If I’m getting into a new hobby or something and am suspicious about the listings I’m seeing on Amazon or Etsy or wherever, I check Temu. If the same thing I’m seeing on one of those sites is on Temu, it confirms that it’s just cheap Chinese stuff with an high markup and I move on to a different seller/maker of the product.

I like to hit Amazon before I look anywhere else since there will be a lot of the knockoff products and I can get in my head what they look like before looking elsewhere for the real deal. If I go to a different site and they have one of the Amazon/Temu products I’ve seen, I leave that site and find another.

One thing I do is read 3 star reviews. Generally, five star reviews are bots/shills or just people trying to affirm a bad decision; One star reviews are people that had shipping problems or didn’t understand what they were buying. Three star reviews tend to be people that actually bought the thing, and are capable of rational thought.

Yet another reason to be skeptical of reviews is that they are heavily weighed towards first impressions. So if someone gets a product and it works great, they might go and immediately leave a glowing review for it. But if it breaks 6 months later due to poor manufacturing quality, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and update their review.

Just ask the AI what you should buy and buy the opposite of that. /s

Flir makes one that connects to your phone to use as a screen. Worked well for me to look for leaks in my insulation.

Buy with a credit or debit card that has purchase proetection: If it’s a scam, issue a chargeback.

One of the better ways to avoid scams is to try and filter out the companies that have the bigger marketing budgets. Some companies live off advertising a passable product at a premium. Harder? Definitely. My recomendation is you find someone passionate on thermal imaging, after all, word of mouth is the only thing that a marketing budget can’t buy.

I look on reddit for basic discussion, but there are usually specific forums like HiFi forum, I am pretty sure there is a community for cameras as well. I compare stuff on geizhals.de, which is an independent comparison portal for the German region. Often I don’t but anything at all because the internet is so annoying. I don’t pay for Jeff Bezos’ wedding so Amazon is out of question.

For whatever thing you’re into, there are dedicated hobby communities for it. If you can find an old school forum, subreddit, Lemmy community for that specialised thing you’ll find people who genuinely want to recommend products for you, not because they want to get paid but because they’re passionate about it. That’s where you find honest reviews.

I sort the reviews by recent on the assumption that when these companies pay for fake reviews they sort of come all at once and the recent reviews will be humans who’re actually reviewing it since then.

I stick to known vendors, brands, and shipment agents.

Oftentimes, and I hate to say it, I look on reddit, for all the reasons you just described. I’m not saying it’s a perfect method, but these days I find myself looking on there for anything based around opinion - such as the quality of certain devices. It seems the fastest route to find opinions of real people. And besides with how pretentious most reddit users are, they have a tendency to OVER recommend (for example suggesting anything less then the best is dog water and shouldn’t even be considered, a rare benefit).

You just have to learn to see through the occasional bot post but it is usually pretty obvious, at least moreso then the endless crap on the, as you put it, hellscape.

Know good review sites

Rtings and Tom’s Hardware are usually all you need, but for niche things you need to branch out

I look for online stores with actual brick and mortar shops. Here in Finland they aren’t the cheapest, but I’ll also buy from German or other European stores depending on the item.

I just feel safer knowing there’s a shop somewhere I can return to.

I tend to avoid amazon in the first place.