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 should become the Rotten Tomatoes for products, almost like you check the trustworthy rating of a movie before you watch it, people could check a brand or product before they purchase it.
A metric I am working on is the average cost per month of ownership. That feels like a great metric that shifts consumer mindset - the longer you own something, the more you save. I still don't have enough data, so please submit your favourite product.
Let me know what you think!
PS: this project is completely non-commercial and entirely community-driven. It is still a work in progress, but I want to get feedback as early as possible.
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 truly differentiate, and can appeal to everyone, not just people that are concerned with reducing their environmental footprint.
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 product link because... why wouldn't I? except now that i look at the products i see there aren't any links? Why wouldn't you offer links to go buy these things, doubly so when you could profit from it AND make life easier for users without costing them anything.
obviously there needs to be a fallback mechanism to handle things that aren't sold on amazon.
you ask for a weight in kg or lb, thus suggesting a desire to cater to international audiences but then you don't have a currency for price.
"BIFL Score" is something i can guess but is never actually defined. Don't make users think.
when i submit it asks for an email address, but you already HAVE my email address from when i signed in. You could just make this a checkbox "do you want to be notified when we add this?"
Some products seem to have multiple categories but i could only select one. These seem conceptually like tags so i don't know why it's a pull-down instead of a multi-select or some other multiple choice thing.
I love this idea. I own a couple of items on the list now (Le Creuset Dutch Oven, and Kitchenaid Mixer) and I can attest to their durability.
I think your idea of cost per month is good for things you use often. One thing I've been thinking about lately as I've undertaken a medium-sized kitchen renovation is the cost of ownership of tools. Since I'm not a professional I can't take a cost per month approach since I may not use the tool for many months at a time.
Instead I've been thinking about two things:
1. How many hours of operation can I get out of this tool? If I amortize those hours over my lifetime, will I ever have to buy the tool again? In this case a mid-range tool may be an A+ for me, but a B- for a professional.
2. What is the lifetime of a battery-powered version of the tool? I'm avoiding battery-powered tools (with a few exceptions, I'm looking at you power drill) because I'm concerned the batteries will fail before the tool does.
My ideal situation is that I buy these items once and never need to replace them. As an amateur, I should be able to do that without buying the most expensive tool. As a professional, I probably already have preferences and a strong opinion anyway.
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.
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.
Actually, I don't think that durability is the primary driver of my shopping decisions.
I mean, I am a guy who still uses his 8 year old smartphone on a daily basis, so durability is relevant for me, but when I buy something, I want something good. So just because it is made of plastic and can be used for the next 350 years, doesn't mean I would enjoy using it for a single day.
Duration is just one aspect of a high quality product, but so is ease of use or overall functionality. High quality is what I want to buy. Nevertheless, I appreciate the undertaking to develop a platform that is not just about the price and has a higher goal in mind.
Maybe include any class action lawsuits, recalls issued, Etc.
Also don't let pissed off people derail product ratings because they are unhappy.
I'm thinking of a Wirecutter product research methodology and wiki below to list breakdown of materials, where they were sourced, changes in materials by manufacturer in later product updates, etc.
Let the users duke it out in the discussion section.
Basically avoid being Yelp and full of amateur reviews and people gaming the review system.
I would love for this to be an open source 'consumer affairs' product quality watchdog/authority. Too many times do manufacturers do a bait and switch where the first version has durable parts then subsequent versions are tweaked with cost cutting measures and you have inferior pieces that breakdown when they've captured a large market share of customers.
Unlike software, there is no 'what's new in this update' readme overview and you never really know if the manufacturer decided to cut corners by using a factory in Shenzhen that mass produces cheapo materials when they were previously made in a factory in middle America with a higher standard of quality, etc.
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.
I love the idea, but the site needs some more work. For example, on an iPhone with chrome I’m unable to actually search for anything (there is no “search” button on the keyboard on the search bar. I can enter text but it just sits there. Possibly incorrect annotations on the widget?).
Among the challenges for a site like this is the dimension of time. An outstanding brand one year can become a scourge five years later. But does the site's algorithm account for this?
