[Google Pixel 4 XL Questions & Answers] Dusty Rhodes:
I'm going to vent a little bit...

I'm an older guy (48) and I've been doing tech and gadgets for over 20 years now. I love this site and have participated on and off for many years. There is a problem growing online and it is only going to get worse. The system here isn't equipped to counter a growing troll problem, so we all fall prey to the effects. Every aspect of the online consumer space is being manipulated by "troll farms" and it is obliterating the signal-to-noise ratio in everything from entertainment to personal devices. Across the board, every device is eventually portrayed to have some fatal flaw rendering it inferior. When in actuality, it can adequately perform the primary task and may only fall short in a single aspect depending on a very specific need that varies individually by consumer.

I used to participate here rather frequently, then I began to only stop by during a device's release to gauge anticipations and thoughts. Every year the noise has increased. Not just here though, almost every forum beyond a certain size has the same issue. Online sources and articles are not immune and are populated with extremely vocal "detractors" in the comment sections, they rally with a frequency and voracity that no ordinary working person could maintain. The methods used by professional trolls is complex, and unfortunately, PROFITABLE.

Without giving too much personal information, my wife WAS a partner in one of the largest PR firms in the U.S., and I can tell you that troll farms and bogus self-cross-referring review sources are real. Her firm never participated, but they could see it coming and now there's an entire "dark" branch of marketing and PR that has arisen (some would say re-emerged) that essentially has the ethics model of the old cigarette industry with the agility of a modern digital campaign.

So if you're wrestling with specs, don't kill yourself searching for the ultimate device. You can do three things and I promise you'll be as happy as you can be.

If you really care about what you're going to buy ,to the point that it may cause a devastating case of buyer's remorse you should:

- First, make lists. Make a list of what's important, make a list of what specs make your tech-feels tingle, make a list of devices and start prioritizing and crossing off.

- Second, do a one afternoon search (not one second longer) of trusted reviews and ignore very tilted reviews.

- Third, and this is crazy... Go to a store, look at the physical functioning device and play with it.

This should be an extra separate step, but whatever, I'm not going back to edit...

- Buy what you want and be prepared to return it within 30 days and pay a restocking fee. Don't like the fee? Too bad, that's life... If you don't like something you may have to pay to return it, it's the world we live in.

This should be one more step too. Damn, I really messed up.

- Unless you are doing ongoing development NEVER revisit the topic of purchasing and specs. Go and enjoy your device and every once and a while keep up with updates and new features. There's a whole life to live out there, so don't waste your energy spec-gazing or griping with trolls.

Online communities are becoming less valuable to me every day because of the noise, it's unfortunate.