this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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There is a way to avoid buying utter shit on Amazon most of the time, but it's annoying- type in the full product name including the manufacturer. Like instead of "noise-cancelling earbuds," you have to type in "Skullcandy sesh ANC" (highly recommended and inexpensive wireless earbuds, by the way). Then the result is at least near the top of the list. Of course, this requires you to know what you want before you go there, which can sometimes, due to researching it, require going to some other website to make the same purchase anyway.
I basically don't do non-specific searches Amazon at this point unless I want it to be cheap and I honestly don't care if it sucks. If I buy a male-to-male cable converter and it craps out after a month... well, it was only $1.
Also, sort reviews for things by "newest" and read the reviews. Most of the time companies will do the majority of their fake spamming of reviews during the first weeks of release and if you read the more recent reviews you're likely to get more truth to them. I've looked at 4.5 star rated stuff with a thousand reviews before, but sorting by most recent I've seen 4 out of 5 of the reviews show up as 1 star rated.
It's really hard to know whether or not the reviews are astroturf though. Sometimes poor English is a clue, but not always.
That's where fakespot comes into play. I have the add on on my browser and it rates the reviews. Anything below a B is probably filled with fakes. You can even sort the entries using fakespot adjusted review scores.