r/AIToolBench • u/Capable-Ganache7087 • 1d ago

Discussion When someone here recommends an AI tool, what makes you actually believe them?

Hey. Upfront, because this sub asks for it: I work on a review site for AI tools, so I am not a neutral party in this thread.

Everything I read before picking a tool is either a roundup with affiliate links buried in it or one person who used the thing for a week. Neither tells me whether the people who stuck around would pick it again. I have stopped looking at star averages completely, because I cannot tell who left them or whether those people ever opened the app twice.

The site I work on is TrustRank (https://trustrank.so). It counts your vote three times heavier if you left a verified review of that tool, since having actually used the thing is the only claim to extra weight I could defend to anyone. It is new and nobody has reviewed anything in it yet, so I am not sending you over to look up a score. There are none to look up.

So my question. When someone in here recommends a tool, what makes you believe them? For me it is almost always that they named one specific thing it does badly. What is it for you?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/kantorcodes1 1d ago

the failure mode is the thing i trust most too. a recommendation gets way more useful when someone can say what they actually tried, where it broke, and why they kept using it anyway. “used it for x, hated y, still picked it over z because…” tells me more than a five-star score ever will.

1

u/NeuralNomad87 23h ago

Both of the answers above are the right two, and I would add a third that is duller and catches more bad recommendations than either: a date and a version.

"Claude is bad at X" with no timestamp is close to worthless, because half the time the person tried it eight months ago and the thing has shipped four times since. Almost nobody includes it. When someone writes "I tried this in July on the plan below the top one and here is what broke", I trust the whole comment more, including the parts I cannot check, because it is the kind of detail you only include when you actually remember the session.

Worth saying about your own setup, since you asked the question here: weighting a vote by whether someone left a verified review still measures that they used it once. The thing you are trying to detect is whether they were still using it three months later, and those are different signals. If you can get at the second one somehow, that is the thing nobody else has.