Don't get me wrong, the internet is full of information, and I mean good quality information, which is unfortunately buried under a huge pile of dung. You need to get dirty to find a good piece of information.
Like the old guys are usually saying, "when I was young the world was better", I start to dream at the "golden era of internet information" and see the decay of quality in our days.
Of course, back then you had to put some work in having a website, not all idiots had the money to pay for a internet connection and when they did they searched for boobs anyways. There was less information but of somehow better quality.
Today is different, you find everything and nothing, thousands of idiot-proof website building software took care of this, social media raised "opinion leaders", YouTube raised "superstars", every huge company has a forum, then are other thousands of individual forums covering the same products / companies. There is at least a discussion board for each subject you could think of, there are hundred of thousands of search results for each question you could think to type on the search field of any given search engine. You could say that this is awesome, you do not need any specialists at all, just ask Google and you can get your answers. While partly this is true, at the same time is so false, yes you get your answers but, man, you get so much junk answers as it becomes a hard job to go through all the answers and find the good one. And all of this is harder because you do not know the answer, that's why you ask / search.
I know that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and always the other ones stink, but it becomes everything a "knowledge" based on opinions. I have my opinion too, I use the easy to use blogger, I bash the others on my blog, but I keep it as a blog and not going to the direction of creating pseudo-scientific articles or post my vision of the future or do some perverse paid advertising. I have my opinion and advertise it to be taken with a pinch of salt.
My take on selecting the information:
1. Search for more than one source
Along motorcycles passion (I bashed here anyways the adventure scene, and I will continue to do it but not today) I also build stuff - guitars, arduino based gadgets, raspberry-pi thingies and other home made improvements. Well, from practice I know that there is always more than one way to do something so why stop at the first search result, look into others as well even if you are satisfied with the first answer, maybe is another way available, maybe fits better, maybe not but just look on the next one.
2. Using the brain power to understand different opinions
For example, if you search for which type of potentiometer (link to Wikipedia) to use in a guitar you end up nowhere if you do not use your brain too. One option is to use logarithmic potentiometers or linear ones. Historically the logarithmic ones are called audio tapers because the human hearing is logarithmic and not linear. From this point on you get people fighting which one is better and who is smarter and so on. But here is what I do ....
I get that our hearing is logarithmic if we think from a certain perspective, at the same time I also do notice a linear change in sound. And at least for me a small logarithmic pot depending on the application offers a more on/off effect, while the linear one offers a more linear feel.
Now you can mix and match depending on the application need and the information you gathered from the net. You need a very fine control go for linear, you need a signal that you can heavily modify at the extremities go for logarithmic. I use mainly linear for volume to get a finer overall control and logarithmic for the tone and sometimes linear at the tone, depending on the guitar I build.
3. Use common sense to filter junk
Especially when you search for some medical issues you end up with the stupidest answers although you find people swear by all gods that they do work or whatever. I know that there is some traditional healing science tested for thousands of years, which somehow died when the medicine became available for people. There are some "grandma treatments" who work sometimes better than medicine but... a lot of bullshit is flying around as "grandma knowledge" but it is not. More disturbing is that those people could hurt others by recommending crazy things.
The hardest stupidity I was reading is that you can completely change the color of your eyes. No shit!?!? Yes I know that depending on some stress factors, light and so on the eyes ca be a bit more clouded or change a bit the shade of your color .... but turning your eyes green from black .... hmmm. And the funny thing is that they recommended some stuff to take. Here is where the common sense should kick in!
Or cure cancer with some herb when you are in need of urgent surgery because is already too late ... use common sense.
4. Keep in mind that one man's garbage may be another man's gold / your realistic needs
Of course this does not mean you need to live out of the trash bin, and since we are talking internet is not possible anyways ... but ... if someone says that some device is garbage because bla bla maybe it fits my bill because I have different expectations.
Returning to my guitars example - is full of people who say that if is not finished with any nitro based laquer then is garbage. I would say maybe nitro is not available for the consumers in my country because is considered toxic, maybe I do not have the tools for nitro, maybe I just like the feel of other finish since I will hold the guitar in hand anyways. So what is for those guys garbage, is for me the tool to work with.
