Probably part of it. A lot of reviewers get their units for free and it's easier to be happy with something you didn't pay for. We can't tell which reviews were sponsored, so we can't measure that directly.
One unfortunate thing is that Amazon blocked all reviews that said "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received ..." which was a good marker of product crapitude. It makes sense for Amazon to do that since it makes them look better but as a user I wish it hadn't happened - because of AI I can now review all the crap reviews easily. It would have been good to have known.
Beyond that reviewers probably don't get as much time with the product so they're not likely to get the chance to see reliability issues. A new product isn't likely to break within a 1 month review period.
I've been on Amazon's "get free stuff" list for a few years. I review stuff honestly.
If the product is trash, I review it as such.
If it's good, it gets some notes about the good stuff and the parts that make it less-than-great.
If it's great (and I'm rather particular so most things fall short of "great"), then it's still gone over in detail.
If my opinion changes over time, either positively or negatively, then: I update the review.
---
This is in-keeping with the program's terms of service, and nothing about those terms compels me to behave other-than-honestly. I'm not expecting to get kicked out of it anytime soon regardless of how many 1-star reviews I post.
Yeah well not many reviewers actually use them long enough before putting up a review - fair play, they review what they have on hand. Reviewers are mostly working a job too, the money boat is during a release of a product, not a year after they've well tinkered with it - assuming they even have the time to with multiple same-category products released constantly.
Anyway, all i'm saying is its not terrible. People who watch reviews on release should know there is no reliability to talk about unless the reviewer spends the effort to 'accelerate' these - e.g. Fold testing foldable phones and counting them.
Take a look at my country's (Singapore) arguably #1 e-commerce platform and you'll notice something even more mindblowing - platform-generated, ai-generated reviews. And no, its not the sellers, most of them have even voiced their frustrations that they dont even have an option to block these 'ai-generated reviews' on their products. Yes, there are ai-generated humans wearing ear0hones clipping through ears, on the complete opposite directions and telling you how awesome the product is. Truly dystopian.
Whenever I look at reviews for something, e.g. a restaurant, I always sort by worst and see what they say. If it's some dealbreaker like "I found a rat in my food", then I'm outta there. If it's "the service was slow this one time", I can live with it.
I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.
yes, I’ve found a pretty reliable approach for apartments is if people are complaining about the fees in the 1 star reviews, it’s probably a pretty good apartment.
Other places have 1 star reviews mentioning mold, pests, break-ins, etc.
I use a similar approach for amazon reviews. If all the 1 star reviews are telling the same story then it’s bad. If there’s not much consistency then it’s probably fine. That and the percentage of 1 star reviews. generally I aim for <5%
I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.
The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy
The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.
I learned this lesson with my Kia Telluride. Rave reviews, but it was a new model without years of data behind it.
At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.
I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.
I think small accidents == large bills is caused by the amount of sensors and crumple zones in cars.
Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.
All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.
So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.
One interesting thing I noticed about Chinese vehicles is that the expensive sensor arrays are commonly mounted on the roof, presumably safe from small fender benders. Hopefully Western manufacturers will pick up that feature.
Ideally that would be the place to keep them. It'd also help with not having to recalibrate the sensor arrays due to bumps that might not damage anything but which jostle things a bit. I think recalibration essentially requires an expensive visit to the dealer since the software needed to do it is dealer only or extremely expensive for independent mechanics.
Sensors and crumple zones are part of it. But for the Telluride, some of the issue as well is that the OEM parts are often available only for gross assemblies. So where as historically you could get discrete parts for other manufacturers, for KIA they often only have big pre-assembled assemblies available. That was the case for the alternator which played a few different roles and could only be replaced en-masse. Headlights are another area where any damage requires an entirely new assembly.
The approach makes repairability really, really expensive.
If you're conservative and buying something as critical as a daily use car it makes a lot of sense to get second or later model year of the second or later generation since a major redesign. Preferably a model that has been sold in high volumes and used heavily as a taxi or something. Then at least you will know the most likely problems before you buy.
For second hand cars, here in Australia we have a youtuber that goes by the name ReDriven, this guy Adam reviews second hand cars specifically and focuses on reliability, and what it's like to live with. He's got a mate who's a mechanic that details all the specific mechanical problems that they see with the cars.
Such an insanely useful little channel and they do amazing work.
That is why Toyota is so popular in the US: They are extremely reliable.
(I personally don't drive them, but many of my family members love them.)
If you want to keep a new car 10+ years, they're generally a safe bet. Related: I had very little problems with my 2018 Tesla Model 3, but traded it in at 6.5 years because I needed a larger vehicle for my family.
