Searching for product recommendations has become harder and harder over the years. I used to google or browse reddit for reviews, used them to create a shortlist of products and then actually dig deeper and compare them.
Lets say I’m in the market for a mechanical keyboard, but I don’t know much about them. I use whatever search engine to look for “best mechanical keyboard 2024”. The results are really bad, and I mean really bad. It’s more of a list of keyboards to avoid, to be honest. The problem is not just google. Bing, duckduckgo, Kagi, Startpage… all results suck. The results are filled with AI generated pages or outlets farming affiliate links. There are a couple of good suggestions in the middle of the garbage but if 9/10 websites recommend a random razer keyboard, I’m inclined to believe it’s an option worth considering.
Some of my friends say they resort to Youtube. I can agree that Youtube has amazing content creators that give amazing reviews and produce great quality content. But if you don’t know anything about the subject, how do you know which content creator is good and which content creator is just farming affiliate links?
One of the things I loved about Reddit was that I could just go to /r/whateversubject and talk to what I felt was real people discussing products they loved. I no longer use Reddit ,and Lemmy, unfortunately, doesn’t have a big enough userbase to have a good community for each type of product.
So, what’s your strategy to find out good products on subjects you know nothing about?
Yup. I mean it was, prior to the update. I wonder if I might have caused any of the issues b/c I delayed installing it for months, but I kept hearing so many sad horror stories about the update that broke everything, that I knew it would cause problems. But I was applying for and then starting a new job at the time, so replacing the phone OS was not something I wanted to do at that time.
The 7-series just basically fell through the cracks between where the older 6-series got one last update and newer 8-series were promised to get a few future ones, but they short-changed the 7-series updates both in number and SUBSTANTIALLY in quality too:-(. People felt really betrayed at the time. And then ofc most everyone forgot, just like what happened at Reddit, and Google, etc.
I think Carl Pie may have taken a bunch of programmers with him during all of that, and the company must have already decided to switch to Color OS (though they had not announced it at the time, yet it seems more clear in retrospect), so they did not have the programmers that they needed, and it would be a short-term job if they went and got them, so instead they simply… didn’t do as many updates as originally planned, and the 2 that they did do were so crappily deployed that I literally wish that they had offered zero updates rather than what they did. It didn’t quite “brick” my phone, but neither did I have a phone that worked even a tenth as well as it had previously, prior to the update.
And the thing is, OnePlus has a history of doing stuff like that. My brother warned me, and I didn’t listen - “naw bro, they’ve changed, that was the past, etc.” I fooled myself there, thinking that any bad changes would simply prompt me to swap out the OS with a custom one and I’d be fine to continue forward with the nice specs. I did not count on their update process being SO BAD that it literally damaged the hardware on my phone:-(.