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

buyforlifeproducts.com

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

#351

Post by Polylactic_acid »

ryandrake wrote: post #109
julius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea. Thanks for making that site. I am an asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 5 star review from Amazon, using a fake account. Do you have a plan to stop brands from doing this to you?

I think the ship has sailed on the trustworthiness of online reviews from rando people. Pretty much every store or review site that aggregates user-submitted content has done a poor job of removing spam and fake reviews, and people are finally starting to realize how worthless the ratings are. Even if someone does crack this nut and figures it out, they won't be believed because of how fake everything has been for th…

I have found that the best method is to just add "reddit" to my search of the product name. While it is most certainly gamed, you still see mostly real content as well as descriptions and pictures of issues.

Seeing 4 posts with pictures of the same failure on reddit is a pretty good sign the product has a problem.

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

#352

Post by Polylactic_acid »

rconti wrote: post #122
rileyteige wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> average cost per month of ownership Speaking strictly to that, I cannot agree more. This is exactly how I look at purchases, especially larger ones. I'm sure many others think the same way.

Probably the first time this occurred to me was when I bought my first wireless headphones (bose qc35, FWIW). It hit me like a ton of bricks that I wasn't buying them, I was renting them: * They will not last forever. Batteries die, wireless specifications change; some day I may buy a phone that uses GreenTooth instead of BlueTooth. * In the event that I like this new (to me) product category (I had never owned noise…

I always find the monthly cost hits me hard. Its weird to think that buying something is going to cost me $20/month when I would instantly reject subscribing to a $20/month service normally.

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

#353

Post by Polylactic_acid »

citrusybread wrote: post #224
acd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea! List of more durable items: Stainless steel frying pan instead of nonstick frying pans where the non stick coating wears off. Cast iron even better. Plain bicycle without electric parts easier to recycle metal. Durable quality Screens drivers. Non electric espresso maker. Bailetto. Corded headphones no batteries that wear out. Changable parts. No wireless protocol that go obsolete. LifePo4 lithium iron ba…

>Stainless steel frying pan instead of nonstick frying pans where the non stick coating wears off. Cast iron even better. that's misleading if not outright wrong. the counterpart to nonstick is not cast iron or stainless steel -- it's carbon steel. carbon steel pans compare well to nonstick when seasoned (good woks are still carbon steel, and you can still find good carbon steel skillet pans, just not by lodge).

Which pans would you recommend? I have found non stick ones to be garbage because the coating gets scratched. I have a SS pan but its super sticky even with oil. My cast iron one works well and is fairly non stick but a pain to clean.

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

#354

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

herpderperator wrote: post #348

Just curious: I can't seem to figure out where the data used on this site is coming from. Is it hardcoded in the app and encoded differently? I can't see an API being used that references any of the products. When I refresh, it seems the data loads at the exact same time as the app which makes me think the data is hardcoded somewhere. Example: There is a product with the word Dungarees in it, but I can't find any ref…

It appears that the data is coming from a Firestore database, due to the request to https://firestore.googleapis.com

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

#356

Post by verroq »

gleenn wrote: post #346
julius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea. Thanks for making that site. I am an asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 5 star review from Amazon, using a fake account. Do you have a plan to stop brands from doing this to you?

How about, for someone to post a review, you have to take a picture of yourself with the product. But before you take the picture, you get randomly assigned a number. You must post a picture with that number in the photo. Then either do magic machine learning to check, or have a review process. Better, have it be manual. Get more people in the process, not less. I think this is an awesome idea, which would be complet…

How does this prevent shill reviews?

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

#357

Post by l0b0 »

Some issues after using for a few minutes:

- Registration via Google, even for a non-Google email address. I really don't want any third parties scooping up my address.

- The price should have a currency associated with it. You might not do much with it right now, but you could for example integrate with a third party to convert 1995 Yen to 2020 US dollars, allowing anyone to see the price in their preferred currency at this time. Country of purchase would also be useful in this case, since prices can vary a lot across markets and this would enable at least rough translation based on known ratios between countries for different product categories.

- The weight unit should be an enum, not a string. That way it'll be trivial for you to convert to the user's preferred unit (kg for something like 95% of the world).

- Searching for "backpack" returned no results, which is weird.

- It would be useful to have some help text for the BIFL score, to have a slight chance of people rating using similar criteria. I'm not sure the BIFL score is even going to be very useful; maybe it would be better to generate it based on how long people have had the item and its condition at submission time.

- The front page without any filters applied shows 43 products. After switching to brands it shows 157 results. Are there really more brands than products?

On a more general note, if the data is supposed to be community driven it might make sense to also make meta-reviews community driven, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.

All that said, thank you for building this! I desperately want a site like this, focusing on reliability ahead of cost, packaging, and design.

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

#358

Post by cptaj »

dumbfounder wrote: post #50
hubraumhugo wrote: post #2

A few months ago, I began developing the Buy For Life platform. It started as a simple list where people could add brands that manufacture durable products. It now evolved into a full platform with aggregated product reviews from all over the web, discussions, and various metrics to calculate a score for each brand and product. I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It s…

I don't think the comparison to Rotten Tomatoes makes sense because you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products. To me it is just another product review site tackling a niche. But the idea of tracking cost per month is very intriguing (a measure of TCO, which you may want to tackle as well, because for some products that may include electricity usage, upkeep, etc). I think it is something that can t…

Another thought is comparing its durability with just buying more of a cheaper version.

If I have a 500 shoe, does it last the same as 5 similar shoes in a row?

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

#359

Post by _tom_ »

TT3351 wrote: post #234
0xffff2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Positive reviews are noise for me on any product. For products I don't care enough about to do independent research, I evaluate them exclusively by reading 1 and 2 star reviews, ignoring the additional noise of "the product didn't ship on time" type reviews, and deciding if the specific complaints made in the rest are things I care about.

Are you open to the possibility of competing brands bombarding decent products with negative reviews? FWIW, almost every [negative, because I'm trying to warn others about wasting money] Amazon review I leave is removed for arbitrary reasons set out by Amazon. They seem uninterested in contributions like "this mouse was $30 not 6 months ago, and the current $90 price tag is unconscionable. [LG G602 mouse]" The few ti…

Amazon is correctly removing your reviews, because neither of your examples are things that belong in product reviews.

Do not leave price related reviews. The prices change daily. You may leave a bad review because you think the price is too high. Tomorrow the mouse may cost $10, but your one star review is still there ten years later.

Shipping problems do not belong in product reviews. The listing is for a PRODUCT, shared by any number of amazon sellers. Amazon provides seller reviews to comment on seller's shipping problems. (If you are leaving these as seller reviews, then I apologize for assuming, and you are correct)

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