Family member had a rav4 prime instrument cluster go black. Spent 4+ months without that vehicle while they were trying to figure that shit out. No idea if this is common, but those cars aren't exactly readily available so they were stuck with a Corolla for a long time.
I think it depends on were you live. The roads in my country are high quality and the winters are soft. You'd actually have to try really hard to wreck any car in 10 years.
My dad kept a new Camry for ~15 years in the Northeastern US; no major problems. 20 years earlier he was lucky if he could get a car to go over 100k miles and last 10 years.
(In the winter, road salt corrodes the cars and the snowplows bear up the roads.)
Cars are different nowadays (hopefully even more reliable), but the '95 Toyota Camry that my parents bought new in 1995 or 1996 lasted until I was done using it in college in 2011. Then my dad sold it for a chunk of cash. The only thing wrong with it was that the roof paint was gone to shit from the Florida sun. You could probably paint it, redo the ceiling fabric, and run it for another 10 years. They sunk a fair amount into it over the years, but nothing catastrophic -- no powertrain issues, no "fixing this AC will cost more than the car" issues. In the four years I drove it I think it needed about $300 of work (something about the steering or suspension).
There are lots of Camry from 2008 to 2017 which has paint delamination issue. Ours is from 2012 but it only started getting noticeably worse near the end of the warranty period and I never heard about it because it was during the pandemic and our dealer went out of business. Toyota didn't publicize the issue till the end.
Happy fellow TR7 owner here, though I am curious if Whirlpool’s latest foray into seemingly reliable washers will pose any real threat/competition. The TR7 is definitely one that “just works” and fades into the background of your life.
Sadly Bosch didn’t take the same tack; the prospect of slurping up all that sweet, sweet data must have been too hard to resist. I love my 800 series dishwasher but I do wish it were as “dumb” as the TR7.
Who can tell which Whirlpool appliances are actually quality? It's so hard to trust anybody. Between the short-time-horizon thinking of public companies driven by the share price and the brand cannibalism of Private Equity, the brand you thought was reliable a couple years ago is today putting some money in the bank so that its current leadership can gut the company and retire.
Reviews are so easily gamed that it's hard to trust them. Only companies with small product lines can build and maintain a durable reputation for quality.
I own a speedqueen. I love my speedqueen. I wouldn't buy speedqueen today and instead opt for a different, cheaper dumb model.
My speedqueen dryer needs a new control board after 9 years. A new dryer isn't as high quality. From what I understand the dryer quality dipped in the past 6-9 years whereas washers are more or less the same. Maytag and GE have much cheaper dumb options you should consider, and save yourself several hundred. It will also make replacement less painful if a critical part dies.
I don't trust Maytag and GE. It's good that they have simple interfaces and lack surveillance tech, but their cheap machines are almost certainly built for price-driven consumers who don't consider that they are built to fall apart.
Household appliances have been around for a long time now. I wish that there were open-source hardware designs that a certification organization could evaluate.
don't do it! i just got rid of my set i purchased new in 2020. i'd rather have a washer/dryer that i have to replace every 5 years than the terrible function of both the washer and dryer. the washer i'll forgive a little being it was the front loader model, but their door seal is a terrible design and pools water, just reeked of mold all the time. i'll forgive it because it's a common front loader issue. the dryer on the other hand had failed heating element in the first few months. whatever these things happen, however the heating element on that model gets too hot. it would melt the synthetic lint onto the screen as it passed out of the main dryer body, which after a couple months would form these plastic stalactites on the grill that i would have to grind off every two months, because they would start shredding my clothes.
How’s this even news? Most if not all youtubers are shills, paid shills, and they are not hiding it with sponsorship, and even the ones who say “i bought it with my own money so im honest” are rarely honest because they don’t want to upset the brand who can hurt them legally or preventing them from buying their stuff in the future, or the fans so means less subscribers. The rare good youtubers are usually the ones that you don’t know because YT never promoted their vids or the ones that post one vid a year or so.
I've noticed that people seem to also have two working definitions of "reliability".
1. "This works as expected to without error or repair for longer than expected"
2. "This is easy and straightforward to repair, so when it breaks the halt in operations is only temporary"
I don't know why people seem to use #2 when it is obviously not the meaning of reliability, but some version of it almost inevitably brought up when discussing an unreliable technology that somebody still prefers to use over the reliable one.
This thinking infests everything from computing to cars.
