Your description of reality is accurate, and reality just sucks in this case.
Photography magazines, same thing. They don't tell you that
all their reviews are all based off gear provided to them
that has been likely hand-assembled very carefully
The obvious answer is for reviewers to purchase their own products outright at retail, like Consumer Reports always did. A lot of outlets do this, but it's often impractical.
Some amateur reviewers rely on samples sent/lent to them by fans. Lots of audio equipment, watch, and car reviewers do this to name a few I'm familiar with.
Of course that can also lead to the opposite problem. Instead of getting above-spec, hand-picked models from the manufacturer they may wind up with products that perform worse than the typical sample.
One "middle ground" that works is some companies will ship review copies to reviewers straight from Amazon. I've received review products in this manner. Not perfect, but at least they weren't handpicked by the mfr.
Another example: I bought a set of sheets
recommended by Wirecutter. They were garbage,
fell apart rapidly. Reading the comments later
on the store website, I see drumroll please
they clearly changed the sheets - people
saying the manufacturer had clearly changed
suppliers or something.
Wirecutter makes a pretty decent effort to update their reviews when information like this comes in, but yeah -- I wish they were more proactive about this.
It's tough to know what the answer is. It seems impractical for a reviewer to continually re-buy every product they've ever reviewed every N months to check for quality issues. Crowdsourcing it and monitoring recent user reviews from Amazon etc seems like the only remotely viable option, but still a massive timesink.
Every time I've trusted their reviews, the product
I ended up with turned out to have glaringly obvious
flaws the somehow expert panel of reviewers didn't
notice or mention
I can't say I've shared your experience. I've bought dozens of things based on their recommendations. Far from perfect but I have a generally high opinion of them.
Car reviews? It's all a focus on performance and
looks, and nothing to little about repairability,
reliability, depreciation.
I have to cut the auto mags a little slack here. How could a reviewer know about the reliability of a new car? You've got to put 50-100K miles on a car before you can even really assess that. That's like 100+ days of heavy driving. And even then, your sample size is one. So not even useful. You'd have to buy a fleet of the vehicle in question and have dozens of reviewers putting serious miles on them. I don't think that's something new-car reviewers could even tackle, so it's better that they stick to what they can do.
It's been a while since I've read them, but Motor Trend and Car & Driver always did long-term reliability updates. Admittedly it was only for a subset of the vehicles they reviewed.
Car & Driver was a great magazine, sometimes tough to get down under and two thirds of the cars were unobtainable here, but the level of journalism was great. Kinda lost the appetite for car magazines when the fun cars got sold for kiddie haulers and I realised a lot of the magazines I was reading were full of wankery arounds seconds to 60 when all I wanted to know was miles to breakdown.
Some amateur reviewers rely on samples sent/lent to them by fans. Lots of audio equipment, watch, and car reviewers do this to name a few I'm familiar with.
Of course that can also lead to the opposite problem. Instead of getting above-spec, hand-picked models from the manufacturer they may wind up with products that perform worse than the typical sample.
One "middle ground" that works is some companies will ship review copies to reviewers straight from Amazon. I've received review products in this manner. Not perfect, but at least they weren't handpicked by the mfr.
Wirecutter makes a pretty decent effort to update their reviews when information like this comes in, but yeah -- I wish they were more proactive about this.It's tough to know what the answer is. It seems impractical for a reviewer to continually re-buy every product they've ever reviewed every N months to check for quality issues. Crowdsourcing it and monitoring recent user reviews from Amazon etc seems like the only remotely viable option, but still a massive timesink.
I can't say I've shared your experience. I've bought dozens of things based on their recommendations. Far from perfect but I have a generally high opinion of them. I have to cut the auto mags a little slack here. How could a reviewer know about the reliability of a new car? You've got to put 50-100K miles on a car before you can even really assess that. That's like 100+ days of heavy driving. And even then, your sample size is one. So not even useful. You'd have to buy a fleet of the vehicle in question and have dozens of reviewers putting serious miles on them. I don't think that's something new-car reviewers could even tackle, so it's better that they stick to what they can do.It's been a while since I've read them, but Motor Trend and Car & Driver always did long-term reliability updates. Admittedly it was only for a subset of the vehicles they reviewed.