Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

buyforlifeproducts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 413 posts

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

#241

Post by floatrock »

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…

Op can't avoid this problem if following the reviews-masquerading-as-affiliate-marketing pattern.

What's needed is to turn it all upside down: rather than reviewing new products, review broken products.

Make a site about how things break -- review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that haven't broken, and look at why they haven't.

Repairability also comes to mind. Everything breaks eventually -- can't cheat entropy -- but when it does, can you easily repair it? Right-to-repair movement would get in on the action.

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

#243

Post by Cd00d »

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…

Well, you're not actually reviewing the product. Sure, I wouldn't mind a time series of the price history of an item esp in cases with large jumps. But, generally the point of reviews is to tell me about the product. I can do my own evaluation of what I am willing to pay.

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

#244

Post by hubraumhugo »

masukomi wrote: post #40
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…

attempted to add an item. Here's my thoughts: first, adding an item is a LOT of labor to enter data that's freely available from amazon's APIs for most products you're going to encounter. not only would this be _much_ easier if you just allowed me to paste in an amazon link, or name that you searched for on amazon, you could also easily generate affiliate links and make money. I used _my_ affiliate link for the produ…

Super valuable feedback, thank you! I will definitely work on all the things you mentioned to make the submission-process way more intuitive and frictionless.

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

#245

Post by canada_dry »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #210
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…

How is your platform going to weed out the people who spent big bucks on some upper middle class targeted products and then double down, reality be damned, on their sunk cost saying it's the best stuff ever? That seems to be the fate that has befallen the various other "quality products" forums, subreddits, etc.

On review/discussion sites I find it very useful to know how new an account is, how many posts they've made, and a score (up/down votes) on their previous posts.

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

#246

Post by hubraumhugo »

gravypod wrote: post #183
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…

Is there a way to add an item as "I don't own this buy I want to know if anyone does"? I'm thinking of buying a https://www.terrakaffe.com/product/tk-01-b/ but I don't know how actually good it is and I can't find it on your site. I'd probably also be willing to put up ~$5 dollars to have someone check out the product. I'm not sure if you could turn that into an effective compensation model for reviewers.

Interesting idea, just added this idea/feature to my backlog :)

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

#247

Post by hiidrew »

Love the site but I feel like this could be exploited the same way as Amazon reviews, e.g. paying people in fivrr to 5-star review your shitty product.

Wondering if there's anything we could do to fix this relationship or if community submitted reviews are broken in general.

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

#248

Post by hubraumhugo »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #210
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…

How is your platform going to weed out the people who spent big bucks on some upper middle class targeted products and then double down, reality be damned, on their sunk cost saying it's the best stuff ever? That seems to be the fate that has befallen the various other "quality products" forums, subreddits, etc.

I introduced a credibility system for every user, similar to Reddit's karma so people can see how trustworthy the user is in the Buy For Life community. I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.

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

#249

Post by ryanSrich »

dymax78 wrote: post #206
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…

"BIFL" footwear; genuinely curious, does such a product even exist?

You could certainly buy Danner's for life. https://www.danner.com/boot-recrafting

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

#250

Post by kritiko »

mr_luc wrote: post #204
Frost1x wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage trustworthiness? This is an issue I've been thinking about for quite some time and haven't found a satisfactory solution to. I like this idea and a lot of similar information sharing sites but I find in today's environment, anything successful will be targeted by misinformation and gamed which makes it difficult to determine if the information was provided in an uninfluenfed manner from the product…

Consumer Reports can be really useful. I've found them to be great for getting up to speed on quality of products like snow blowers, some kinds of cars, etc. Their model seems like the only way to provide a service that good, outside of embedding with a community of enthusiasts enough to make yourself an expert consumer. I wish there was some way to provide their service for free, but I don't think we should discount…

I think even the CR model has drawbacks - users on this thread talk about degradation of product quality from a manufacturer over time. It's hard to imagine that even a CR model could handle that. Their comparisons are a snapshot.

I still turn to Wirecutter or Outdoor Gear Lab first when I'm trying to understand the landscape and feature set of major purchases because you're right, that's the only way to make a broad comparison.

Amazon does sponsor several review sites via their Onsite Associates program[1]. The bigger challenge for me with buying BIFL from Amazon is that they seem to have real problems with counterfeit goods[2]

1 - https://digiday.com/media/revel-keeping-messy-amazons-onsite... 2 - https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-f...

Post reply on HN