If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, des...

trgn · on March 30, 2023

> Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.

This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it.

The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).

ClumsyPilot · on March 30, 2023

> you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them

This is such a lie - no, you can't do the research. There are no reseatch papers conparing consumer products

Doing the research means buying everything avaliable on the market and testing it yourself.

Googling is not research, its choosing which SEO'd fraudulent article will lie to you today.

Quality is going to shit, because there is no way to twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.

zaroth · on March 30, 2023

I mean… just here in this comment section are suggestions for suppliers of premium LEDs that I would trust based on the karma rating of the people who posted the links.

Googling for “premium LED high ratings 95 cri” or searching on Amazon definitely isn’t going to work, because they will just send you to the highest bidder, or the most proficient scammer.

ClumsyPilot · on March 30, 2023

The comment section is great , but if I need to find out quality of a random consumer product, what is the chance I will find it in this comment section? like 1%?

zaroth · on March 30, 2023

You go where the people who might know better talk about these things!

AV forums for picking a TV or projector, cooking forums for picking a knife set, and HN, you know, for picking the contrast level of your <body> text.

ClumsyPilot · on March 30, 2023

For most of my purchases, I cannot find any trustworthy content at all. This experience is shared by 90% of people I talk to

zaroth · on March 31, 2023

I feel like I’ve been able to make decently informed choices without too much hassle…

Recent purchases include usb cables, rechargeable batteries & USB power pack, LCD monitor, SSDs, multivitamins, torque wrench, belt sander, pressure washer, washing machine, gluten-free pastas and baking mixes, video games…

LED bulbs are kind of a pathological case, along with things like USB cables, speaker wire... If you want something better than the lowest common denominator it’s very hard because they are nearly indistinguishable from the outside and take a long time to fail.

But for example shopping and comparing washing machines online wasn’t terrible. You can narrow down the list very easily based on your requirements and budget, probably you end up with 2 choices that both seem great, you can watch videos of them running, and then you pick the one assembled in your home country or the one that makes a more pleasant ding when it turns on, and call it a day? Obviously the “reviews” are all fake, but the point isn’t for someone to tell you what to buy, but that all the options are readily discoverable while I’m lying in bed on my phone.

kleer001 · on March 30, 2023

Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you.

That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.