Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
siftery.com
Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#2It's always interesting to see what tools people are using, but to be honest I was a little disappointed that everything on the list is a well-established, already popular app. I was hoping to see more in the way of new and up-and-coming stuff. In other words, I don't gain anything if a website tells me GitHub, Slack, and Sketch are popular.
That said, I think the overall problem of productivity/business software discovery is one that will grow in the coming years as we see a shift away from traditional enterprise dev and sales and towards a more consumer-like model. And Siftery is smart to try to build buyer trust and own the buyer side of the equation. We may well see a lead gen industry emerge in b2b software that looks a lot like the lead gen industry for consumer products like, say credit cards.
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#3From the "how does this work"
> How do products trend? What causes a product to trend? Products are ranked based on the number of users who have recommended the product in the past month (we’re using a rolling 30 days).
Ok so this isn't trending, it's popularity. Typically you want to normalize such that items with evergreen popularity get sifted out and you're left with items growing in popularity.
A marginally better approach might be to look at % of like growth month over month, with some floor of likes so that going from 1 to 100 likes doesn't dominate. This isn't perfect but it should kick google drive, Dropbox, and git out of the list.
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#4It's always interesting to see what tools people are using, but to be honest I was a little disappointed that everything on the list is a well-established, already popular app. I was hoping to see more in the way of new and up-and-coming stuff. In other words, I don't gain anything if a website tells me GitHub, Slack, and Sketch are popular. That said, I think the overall problem of productivity/business software dis…
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Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#5It's always interesting to see what tools people are using, but to be honest I was a little disappointed that everything on the list is a well-established, already popular app. I was hoping to see more in the way of new and up-and-coming stuff. In other words, I don't gain anything if a website tells me GitHub, Slack, and Sketch are popular. That said, I think the overall problem of productivity/business software dis…
Interesting thoughts! We're definitely trying to strike a balance between reliability and short-term popularity. One of the ways we're trying to solve is by every day pushing up "wildcard" products that are getting traction.
Another of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer products will surface.
This effect might become more noticeable with some filters (e.g. recommendations only from YC companies).
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#6I like the idea of a social network of businesses first, individuals second.
The problem in this space (usually encountered when typing "Quickbooks Reviews" or "Quickbooks vs Xero") is the results do not feel trustworthy, mainly because there is no provenance of the reviewer. It feels like the reviews can be bought.
If you can build a high quality review and dataset, that answers detailed questions about the product in an objective fashion, that would be very useful.
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#7It's always interesting to see what tools people are using, but to be honest I was a little disappointed that everything on the list is a well-established, already popular app. I was hoping to see more in the way of new and up-and-coming stuff. In other words, I don't gain anything if a website tells me GitHub, Slack, and Sketch are popular. That said, I think the overall problem of productivity/business software dis…
Interesting thoughts! We're definitely trying to strike a balance between reliability and short-term popularity. One of the ways we're trying to solve is by every day pushing up "wildcard" products that are getting traction. Another of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer produ…
IMO you need two lists: "Popular Lately" which is what this list is now, and ALSO "Trending" which is sorted by some measure of recent growth.
That way up and coming stuff doesn't have to dethrone github/slack/etc in order to get seen.
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#8I like the idea of a social network of businesses first, individuals second. The problem in this space (usually encountered when typing "Quickbooks Reviews" or "Quickbooks vs Xero") is the results do not feel trustworthy, mainly because there is no provenance of the reviewer. It feels like the reviews can be bought. If you can build a high quality review and dataset, that answers detailed questions about the product…
Yeah, most reviews in top software review sites may be incentivized (e.g. with an Amazon gift card). Siftery's approach is to be as data driven as we can, while focusing on verified business users and what products they use and recommend at their workplace.
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#9From the "how does this work" > How do products trend? What causes a product to trend? Products are ranked based on the number of users who have recommended the product in the past month (we’re using a rolling 30 days). Ok so this isn't trending, it's popularity. Typically you want to normalize such that items with evergreen popularity get sifted out and you're left with items growing in popularity. A marginally bett…
We're looking into ways to improve the ranking, so thanks for sharing that teej. We actually started with a normalized and more complex algo that was more along the lines of what you suggest, but the resulting feed had mostly random products and was not very helpful for more casual users. It also made it difficult to understand why a product was ranked. I think you're right that as it stands, we can do more to surface younger products. So far, we're doing it manually with "wildcards".
I mentioned in another comment that one of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer products will surface.
e.g., if we did a filter of recommendations by YC companies (or more extreme - YC founders), then something like Slack would be popular the first month, but then have few remaining votes. Thoughts?
Re: Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting thoughts! We're definitely trying to strike a balance between reliability and short-term popularity. One of the ways we're trying to solve is by every day pushing up "wildcard" products that are getting traction. Another of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer produ…
IMO you need two lists: "Popular Lately" which is what this list is now, and ALSO "Trending" which is sorted by some measure of recent growth. That way up and coming stuff doesn't have to dethrone github/slack/etc in order to get seen.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Adding additional filters is fairly easy, but I think we decided against it thinking that "no one" would find them or be interested.
Maybe we're wrong about that (there seems to be demand here, and HN seems to be doing just fine with multiple feeds/filters).