Yes, We Read the Comments

Here at Wirecutter, we believe in reading the comments (and tweets and emails and Facebook messages). We have a small Community team dedicated to listening to and advocating on behalf of readers who take the time to reach out and talk to us. Our reviewers also consider it part of their job to pay attention to the conversations you have about their work and the experiences you’ve had with products they recommend.

We try to read every message that comes in. It’s a lofty goal, and it’s not always achievable (the holiday season gets busy, and we do take vacations). But when you make an effort to post or email, we make an effort to read your words. We report urgent issues to reviewers, editors, and other staffers. We use a tool called Airtable to record and sort notable feedback that doesn’t require immediate action, and we revisit what we’ve recorded on a monthly basis, to monitor for concerning trends or red flags. Our two-person team can’t respond to every question, but we get back to as many people as we can. You’ll also see our reviewers and editors talking to readers in the comments and on social media. And we’re also Wirecutter’s moderators. As everyone on the internet knows, not all comments need to be seen. We actively moderate our on-site and social comments to keep conversations relevant and healthy.

But what exactly happens on our end when you post a comment, send an email, tweet at us, or reach out to us on Facebook or Instagram? Let’s take a look at some examples!

Review request

We often hear from readers who have requests and suggestions for new categories for us to cover. We can check to see what’s currently assigned or otherwise in the works by consulting Wirecutter’s Editorial Content Tracker, a massive Airtable database where everything we cover, have covered, or plan to cover is listed in detail, along with the current status of the project. Sometimes—as in the case of e-bikes—we already intend to cover something readers are asking about. (Unfortunately, though, our dreams of testing e-bikes have been delayed due to the pandemic. Someday!)

If we don’t find a direct match for a request in our Airtable searches, we’ll keep looking through our reviews on adjacent topics to see if anything else meets the same need. As all Wirecutter fans know, our guides tend to be long, dense documents that cover a lot of ground. We may not have a stand-alone review of nose hair trimmers, but a few quick searches will reveal that one of our recommended pubic hair trimmers has an attachment for trimming nose hair.

We may also check in with reviewers or editors who handle the larger product category to see whether we’ve ever discussed covering the topic in question. For example, a reader recently asked whether we’d consider reviewing headphones for sleeping. And as it turns out, that’s definitely something senior staff writer Lauren Dragan, our headphones expert, considered. But right now there’s only one real contender, in her opinion: the SleepPhones Effortless headphones. We share any information we turned up during our investigative process in our responses to readers, and then we log the original coverage request in our Community Tracker (the special Airtable base we use to keep track of reader questions and feedback). This lets us make notes of trends over time, and it also allows us to loop in editors when we’ve seen lots of accumulated interest in pizza slicers or garlic presses.

Feedback on a review

When we get useful feedback on one of our reviews, we start by logging that feedback in our Community Tracker. Although we can’t act on every reader request or critique right away, it’s beneficial to us to hear what readers found frustrating or helpful. We save the comments, tweets, and emails to share with reviewers and editors when it might help guide decision-making about what to focus on in a future update.

For example, our current review of hoses and hose reels doesn’t focus on pricier yet higher-quality hose reels, because we believed readers wouldn’t want to spend so much. But we did ask readers to let us know in the comments how they felt about our approach. So far, it appears that readers are willing to spend more for better reels, so we’ll keep that in mind for future updates.

Feedback on a pick

We also log your feedback on stuff we recommend. Even after initial testing, we continue to evaluate the long-term performance of our picks. We often uncover helpful information by doing this. And because it’s common for many of us at Wirecutter to buy our picks to use in our personal lives, we can learn a lot just from staff experiences. That said, we know our firsthand experiences represent a tiny sample size. For that reason, it’s especially meaningful for us to hear back from you about how our recommendations hold up under tough conditions or over the long haul.

However, sometimes readers bring us more time-sensitive concerns. In those cases, the Community team tags the reviewer and editor in our Slack channel—#communitysupport—to discuss those issues. Typically, we’ll discuss the situation, our plans for the review going forward, and our plan for responding to readers in the meantime.

