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

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

#211

Post by noxToken »

driverdan wrote: post #112

I like the concept but since it's open to the public it will suffer from ignorance. For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they're good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too. The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that ha…

Another thing is product revisions. Version 1 might be an actual BIFL product. Version 2 might have a small yet significant revision impacting quality. Even process revisions like offloading part of the manufacturing process or a different part supplier can impact the longevity of a product.

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

#212

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

Excited to see this!

Comment: looking at the Lodge Skillet, I can easily see how this is not going to scale well for products with many, many reviews. The page is already cluttered and hard to navigate with just a few dozen comments. Do you have a plan to collapse the UI into something more of a summary that can be expanded?

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

#215

Post by lilbuilds »

This is super useful. I've definitely spent countless hours trying to research answers to the question "What is the longest lasting x to buy?" because it seems like any other shopping strategy tends to fill my life with garbage that constantly needs replaced.

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

#216

Post by skratlo »

donmcronald wrote: post #192
dumbfounder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> because you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products outdoorgearlab.com looks like a professional review site to me in the context of being an affiliate marketing / review site. IMHO almost all reviews online are affiliate marketing these days, so what I'd really be interested in is a site that hosts reviews and doesn't allow _any_ affiliate marketing or external links. IE: No incentive to game the…

outdoorgearlab.com ? you must be kidding me, in their reviews, they leave out ~50% of competition, and their sorting of best product in category is apparently a bidding game, shifted just right to make the results believable. I do spent lots of time on researching outdoor products for my own needs, and outdoorgearlab.com is a joke

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

#217

Post by jaclaz »

mauvehaus wrote: post #174
jaclaz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage. Yes, in order to re-start, but what then? The whole user reviews concept is bonkers, I would add that there are - besides "fake" reviews - "real" ones BUT written by clueless people (in good faith, but completely disconnected from an objective rating), and in this it is also way off the…

My "favorite" useless review is the "I just got it and unboxed it. I haven't used it yet, but I know it's going to be good!" five star review. How I hate those.

>How I hate those.

Exactly, and rightly so.

But as well the "negative" ones like (I swear I have seen more than one of these) "The item arrived but it is a darker yellow than what seen in the pictures on the site." which may have some meaning if you order - say - a scarf to match a coat (but you'd better go to a shop with the coat and find a matching colour scarf) but doesn't really apply to - still say - a chainsaw or a power tool.

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

#218

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

driverdan wrote: post #112

I like the concept but since it's open to the public it will suffer from ignorance. For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they're good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too. The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that ha…

Funny you call out the Fibrox. I don't think full-tang is a prerequisite for BIFL. Why? Because I have my grandmother's kitchen knife from Ireland from the 1910's and it isn't full tang and is still a workhorse despite having the handle replaced sometime in the 70's.

So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?

For this existential dilemma, it would be helpful if the top DIMENSIONS of quality were explored. In this case with a knife: tang, bolster, handle material, riveting, metal type, hardness, grind angle, etc are all variables that have either a PREFERENCE scale or a DURABILITY scale. I don't think a simple NoSQL-comment-style database is sufficient to define what elements need to be considered to rank a product as high quality vs. low quality.

You must know about AvE's YouTube channel, yes? He's an engineer who deeply understands metallurgy and machining and industrial design, so he can explore these vectors of quality for power tools:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA

This kind of professional analysis is needed FIRST, to determine what the key metrics are. Then the rating system should grade based on this, rather than 5-stars.

Five star reviews are dead. Long live multiple variables!

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

#219

Post by quacked »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #198
quacked wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your input about adding affiliate links, because I think that they would end up working contrary to the goal of this project. Sellers constantly reuse listings to sell updated versions of their products, with variable results. This is a huge issue with Amazon listings. OP lets you add an affiliate link to order Graeter's ice cream. There's 20 years of 5-star aggregate reviews and a link to go buy it,…

> If one is designing for a lasting product review, the information needs to be snapshotted at a certain point in time- ie "In 2020, this part number from this company was constructed well." Modern listings may reflect the 2020+ product, rather than the 2020 construction that got the good reviews. In theory, that’s what the dates next to Amazon/App Store reviews are for. The problem with making them immutable though…

> In theory, that’s what the dates next to Amazon/App Store reviews are for.

There's no way to chart the average review score over time, though, is there? If people saw several years of 4.5-averaged scores and then a sudden drop to 3-average, that would tip them off, but looking at dates next to individual reviews doesn't help because any single review by itself varies wildly with the knowledge and opinion of the reviewer.

As for immutable reviews- that's a good point, although it seems like you could get around that by leaving reviews editable through at least the listed warranty period of the item. Or add a separate set of reviews that only become active after a certain period of time after you left your first review, but now we're getting into anal-retentive nerd territory that no average user is incentivized to venture into. ("Why, of course I'd like to log back on to a review site I used once six years ago and talk about how my washing machine is functioning!")

Edit: Actually, the type of person who would seek out and help populate a "reliability rating site" might be the type of person who would respond with details to a six-year-later email that asks for commentary on a product, especially if you can enter the review straight from an email reply.

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

#220

Post by restingrobot »

racl101 wrote: post #123

Cool idea. Really cool. Quick suggestion: the search could maybe return a results not found message when it can't find anything instead of doing nothing. Otherwise people may think it's broken.

I think the search is actually broken, I can't get it to retun anything, Chrome on Mac.
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