I think a present-value calculation of the cost to buy+run+maintain would be a more accurate/useful metric (i.e. present value of cash flows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Net_present_valu...) - although perhaps it is too sophisticated to be done well in practice for a crowd-data-aggregation project like this. If something costs me $100 to buy, and $10 every year to maintain for 20 years, that is not the equivalent of costing me $300 dollars today - because most of those dollars are spent in the future and need to be discounted by inflation and opportunity-cost investment rates. So it might actually only have a net present value cost of $200 in today's dollars. Somehow you have to account for the time-value-of-money factor in order to properly combine the up-front cost with ongoing operation/maintenance costs.
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 batteries instead of lithium cobalt chemistry. Cobalt is a conflict mineral mining that puts out dangerous pollutants. Lifepo4 can take more recharge cycles than cobalt chemistry and are safer.
Reasoning is if the product last for life it’s more environmentally sustainable.
Cell phones are on the opposite end of the last for life spectrum.
This is awesome! I actually was tinkering with a community driven review aggregator for all things. Post a link to the product and your review.
2 issues I ran into were:
- "taking" product info from the links to be resilient to link breakage without breaking conditions of use
- moderation of user submitted content in order to prevent the bot/fake review issues on platforms like amazon
Seems like you only take the photo here? So that's a good mitigation of point #1. What about point #2? Curious to know if you have a good plan to deal with that :)
> this project is completely non-commercial and entirely community-driven.
Would you be open to pressing the content cc-by-sa? That would make me more interested in contributing reviews.
Also, I went looking for your terms of service (to see if they mentioned licensing already), and all I found was a link to some Google page, even when I clicked to sign in "by email".
Links to teardowns like AvE does and quantitative reviews like Project Farm does can help users evaluate by themselves. You could add editorial value by assigning your own metrics based upon those.
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 has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It's a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn't full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.
This is a common issue with "BIFL" discussions. People overrate something because they don't understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn't repairable, or they don't have experience with a higher quality item.
Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?
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.
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:
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!
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.
One of the most interesting things you can ask in a store with high-end clothing is "Which of your items are most likely to last a hundred years?" There's a special joy that arises between you and the shopkeeper as the veil of bullshit disappears and they tell you up front that 95% of the clothes they sell are disposable name-brand garbage made overseas, but THIS item, typically made of denim, or wool, or leather, has been made in the same place in the same way for a century, and they see customers come in wearing their 50-year old article regularly.
Of course it's much easier to buy this year's model of something hyped & shiny without thinking and then post on a site like this to prop up your ego and mislead everybody else. I'd venture to say that if something hasn't been in production for the length of a lifetime, there's no justification in labeling it as "Buy it for life"
Not sure if you're looking for site design suggestions but I would get rid of the "carousel" and instead have a grid of items below the fold so people can scroll for a brand they recognize.
The carousel is simultaneously too slow and too fast. The visitor has to sit and wait to see a brand they recognize, and then when they do, they only have a second to recognize and click.
Scroll works well on all modern devices and empowers the visitor. There's a reason so many landing pages are tall.
I've thought about building something like this for a while. There is definitely a need.
I've found a huge problem with products is that their quality changes over time. So, a product may be named the same but the SKU changes or the products from a couple of years back were much better made for whatever reason while the company has gutted them and continues to sell on reputation. I've wondered if there's a way to track product changes (user reported maybe?) between revisions of products on a wide scale. Can you convert the "years owned" to a purchase date somewhere? Are you tracking SKUs?
It does not work on firefox with disabled ads, trackers etc. I got white screen without content.
I dont know if the reason is that site isn't compatible with firefox or some other "measure" but those are the urls that were blocked, if it helps you fixing it.
I quite like this because we all need reliable reviews/ratings.
But, how do we deal with product model or component changes?
A couple examples:
"Earthquake" impact wrench from Harbor Freight. Purchased ten years ago, used a lot--for an amateur (maybe a couple thousand high torque automotive bolts, sunk some cement anchors). This product is currently sold by HF, but is much changed.