"Sure my PC crashes all the time, but its a simple reboot and some configuration tweaks to get it back online, takes like 30 seconds"
"I love my car, the service from the repair shop is white glove whenever I bring it in. I'm usually in and out in the same day"
"My stand mixer is amazing, I only have to 3d print a replacement for the central gear every 10 or 11 loaves of bread and it's a 30 second swap out to get it working again"
"I love my new clothes dryer, the maintenance contract gets somebody in within 24 hours to get it back online"
To the point of the post, very few organizations track long-term reliability and repairs for products, even major expensive ones like cars and appliances. The segment of consumer who really cares about this stuff just isn't large enough to make it really viable to do so, and the segment of consumers who follow definition #2 undercut them anyways.
In a sense, the second category can include a reliable repair or mitigation process.
Examnples like service from the shop and a maintenance contract on a dryer are great examples of people mistaking convenience of it being fixed with reliability, which is your main point But in many cases if something can reliably be fixed by the owner in an acceptable amount of time, that is a form of reliability.
Honestly, the first set is the replacement for department stores where you could go and experience the product for yourself. They try to solve the problem of the first impression you might get. For example, I have been in the market for an over-ear bluetooth headphone, and as a result started checking online reviews. There are a ton of audio review sites now that do lab acoustic testing, mic samples, write articles with details about dimensions, weight, build quality, materials used, head comfort, cup depth, clamping force, ANC performance, etc.
Extremely detailed and generally great testing. Though tbh, if you were in a department store with all the options in front of you, you would give them all a try and pick the one that you like the most. You can evaluate half of these variables for yourself in a moment by holding and trying it out. If you're an audiophile, then you would can have your music and give each a listen in the store and decide better than a curve graph.
I spent a ton of times reading all the reviews and narrowing down the options, but was still between 3 or 4. Ended up driving 45 minutes to the nearest bestbuy and they had a decent selection. It was amazing how quickly I eliminated options and ended up picking one I liked.
I tried to make a "unicorn" review on AliExpress. IIRC you can only write a review in the first 30 or 90 days. Too bad because I was going to sell the praises of the thing.
I think there should be a separate dimension who are people who have used similar products before and have strict requirements, and people who don't (just bought it to review it, have surface level use cases, etc).
Me too. I don’t know how that’s even possible though without bias and whatnot finding a way. Sometimes you find out at the same rate as the manufacturer. Hell, I typed this on my third iPhone 18 in last ~month, after never having a single iPhone hardware issue in almost 2 decades, Not even a dead battery, this version has been awful. First one had weak antenna, second USB port didn’t work, third TBD. The associates I’ve worked with say they’ve never seen a version rollout with so many issues.
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
No kidding! About twelve years ago, I outfitted a house with LED bulbs for about $5 a pop (a bargain at the time!) and those lasted for six years, until I moved. In the new house, LEDs were all less expensive but now they also fail quickly. I'd HAPPILY pay $5 for eternal bulbs again.
But to reply to the headline, becuase it's impossible to predict reliability of something new, and it's not possible to evaluate reliability based on a single example, you need lots of data collected over long periods of time.
The only thing most reviewers can do is speculate based on the reputation of the designer/manufacturer, and an educated guess based on the object's architecture and materials.
74 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 8.4 ms ] threadThe car reviewer needs to get over the honeymoon phase of this new shiny gadget.
If the product is trash, I review it as such.
If it's good, it gets some notes about the good stuff and the parts that make it less-than-great.
If it's great (and I'm rather particular so most things fall short of "great"), then it's still gone over in detail.
If my opinion changes over time, either positively or negatively, then: I update the review.
---
This is in-keeping with the program's terms of service, and nothing about those terms compels me to behave other-than-honestly. I'm not expecting to get kicked out of it anytime soon regardless of how many 1-star reviews I post.
Anyway, all i'm saying is its not terrible. People who watch reviews on release should know there is no reliability to talk about unless the reviewer spends the effort to 'accelerate' these - e.g. Fold testing foldable phones and counting them.
Take a look at my country's (Singapore) arguably #1 e-commerce platform and you'll notice something even more mindblowing - platform-generated, ai-generated reviews. And no, its not the sellers, most of them have even voiced their frustrations that they dont even have an option to block these 'ai-generated reviews' on their products. Yes, there are ai-generated humans wearing ear0hones clipping through ears, on the complete opposite directions and telling you how awesome the product is. Truly dystopian.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1wn9cz5/the_stan...