Now you find reviews and "vs." between all you can imagine that you want to compare. That graphic card vs the other graphic card and so on. I will touch the reviews subject later but now let's stick with the simple part of "x product is junk". I got an Marshall Code combo for my guitar, and for fun, although the internet was full of "oh is junk, I got whatever $2000 combo .... it sounds better" Duh ... you pay under $200 and you expect it to sound like a $2000 one?!?!? Are you a retard or what!?!?
Ok maybe some products which are in hype costs too much - like iPhones, the real price is way smaller, and now everyone who tries to get to the status of quality ups the prices, as long as there are idiots who will pay that 1000 for a damn phone.... but let's return to the Marshall example.
At the beginning I was amazed by the YouTube videos and wanted to buy it on the spot, then I got scared from what I was reading on internet. At some point I was convinced it sucks and looked for other options, but they had the same awesome videos and shit comments.
So here is the mental list I made for the "garbage" that is Marshall Code:
Price - 177
Price of all emulated cabs, amps, effects - I presume is over 20.000 (more than 100 times the price of the Code)
Do I use it on a stage - No
Do I want to have a multitude of sounds with one device - Yes
Do I have space for many amps - No
Do I have the money to buy one of the emulated amps - No
Do I care if it sounds good - Yes but not expecting god like tones.
Do I have high expectations from a low end product - Not quite, but to keep a good value for money ratio
Where I use it - small apartment with a lot of neighbors.
After this small assessment I went for Marshall Code 25, Although I would have liked to feel a rockstar having the Code 100 or ... even better Code 100 Head plus a 4x12" sound cabinet behind me when I make noise. Even a Code 50 would have been an option like the lowest of them all, but I went for the 25.
This is not a review of Marshall code - maybe I will do one later, but I ended up having the garbage which became gold for my need. Is louder than I am allowed to disturb my neighbors, sounds a bit better because I can crank it up more than I could do with a 50 or 100, costed way less, gives me options to explore.
5. Watch out for paid reviews
How many products are declared to be the awesome thing that is missing from your house? How many of them are actually ending in the trash or just gather dust? How many you purchased because of that cool review but you can't seem to get the same quality.
Unfortunately there are so many paid reviewers out there that becomes harder and harder to point them out. I got the thing when I purchased the second generation of GoPro, all the reviews were like there is the one and only camera I would need and is missing from my gear. I purchased it ... I was disappointed. I mean I am able to do color grading and basic color correction, but man it was noisy, washed out, bad contrast and the list can continue. I mean it was overpriced for the quality it offered. Then I looked what do all those reviews had in common.... a certain type of weather and a certain type of landscape and way of filming. When you review a product you need to show also the bad parts not only the good ones, except if you do advertising. In this case, using the GoPro as a motorbike driver with different weather, with different colors, turned out to be not so good for the camera so I ended up using a Garmin Virb which was bashed on all forums by the hoards of GoPro followers, and was way better for the type of usage I needed.
6. Think "balance" when you read bad comments / reviews about a product
Usually when we have something which works as expected we do not "advertise" the product, only if a friends asks us about that specific product maybe we say a bit more than "is ok, I had no problems with it". And usually we tend to hang on the "problems" side, maybe because we learned to do so.
Now, imagine you buy a product from amazon, it does not work as expected, or even worse is a lemon and needs to be changed - you immediately give a bad rating. The product works as expected .... you forget about the rating. This is valid for any type of products, you find only "Ford Focus problems", "Audi q3 issues" or "X product improvements" type of comments, websites, forum topics.
I have never seen things like "Ford Focus Strong points" and even when is a reliability topic is still on "how reliable and when/what should I expect to fail" way of seeing things.
So, for each issue out there there are other happy users who did not had it and maybe will never have that issue, but will get another one about which will complain.
7. Keep an open mind
Even if you do a thing in a certain way there is someone who does it a bit different with the same results. As long as we live we learn and is good to keep an open mind instead of becoming a Grinch and bash an all forums people who do a thing a bit different and/or have a different need than yours.
Keep in mind that there are always more paths to the same destination.
Well, this is a short excerpt of how I try to get the most out of an over saturated internet, from an ocean of ideas and opinions and to select what I consider is helpful for me.
Happy surfing!