The site's example of Lodge cast iron. I cook on cast iron 90% of the time and my older lodge pan is much better than a newish one. The newer one has a more coarse surface, is strangely lighter.
Cool project. How do you intend to keep ratings aligned with durability rather than “I bought this a few weeks ago and really like it so I’ll give it 5 stars!”?
I'm in support of things like this, but I also feel like maximizing durability is too simplistic.
When I'm looking to purchase something, the concerns are usually something like.
1. Minimizing the shared cost of throwing the thing away.
2. Maximizing durability.
3. Maximizing the actual efficacy of the thing.
4. Maximizing worker benefit - economical and political.
5. Minimizing animal suffering.
Not everyone is going to have the same mix of goals or order of goals and many have just one overriding goal: Minimizing up-front consumer cost.
So, for example, a "smart-fiber" shirt might be far more durable than a 100% cotton shirt, the throw-away cost is much higher so I'll pass. I'm not saying your site should account for this, but things are complicated, especially among conscious consumers which is an increasingly niche market anyway due to both preference and circumstance.
Edit: Oh I should also add somewhere in there
#. Maximizing ease of repair/cleaning.
eg. MacBook vs. Pinebook or Carpet vs. Hardwood etc.
This is probably on your TODO list, but I wanted to make sure you were aware in case it isn't.
Your terms of service and privacy policy are:
a) Not linked to anywhere except the login screen in very small text. Seems to be part of Google sign in?
b) Clicking them goes nowhere. I suspect you setup Google login and didn't provide links to a terms / privacy screen.
If you're going to be collecting logins (maybe all you store is an email address?) you should probably throw something basic together. Kind of surprised Google doesn't require it when using their sign in.
I personally won't login / enter information on any website without knowing their terms of use and privacy policy.
Great idea. I just left a review. Was asked to register after reviewing. I registered and was brought back to the product page with no review on the page.
I expected the review to be posted. If it's in a moderation queue I'd expect to see a message indicating that's the case. And if the review didn't get saved I probably wouldn't leave another one.
Late to this but I've owned 2 Leatherman Waves and will continue to own them as long as they are produced.
I've lost one, and the second purchase included having the tool replaced for free after 5 years when I'd ruined most of the features due to hard use. This was a mix of 'professional' and hobby use.
This brings to mind some considerations for you:
1. Professional tier tools are often much hardier than consumer, and often a pro tool would last a lifetime for a consumer user, but only a few cycles professionally
2. Warranty and replacement is very important here. Example is Osprey who _had_ an incredible no questions replacement, but they've changed it while keeping the "all-mighty-guarantee" name.
Elements to consider. I'll try add a Leatherman review.
The trouble with finding BIFL products is that by the time it is old enough to know that it is BIFL, the product has been severely cost reduced and if you bought a new one it would no longer be BIFL. Sigh.
Looks great! I've been looking for something like this. Easy to navigate. Clean. Not too information dense. I think the only suggestion I could make would be to weight the scores by the number of reviews. I personally think a product with 100 reviews and an aggregate rating of 4 is probably a better product than one that has a single review of 5.
I'm sorry, I wrote a product review for Tilley hats, but when I got to the login screen, I quit. I feel like these days there are just too many sites wanting to use social sign on.
For what it's worth, this was the review:
> No logo on the hat, because the design is iconic.
There are logos on some of the hats, at least on my T3 wanderer there is. Mark Symons says no frills but, well, there are some. They're not cheap, which "no frills" tends to imply. They're pretty good quality, and overall, the best
- 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.
I don't know. I'm more of the mind to create a new blog post titled "Everything, reviewed" in which I review every product I've ever owned (worth mentioning), and put all my reviews there. I think you could aggregate that info, if only I had good identifiers. This is where I wish the world had URIs & Dublin Core for, ya know, everything. <sigh/> Good luck deciphering what I mean when I'm blogging.
I think Rotten Tomatoes is not the site to copy here, but rather Criticker: if I can rate items and compare my ratingset to similar ratingsets, that would be valuable. It's more of a cornucopia of the commons [1], if you will, where contributing even a little will reward you epsilon (and everyone else, too).
