• A reviewer must not make their reviews based on any monetary incentive.
    • This does not mean that reviewers may not be compensated – quite the opposite. I don’t mind reviewers that openly acknowledge that they are being paid for their work. But reviews must be reviews. Information cannot be tainted by money. This may be subjective in some instances, and debate will certainly follow… but I welcome it.
  • Reviewers MUST provide a basis by which they are providing their review
    • Pros and cons are bullshit. Let’s be honest. I can provide a pro and con for literally anything you throw at me. The true test of a product is its performance and the metrics that back it up – whether that is in hard data or in demonstration.
    • Money isn’t everything. Yes – we are all at different places in life. Yes, we all have more or less money to spend on something. But there is a fundamental misreading of the market in terms of what is important to consumers. Reviews wax poetic about the cost to performance of tools, but don’t quantify. Reviews forget that the human life expectancy is 80+ years and expect you to consume, consume, consume, until time immemorial without giving a single thought to whether a single product could last you as long or longer.
  • Quality = Longevity
    • Full stop.
    • Among other things…
    • The point of this stupid ‘salacious’ bullet is to say that we’ve gotten away from the buy-it-once, or buy-it-for-life mentality. We don’t consider longevity nearly as much as we should any more. I have tools, appliances, and even bed frames that are older than I am, but these wouldn’t be considered in today’s world. Why? Well they’re things that don’t require updating or matintence. They don’t have planned obsolescence as a key (internal) point for them. Again – I’m an avowed consumerist. I buy what makes my life better. But I want to know that what I buy damn well better last until I feel it should fail. If I feel I got my money’s worth, it’s worth it. And I trust the reviewers I vet to feel the same.