I had a series of very good experiences with wirecutter from 2014-2017, where I bought their bike recommendation, their laptop recommendation, their desk recommendation and their headphone recommendations, all of which were really exceptionally excellent and made my life a lot better.
However in the last two years, basically everything I bought from wirecutter has turned out to be pretty mediocre. Their headphone recommendations are kinda OK but not great, their towel recommendation is pretty mediocre and lost tons of fabric for the first three times when I washed them (causing all my clothing that I washed them with to have lots of small towel-fibers all over them), their computer screen recommendations weren’t that good. Their product categories in a bunch of places no longer make sense to me, and something about the review practices has felt worse, but it is totally plausible that I am just imagining things.
Huh, I think the towel is pretty great, but I’m more sensitive to physical stimuli than you are. It did lose a certain amount of plushness in the first few washes, but even still, when I use towels other than that one now, I definitely notice that they’re much rougher.
Also (and I’m not putting this in a top-level answer because it doesn’t contain any info about pre- vs post-2016), their recommendation for large microwave has served us well, but the small microwave recommendation (as of when we were buying a microwave) had 3 Amazon reviews saying it literally caught on fire. This seems like a flaw of Wirecutter’s methodology—i.e., for a lot of products, they don’t actually test out long-term use.
I had a series of very good experiences with wirecutter from 2014-2017, where I bought their bike recommendation, their laptop recommendation, their desk recommendation and their headphone recommendations, all of which were really exceptionally excellent and made my life a lot better.
However in the last two years, basically everything I bought from wirecutter has turned out to be pretty mediocre. Their headphone recommendations are kinda OK but not great, their towel recommendation is pretty mediocre and lost tons of fabric for the first three times when I washed them (causing all my clothing that I washed them with to have lots of small towel-fibers all over them), their computer screen recommendations weren’t that good. Their product categories in a bunch of places no longer make sense to me, and something about the review practices has felt worse, but it is totally plausible that I am just imagining things.
Huh, I think the towel is pretty great, but I’m more sensitive to physical stimuli than you are. It did lose a certain amount of plushness in the first few washes, but even still, when I use towels other than that one now, I definitely notice that they’re much rougher.
Also (and I’m not putting this in a top-level answer because it doesn’t contain any info about pre- vs post-2016), their recommendation for large microwave has served us well, but the small microwave recommendation (as of when we were buying a microwave) had 3 Amazon reviews saying it literally caught on fire. This seems like a flaw of Wirecutter’s methodology—i.e., for a lot of products, they don’t actually test out long-term use.