> Reviewers often have their issues really understanding how people use products, often because rapidly changing things to review, doesn’t allow them the time to truly use and understand a product.

The reviewer states:

    I’ve been using AirVisual Pros for the past five years.

so it's not like they're new to the field. They know what they want out of the product they're reviewing. That may not be what someone reading the review may be after, but that doesn't invalidate the review.

Achim from AirGradient here. Some thoughts on this.

Purely focusing on the display, I can see a certain logic to say: Display not working => Not recommended. And probably I chose the wrong title for this as it made the article too much focused on this aspect.

However, the main critique for me is actually the general subjective nature of the article and the lack of a systematic testing approach for the monitors. In my opinion this review should not to be called "The Best Indoor Monitors" if Wired has an intention to provide objective and a balanced assessment of indoor monitors.

Of course I am unhappy that our monitor got labelled as "Not Recommended", but the bigger picture to what extent these "Best ..." reviews do provide a fair and comprehensive assessment is in my opinion the much more important discussion that we should have.

That, and many reviewers are given the "here's 20 products, I need an article hitting these buzzwords in X Weeks" task.

You can't just do that and get in quality testing time with more than one or two products.

Reviewing things fairly and helpfully is hard and takes time, and especially as AI slop takes over writing (thankfully it looks like this article at least has a byline), I think it's going to be harder and harder to find actual useful human reviews to guide decisions.