Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

Maybe rating by brand would be better. Harbor Freight is known for high variance. If they added a “no really, not destined for a landfill” brand line that was 99% unbreakable, then that would bubble up to the top.

The problem with trusting brands is that manufacturers (like whirlpool and frigidaire) intentionally rotate which of their sub brands is garbage every few years to prevent people from avoiding planned obsolescence.

Better then, to go off of manufacturers / holding companies / design houses, but that varies by industry. (In computing, counting all the name brand computer companies as design houses would make sense. But then, what about ikea appliances? They’re mostly rebranded whirlpools...)

The other problem is that internal politics can tear down a reliable brand in less time than it takes their old stuff to fail. Various shoe brands in the late 90’s come to mind. They went from reliably lasting years to lasting 6 months (there was a trend where the hiking or leather tongue bottoms were replaced by tennis shoe style material).

If I could actually know "durability" before buying something I would love that info. It's just hard to really know that in advance, because products change so much. E.g., my vacuum cleaner is still working fine after 15 years. Great, but that just says that if you bought one of these vacuums 15 years ago it probably would have been a good idea. But it doesn't actually tell you much about what to buy today, because the models and designs and manufacturing processes and quality control have all probably changed since then.

Nonetheless this site looks great for getting what info we can. Nice work and I'll be saving it.

Also see https://www.shitredditbuys.com/page/17

This is a new category of websites that are frontends for Reddit content. A year ago someone made a jobs website that compiled interviews with people in different occupations. All were from Reddit and uncredited.

I think a present-value calculation of the cost to buy+run+maintain would be a more accurate/useful metric (i.e. present value of cash flows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Net_present_valu...) - although perhaps it is too sophisticated to be done well in practice for a crowd-data-aggregation project like this. If something costs me $100 to buy, and $10 every year to maintain for 20 years, that is not the equivalent of costing me $300 dollars today - because most of those dollars are spent in the future and need to be discounted by inflation and opportunity-cost investment rates. So it might actually only have a net present value cost of $200 in today's dollars. Somehow you have to account for the time-value-of-money factor in order to properly combine the up-front cost with ongoing operation/maintenance costs.

It does not work on firefox with disabled ads, trackers etc. I got white screen without content.

I dont know if the reason is that site isn't compatible with firefox or some other "measure" but those are the urls that were blocked, if it helps you fixing it.

https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-154925745-1 (blocked by ublock origin)

https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.... (blocked by ublock origin)

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,500,6... (blocked by LocalCDN)

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&display=sw... (blocked by LocalCDN)

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cookie (blocked by LocalCDN)