When readers recently flagged an issue with the Skullcandy Evo Sesh earbuds, the Community team tagged in the reviewer, Lauren Dragan, to discuss the issue and make a plan. Lauren asked us to follow up with readers to get more details on how the earbuds failed, and she tagged in powering expert and senior editor Mark Smirniotis to consult. Editor Adrienne Maxwell made the call to pull the pick from our recommendations while we investigated, and she posted a red warning box at the top of the review. After consulting with Skullcandy—which told us the issue was confined to one bad batch and that it had pulled all faulty cases from the market—we reinstated the pick.

Advice for specific circumstances

We get a lot of delightfully specific questions about the best products to use under unique conditions. We’ve been asked about the best vacuums for cleaning small, delicate puppets and the best washing machines for living in remote fire lookout towers. Sometimes, interestingly enough, our reviews or blog posts already have the answers, and answering the reader is just a matter of remembering where we’ve talked about the subject before. The rest of the time, we’ll take the question to our #communitysupport channel in Slack and tag in the reviewer, as seen in the screenshot above—our home office expert, staff writer Melanie Pinola, offered some guidance on paper shredders for infrequent use in small spaces.

Tracking down the answers to questions like these is one of the major delights of being on the Community team, but it’s time-consuming. If we brought every reader question to the reviewers, they’d never be able to get anything else done. If we don’t have time to answer a reader’s question right away—or even if we just think it’s an interesting question that other people might also have—we’ll log it in our Community Tracker in case the question inspires an update to a review or a blog post of its own down the line.

We also encourage readers to post questions like these in the comments on our site—as opposed to emailing us—so that even if we’re not able to answer, other people can chime in with their suggestions and solutions.

Issues, errors, or corrections

When one of our buy buttons is pulling an incorrect price from a retailer’s website, or when we’re straight up wrong about something—like when a reader recently informed us that the Technivorm Moccamaster is Dutch, not Danish—the Community team is responsible for making sure that the issues readers report get to the right people. We use a form to report incorrect prices to our affiliate team, and we use another form to report easily verifiable mistakes or typos to the producers, who maintain all the content on our site. If an issue isn’t clear-cut, we’ll bring your words to the editor in #communitysupport; that person will decide how best to proceed.

Requests for an update

Many of the messages and comments we get are requests to look at new models. Especially when it comes to major releases or flagship phones, we’re pretty much always already on the case. In less high-profile categories, though, we’ll log reader requests and model suggestions in the Community Tracker, just in case they’re helpful when the reviewer or editor takes a look at the category and decides whether it’s time for an update.

Trends in reader requests can also help us decide what to cover in future updates; if we see lots of people asking about cheaper models, we then think there’s a larger insight to be gleaned from that. After analyzing trends in reader requests on our sunscreen coverage, our expert, staff writer Nancy Redd, tested 11 additional physical sunscreens for the most recent update.

Feedback on Wirecutter

We also log feedback on Wirecutter as a whole. The Community team keeps track of overarching “themes” in reader feedback, in addition to feedback on specific reviews. After logging something like this as feedback on our post about comparison tables, we also tag the entry with relevant themes: “process,” because of the suggestion to include comparison tables in reviews going forward, and “how we work,” because this comment is a good reminder that our readers want us to show our work, data nerd to data nerd. We tagged other comments on this topic with “trust,” since some readers said these insights help build confidence in our recommendations.

Later, when the Community team analyzes what we’ve been hearing from readers to share takeaways with other teams, sorting by theme allows us to share your words with the staffers who need to hear them, at the right times.

We don’t simply log the praise, though—we’re just as interested in hearing about how we’ve let you down as we are in hearing about what we’re getting right. We believe in making changes to improve over time, and just as we’ll update our reviews when we learn more, we’ll change our site and our approach over time based on what we hear from you. You’ve all been clear about how much you value transparency, so we’ve made it one of our missions this year to share more information on how we work—which is one of the reasons we wrote this post!

Site feature request

We also keep track of your feedback on the usability and design of our site. Such suggestions are relevant to several teams: our designers, our product managers, our engineers, our managing edit team (which keeps all the figurative trains running on time), and our editorial team at large. When conversations about design or functionality changes happen, we’ve got a cache of your feedback and requests ready to share and discuss. Changes to our site’s features usually take a long time to implement, but paying attention to your requests helps us develop and refine our plans.