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Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

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Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#21

Post by thousandflowers »

Really nice project!

It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.

Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.

Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#24

Post by tavavex »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #9
worik wrote: post #3

This is good work. Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise

There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations. The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.

> There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.

I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#25

Post by NortySpock »

eikenberry wrote: post #10
LPisGood wrote: post #8

I wonder of there is a version of this but for jobs?

+100... I'd love to find a spot at a tech co-op but they seem as common as a hen's tooth.

You can work in the technology department of a non-tech company.

I am enjoying being a part of an employee-owned company so far.

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#26

Post by abrookewood »

IESAI_ski wrote: post #2

I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable. 22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me. There's also a section for finding…

Hey, this is pretty cool and very fast. So there is no database? How do you handle the scraping etc? Do the businesses know you are doing this?

One thought, it might be good to list all of the products together,rather than only being able to view them by each business. Nice job :)

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#27

Post by rafram »

The search field loses keypresses on mobile. I haven’t looked at the code, but I’m assuming it uses a React-style value binding but has some synchronous processing before it propagates the new field value back into the state variable. That is a really terrible pattern.

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#28

Post by robot_jesus »

Neat project and I love the motivations behind it.

A few friendly recommendations:

• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality

• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails

• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me

• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.

Keep up the good work!

Re: Show HN: Searchable directory of 22k+ products from worker-owned co-ops

#30

Post by eikenberry »

NortySpock wrote: post #25
eikenberry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+100... I'd love to find a spot at a tech co-op but they seem as common as a hen's tooth.

You can work in the technology department of a non-tech company. I am enjoying being a part of an employee-owned company so far.

That could be just as good but it has the same problem... how to find these jobs.
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