When you Google for “best whatever” and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.
You’ll find many cases where the only post they’ve ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.
A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.
deleted by creator
We all used to agree that it was the best option to go for.
deleted by creator
And it’s only going to get WAY WORSE with LLM and Gen AI…
Good suggestion.
I think the savviest of the savvy out there are both properly seeding comment histories and continuing to post other comments after they astroturf which makes it all but impossible to identify.
Big bummer and no perfect solution I’ve ever heard of but we do what we can and can always hope.
The perfect solution is to research which to buy for 9 months and then end up buying none.
depending on reddit for any kind of real world advice is a crapshoot at best
Even a crapshoot is better than the straight advertisements on Google.
For something like a hoodie, I recommend you go to a thrift store. Anything you find there will be durable and quality enough to survive, and you can feel it or try it on. It’s very easy to find high quality stuff while thrifting. 8 dollars for what might cost 80 new.
Try to focus on non-synthetic fibers or semi synthetic. Plastics in clothing are bad for the environment.
Plastic in clothes is bad for you, not just the environment
Microplastics apparently do infiltrate through the skin
We have… done bad things with our world.
If you really are looking for a hoodie: 1620.
Prices are high, they’re very proud of their products. Their work pants aren’t worth it, garbage*. Both pairs I bought don’t come close to my Wrangler for durability.
However, their hoodie is pretty dope. It’s long, and the hood is huge. A proper functioning hood, I can pull it down to my nose. Buttons instead of string. It’s thick & warm. Only downside is it’s long, and I’m 6’1", it falls below my ass. The waist is also wide, or my waist is just more narrow than the average tradesman they’re targeting.This is where guitars are right now.
Both Fender and Gibson are now owned by venture capitalists. Their quality of everything, from strings to picks to guitars, has plummeted across every brand they own in the last five years. It’s sad really.
You go on Reddit and people talk about the models and which one is great for this, or why they prefer it for that, but then you find some deeper dives into more recent spaces and people who know what they are talking about have moved away entirely from both brands.
If anyone is curious, you can buy a better guitar from Harley-Benton, Cort, or Jet than from Fender/Gibson and it will be 1/2 to 1/4 the cost.
The classic “Buy a reputable brand, cut costs and coast along on the reputation until you can sell off all your shares and move on to another company”. Bonus points for using
legalised embezzlementshare buyback.I saw a headline on some guitar magazine “These are the most over priced guitars currently”. Says a lot and it’s true.
There’s not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It’s alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.
My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I’d need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I’m not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.
Did you like building your own? I have a used PRS SE 24, which I got for a steal due to paint scuffs, but thought about building my own.
Yes absolutely, I enjoyed it and might do it again sometime with a different kit.
I do have a lot of tools already so that wasn’t costly, only good practice, but it did take somewhat longer than I expected.
I wouldn’t attempt to make the neck and fretboard from scratch, so a kit with a good neck is a good starting point.
Did you find any useful guides online or on YouTube for getting started? I have a decent set of tools, but this would be a new endeavor for me.
Well aware this would be a “me” guitar and not something that would have much of a value to anyone else. Some people seem to think they are building their own K-Line guitar.
It was all pretty straight forward. The kit was made to be assembled with a bolt on neck all predrilled, so it was basically just shaping the body and headstock and then paint and varnish.
I did look up some painting techniques, but I really just wanted to stain the wood, so I did that with a brush and then 2 coats of varnish. I had to sand the wood first to make it more open for staining instead of paint. If you want to paint or spray paint you should probably keep or make a base coat to avoid the wood absorbing the paint.
It was a cheap stratocaster-like kit, so I wasn’t too concerned with making mistakes, but I’ll admit that putting the saw into a guitar was a little daunting at first.
I used a multi-cutter for most of it to make very precise cuts. And lots and lots of sandpaper by hand with different grit sizes.
It only took a few evenings to do, so it is not difficult at all, but I guess it depends on how much you want to customize it.
Do you know the brand? Sounds like my next winter project.
I want to make one with normal pickups - Out1 and add a piezo bridge with a three way switch for an Out2. Some of the sounds people are getting by blending the two are incredible.
The kit I used was a Harley Benton from Thomann.
I ran into this when I was thinking about buying some Doc Martens recently. I know there have been other examples, that’s just the most recent I can remember.
Just get a cheap one in KMart. It’ll likely fall apart, but it still comes from the same sweatshop as your favourite brand and you didn’t pay so much for the months of wear you got.
KMart?! What is this, 1995?
They’re still kicking in Australia
When I started fishing as a hobby, I couldn’t believe that it was the only hobby I’ve ever taken up that pretty much had unanimous recommendations for beginners. Everyone seemed to suggest the Ugly Stik GX2 on every website or forum. And there were no threads about how I should buy a more expensive rod/reel, other than a few that mentioned that I might want to upgrade the reel on the GX2 after a year or so.
Even the salesperson at the Bass Pro Shops store recommended the GX2 even though I could have afforded a bit more.
It was a completely new experience for me. I am used to having to spend at least $300-400 on initial investments for new hobbies. Fishing was only CAD$120 for everything!
My hobby (speedcubing) is like that as well. If you ask any semi competent speedcuber you will hear something along the lines of “Get the newest RS3M (9$) and maybe some lube (4$)”. I love it for that.
(Of course it s all a foot-in-the-door scam to get you hooked so you buy other events but shhh)
there needs to be a crowd sourced product review and maintenance website that can see trends of enshittification.
From Wikishittia, the free enshittepedia
Because Reddit is infested with bot accounts at this point I tend to trust older threads over newer ones. Easy as hell to buy accs to say a competitor sucks dick
Or it’s just late stage capitalism where the product has truly gone to shit.
Por que no los dos?
My exact experience finding out Audacity has adware
No it doesn’t?
I just googled it to be sure, but i already assumed you meant ‘spyware’ (which is something completely different), referring to the telemetry (which i can get is a sensitive thing, but anonymous usage statistics to know where to focus their development sounds like a decent idea, and afaik they implemented it with respect for the user)
That’s why Tenacity is here to save the day!
After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.
In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, leading to the creation of a new fork with virtually the same intentions. Unsurpringly, this fork was named Sneedacity.
Sneedacity lmao
Did they learn nothing from the Boaty McBoatface disaster?
Aka “larger sample size provides different results”
That’s not really the case, everything is lower quality now on average.