It’s not quite a full long term review, but I always liked when car mags did the “live with it for 3 months” section across a load of people. Average reviews don’t have that behind them typically.

I could take my car from the dealer and drive it for 30 minutes and learn not a lot. I could live with it for a month, and learn that it doesn’t make the wagon cover go back and forth automatically like the old one, the infotainment restarts twice as often, I can’t have X and Y visible at the same time in the digital dash, the armrest is a bit of a pain to reposition up and down if there’s a coffee in the holder, the coins rattle in the coin bin…

The “I’ve had this a year” review is always a lot more helpful.

Reviewers have limited data with which to rate longer-term reliability. Nobody can blame them for not doing-the-impossible.

The actual friction point is the subtle divergence of expectations. "User review" is a psychologically powerful concept - an extension of the "my friend/neighbour told me this" trust elevation.

But paradoxically, in today's popular society the reach of any given user review is (quasi) proportional to the amount of commercial involvement driving the exposure. Providing the platform, its userbase, and incentivising the content creator by metric of popularity.

So, now we have entire (minor) demographics in the business of finding new things to review. Class-leading tool of amazing reliability already exists for 10 years and is the benchmark for enduring quality in the field? That is wonderful, but the career reviewer still needs to review 10 new good-bad-and-ugly ones each year. Several will get a positive overall verdict from the reviewer, and some followers who make their purchase choices based upon the latest opinion they've heard from a person-of-respect will go out and buy those ones.

A reviewer who ended every new review for several years with "..but overall, the industry consensus of the Old Trusty 2000 is still the wisest holistic choice" would not be terribly compatible with the evolved world of User Reviews that we have.

Backblaze drive stats used to be very useful when purchasing consumer drive stats for my laptops, e.g. in 2015:

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.

Online reviews fall into two categories:

- 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.

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'm about to buy a Speed Queen TR7 washing machine. It feels great to buy a dumb appliance that's built to last and serviceable.

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.

tangentially related: I’ve been apartment hunting recently and it reminds me of a common occurrence for apartment reviews:

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…

Is this like Amazon where the reviewers are basically on a “get free stuff” list, and they are no longer selected once they leave a negative review?’

Can somebody explain "share of each sides opinions" as a statistic? Why am I solving a riddle to read an article?

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.

I would really love to know a reliable way to determine if a product is a reliable before buying.

The most useless review is the one where I am asked to review something on the day it is delivered.

Why is this news? Who didn't realize

> Most of what breaks shows up after the review is done

Here was me thinking this was about code ownership ;)

article is complete unreadable slop.

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.

owners who face reliability issues are more likely to post. This could be reverse "survivor bias."

This is just reverse survivorship bias.

Because reviewers don’t use things for long, while owners usually do. So reviewers generally tend to fixate on new features by default.

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.

Long term review content is always so good but it’s rare so it’s expensive and people skip to the conclusion.

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.

Never pay to be a new product tester

> .bs-consent__sheet { … }

Couldn't have said it better myself

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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.