I do is read 3 star reviews. Generally, five star reviews are bots/shills or just people trying to affirm a bad decision; One star reviews are people that had shipping problems or didn’t understand what they were buying. Three star reviews tend to be people that actually bought the thing, and are capable of rational thought.
5stars: looks okay but haven’t tested yet.
1 star: my grandson loves it
I do this! I sort by recent and critical if they have the category. IDC about the people who loved the product, I want to see why people didn’t like the product.
Right, but sane 3 star reviews mixed with bots is how we get 4+ star average products. I usually give one star to offset the shills.
Oftentimes, and I hate to say it, I look on reddit, for all the reasons you just described. I’m not saying it’s a perfect method, but these days I find myself looking on there for anything based around opinion - such as the quality of certain devices. It seems the fastest route to find opinions of real people. And besides with how pretentious most reddit users are, they have a tendency to OVER recommend (for example suggesting anything less then the best is dog water and shouldn’t even be considered, a rare benefit).
You just have to learn to see through the occasional bot post but it is usually pretty obvious, at least moreso then the endless crap on the, as you put it, hellscape.
You gotta make do with what you got
For whatever thing you’re into, there are dedicated hobby communities for it. If you can find an old school forum, subreddit, Lemmy community for that specialised thing you’ll find people who genuinely want to recommend products for you, not because they want to get paid but because they’re passionate about it. That’s where you find honest reviews.
Definitely, forums and reddits are where I get my purchasing decisions. Reviews are bots so I don’t trust them
Buy with a credit or debit card that has purchase proetection: If it’s a scam, issue a chargeback.
One of the better ways to avoid scams is to try and filter out the companies that have the bigger marketing budgets. Some companies live off advertising a passable product at a premium. Harder? Definitely. My recomendation is you find someone passionate on thermal imaging, after all, word of mouth is the only thing that a marketing budget can’t buy.
Yet another reason to be skeptical of reviews is that they are heavily weighed towards first impressions. So if someone gets a product and it works great, they might go and immediately leave a glowing review for it. But if it breaks 6 months later due to poor manufacturing quality, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and update their review.
2-3 star reviews. This will help color in which 1 star reviews to believe.
Sadly, the 5 star review is the most questionable.
Aside about Amazon. What didn’t work. I do woodworking so I wear a respirator. 3M, dual cartridge. I found a carton of 30 pairs of P100 for $85 on Amazon. It was through the 3M store on Amazon. Legit, right? The filters that came appeared legit, and nowhere near expiration. The issue is, they sent a box of 6 pairs not a carton of 30 pairs. Customer service fixed it, or so they said. Again, my carton of 30 pairs was a single box of 6 pairs (5 to a carton, probably). Amazon did issue a refund but would not order a replacement. I couldn’t order a replacement, I didn’t trust it.
So, I went to 3M. There is no way to contact their customer service unless you’re a large contractor or seller. 3M store? I guess it’s just a pretty frame on Amazon. The 3M site itself links back to Amazon and 2 others for purchase. The two others: one has no availability and the other wants $100+ for that box of 6 pairs of P100 filters.
This isn’t uncommon. You try to buy direct, and may end up on Amazon anyway.
I never did get my carton of 30 pairs of P100 filters.
I stick to known vendors, brands, and shipment agents.
Know good review sites
Rtings and Tom’s Hardware are usually all you need, but for niche things you need to branch out
I look for online stores with actual brick and mortar shops. Here in Finland they aren’t the cheapest, but I’ll also buy from German or other European stores depending on the item.
I just feel safer knowing there’s a shop somewhere I can return to.
When possible, go to the manufacturers site. In this case, someone like Flir.
Flir is absolute dogshit overpriced Chinese junk. Don’t get me started on how bad the industrial software is.
Regardless, go to the manufacturer site, whoever you pick.
Today I learned.
My main strategy is to avoid needing to buy things online as much as possible. Failing that, what you described is all I know. It sucks. Every purchase feels like a gamble.
You can get a subscription to Consumer Reports. They do thorough and reliable ratings of a lot of things. Not sure about thermal cameras, though. I mean it as more general advice.