Couldn't have said it better myself
5 star reviews are all: “I did the tour and the agent was friendly/place looked nice”
meanwhile the 1 star reviews: “I actually live here and this place is terrible.”
no doubt they ask you to review 5 stars on the tour…
I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.
Other places have 1 star reviews mentioning mold, pests, break-ins, etc.
I use a similar approach for amazon reviews. If all the 1 star reviews are telling the same story then it’s bad. If there’s not much consistency then it’s probably fine. That and the percentage of 1 star reviews. generally I aim for <5%
The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy
The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.
Never pay to be a new product tester
At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.
I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.
Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.
All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.
So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.
The approach makes repairability really, really expensive.
Such an insanely useful little channel and they do amazing work.
(I personally don't drive them, but many of my family members love them.)
If you want to keep a new car 10+ years, they're generally a safe bet. Related: I had very little problems with my 2018 Tesla Model 3, but traded it in at 6.5 years because I needed a larger vehicle for my family.
(In the winter, road salt corrodes the cars and the snowplows bear up the roads.)
No spyware and featuritis a la kings of user-hostilility LG and Samsung.
No planned obsolescence from built-to-disintegrate brands living off ancient reputations like Whirlpool and Maytag.
Just a machine that I won't have to worry about from a company that makes money by providing value rather than by victimizing their customers.
Sadly Bosch didn’t take the same tack; the prospect of slurping up all that sweet, sweet data must have been too hard to resist. I love my 800 series dishwasher but I do wish it were as “dumb” as the TR7.
Reviews are so easily gamed that it's hard to trust them. Only companies with small product lines can build and maintain a durable reputation for quality.
My speedqueen dryer needs a new control board after 9 years. A new dryer isn't as high quality. From what I understand the dryer quality dipped in the past 6-9 years whereas washers are more or less the same. Maytag and GE have much cheaper dumb options you should consider, and save yourself several hundred. It will also make replacement less painful if a critical part dies.
Household appliances have been around for a long time now. I wish that there were open-source hardware designs that a certification organization could evaluate.
here's someone else with the same problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Appliances/comments/10ijvmy/why_is_...
1. "This works as expected to without error or repair for longer than expected"
2. "This is easy and straightforward to repair, so when it breaks the halt in operations is only temporary"
I don't know why people seem to use #2 when it is obviously not the meaning of reliability, but some version of it almost inevitably brought up when discussing an unreliable technology that somebody still prefers to use over the reliable one.
This thinking infests everything from computing to cars.
"Sure my PC crashes all the time, but its a simple reboot and some configuration tweaks to get it back online, takes like 30 seconds"
"I love my car, the service from the repair shop is white glove whenever I bring it in. I'm usually in and out in the same day"
"My stand mixer is amazing, I only have to 3d print a replacement for the central gear every 10 or 11 loaves of bread and it's a 30 second swap out to get it working again"
"I love my new clothes dryer, the maintenance contract gets somebody in within 24 hours to get it back online"
To the point of the post, very few organizations track long-term reliability and repairs for products, even major expensive ones like cars and appliances. The segment of consumer who really cares about this stuff just isn't large enough to make it really viable to do so, and the segment of consumers who follow definition #2 undercut them anyways.
Examnples like service from the shop and a maintenance contract on a dryer are great examples of people mistaking convenience of it being fixed with reliability, which is your main point But in many cases if something can reliably be fixed by the owner in an acceptable amount of time, that is a form of reliability.
- I just received this product and tried it out. Here's what I like or dislike about it.
- I've been using this product for a while and have this big problem with it.
Set 1 will give you a decent set of opinions, but they won't be about reliability, because no one has had it for long enough.
Set 2 will be overwhelmingly negative, because people who are happy with a product aren't posting about it online long after they bought it.
Extremely detailed and generally great testing. Though tbh, if you were in a department store with all the options in front of you, you would give them all a try and pick the one that you like the most. You can evaluate half of these variables for yourself in a moment by holding and trying it out. If you're an audiophile, then you would can have your music and give each a listen in the store and decide better than a curve graph.
I spent a ton of times reading all the reviews and narrowing down the options, but was still between 3 or 4. Ended up driving 45 minutes to the nearest bestbuy and they had a decent selection. It was amazing how quickly I eliminated options and ended up picking one I liked.
> Most of what breaks shows up after the review is done
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387962
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
But to reply to the headline, becuase it's impossible to predict reliability of something new, and it's not possible to evaluate reliability based on a single example, you need lots of data collected over long periods of time.
The only thing most reviewers can do is speculate based on the reputation of the designer/manufacturer, and an educated guess based on the object's architecture and materials.