F* Sponsored Web

I spent three hours last weekend trying to figure out if a pair of earbuds was worth buying. Not three hours of enjoyable research. Three hours of wading through a swamp of sponsored content disguised as real reviews. I wanted the Huawei FreeClip 2. They have an OWS design, which means they sit on the outer ear and do not seal the canal. I like this concept because I can wear them for calls and still hear my kid or the doorbell or whatever is happening in the room. I also was prepared to sacrifice some sound quality given the nature of the design. I just wanted to know about the microphone quality, whether the Bluetooth connection was stable, and how they performed in real-world scenarios. YouTube was useless, and I was kind of expecting that. I watched a couple of review videos. All of them had the same script. They started with the same unboxing sequence, the same “the company sent me this unit, so I could make my unbiased review” shit, the same “oh, this is the best earbud I have…