If you still want to target reddit, without overtly giving traffic to reddit, I highly recommend one of the many LibReddit instances. And with something like LibRedirect you could still be doing !ddgr and click any reddit links, and always get redirected directly to an appropriate LibReddit instance.

I only had occasional luck with this even on Reddit. Some smaller subs for hobby stuff had genuinely good advice, but a lot of times it'd just be people repeating the same brands and products with a shallow recommendation. And there was a lot of astroturfing. Over the years I've learned to ask elsewhere:

For major appliances, the best approach I've found is to find a local business – a well reputed one that's been around for years, and does service as well as sales – and simply ask the salespeople what they recommend. If the shop's willing to warranty it, it's probably good enough.

For gadgets I tend to start looking at recognizable review sites that are easy to skim (RTINGS is especially useful, but Ars, The Verge etc. all have decent reviews) and then expand out to YouTube for the products I'm most interested in. Sometimes it's a good idea to look up the company itself for anything that might change your mind about them (Western Digital's unlabeled change to SMR drives is a recent example).

Shoes and clothes are the hardest thing to get good advice on. The most useful advice I've received has been very general stuff about what to look for in fit and quality. I've also found that high ethical standards from a clothing company tends to go hand in hand with quality and longevity.

Cars are an area where Reddit was still helpful. YouTube can be helpful here, but not so much typical car review channels: the most helpful YouTube videos are often from people who've owned a particular model for a year or so and can speak with experience about its quirks.

Finally, and most of all, I've learned to check the instinct to look up reviews. It's worth spending some time to research stuff between you and the ground, or that you'll use daily, but I've wasted too many hours comparing details that really don't matter. Make sure it's something you legitimately care about before you reach for other people's opinions.

Is there a buy it for life community here on Lemmy/Kbin yet? If there’s something like that, maybe asking questions here would generate some okay responses. It won’t be as immediate, but it would also help grow the amount of useful info we have in the fediverse.

In North America, Consumer Reports magazine.

They're independent and don't accept advertising, but are subscription-based. You can usually find them at your local library (i.e., hard copies or sometimes in their online database).

welp. shouldn't Kbin, lemmy, etc. become the new reddit slowly? So I guess after a while we will have pretty good guides and answers in these platforms.

YouTube is great, but I prefer reading the review so I can skim more easily.

For expensive electronics, I search some reviews. Then I google "{device_model_number} problems" or "{device_model_number} not working" and see what the results are like. I buy one that didn't have a lot of results there.

Sadly, the results are usually from reddit. But you also get some various hardware discussion forums and such.

A lot of the time they're niche specific, I would have found out about a lot of smaller sites from reddit and then just switched to searching them directly once I had a better understanding.

e.g. every second post in retro games subs was always "how much is this worth" and the answer is use pricecharting.com, analog camera subs or analog repair invariably reference butkus, there's heaps of small archives, wikis and old community forums out there for anything you can imagine.

If there's specific niches you're interested in maybe ask in those forums here, they might be able to point you somewhere.

If it’s home-related (or services) I’ve had decent luck with Nextdoor.

I don't know if there really is anymore. I started to notice Reddit was being gamed by bought posters.

Maybe something like signing up for Which.co.uk (apparently consumer reports in US) where you pay for impartial reviews. at least if you are the customer of which they may be more.impartial than internet sites where you are the product to me marketed to.