[+] [-] hubraumhugo|5 years ago|reply
I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It should become the Rotten Tomatoes for products, almost like you check the trustworthy rating of a movie before you watch it, people could check a brand or product before they purchase it.
A metric I am working on is the average cost per month of ownership. That feels like a great metric that shifts consumer mindset - the longer you own something, the more you save. I still don't have enough data, so please submit your favourite product.
Let me know what you think!
PS: this project is completely non-commercial and entirely community-driven. It is still a work in progress, but I want to get feedback as early as possible.
[+] [-] dumbfounder|5 years ago|reply
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 truly differentiate, and can appeal to everyone, not just people that are concerned with reducing their environmental footprint.
[+] [-] masukomi|5 years ago|reply
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 product link because... why wouldn't I? except now that i look at the products i see there aren't any links? Why wouldn't you offer links to go buy these things, doubly so when you could profit from it AND make life easier for users without costing them anything.
obviously there needs to be a fallback mechanism to handle things that aren't sold on amazon.
you ask for a weight in kg or lb, thus suggesting a desire to cater to international audiences but then you don't have a currency for price.
"BIFL Score" is something i can guess but is never actually defined. Don't make users think.
when i submit it asks for an email address, but you already HAVE my email address from when i signed in. You could just make this a checkbox "do you want to be notified when we add this?"
Some products seem to have multiple categories but i could only select one. These seem conceptually like tags so i don't know why it's a pull-down instead of a multi-select or some other multiple choice thing.
[+] [-] julius|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] redshirtrob|5 years ago|reply
I think your idea of cost per month is good for things you use often. One thing I've been thinking about lately as I've undertaken a medium-sized kitchen renovation is the cost of ownership of tools. Since I'm not a professional I can't take a cost per month approach since I may not use the tool for many months at a time.
Instead I've been thinking about two things:
1. How many hours of operation can I get out of this tool? If I amortize those hours over my lifetime, will I ever have to buy the tool again? In this case a mid-range tool may be an A+ for me, but a B- for a professional.
2. What is the lifetime of a battery-powered version of the tool? I'm avoiding battery-powered tools (with a few exceptions, I'm looking at you power drill) because I'm concerned the batteries will fail before the tool does.
My ideal situation is that I buy these items once and never need to replace them. As an amateur, I should be able to do that without buying the most expensive tool. As a professional, I probably already have preferences and a strong opinion anyway.
[+] [-] gravypod|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|5 years ago|reply
That seems to be the fate that has befallen the various other "quality products" forums, subreddits, etc.
[+] [-] arendtio|5 years ago|reply
I mean, I am a guy who still uses his 8 year old smartphone on a daily basis, so durability is relevant for me, but when I buy something, I want something good. So just because it is made of plastic and can be used for the next 350 years, doesn't mean I would enjoy using it for a single day.
Duration is just one aspect of a high quality product, but so is ease of use or overall functionality. High quality is what I want to buy. Nevertheless, I appreciate the undertaking to develop a platform that is not just about the price and has a higher goal in mind.
[+] [-] sizzle|5 years ago|reply
Also don't let pissed off people derail product ratings because they are unhappy.
I'm thinking of a Wirecutter product research methodology and wiki below to list breakdown of materials, where they were sourced, changes in materials by manufacturer in later product updates, etc.
Let the users duke it out in the discussion section.
Basically avoid being Yelp and full of amateur reviews and people gaming the review system.
I would love for this to be an open source 'consumer affairs' product quality watchdog/authority. Too many times do manufacturers do a bait and switch where the first version has durable parts then subsequent versions are tweaked with cost cutting measures and you have inferior pieces that breakdown when they've captured a large market share of customers.
Unlike software, there is no 'what's new in this update' readme overview and you never really know if the manufacturer decided to cut corners by using a factory in Shenzhen that mass produces cheapo materials when they were previously made in a factory in middle America with a higher standard of quality, etc.
Thoughts?
[+] [-] rileyteige|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] topsycatt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeopinion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwcarlsen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyh1048576|5 years ago|reply
I have trouble finding reliable floor lamp like [this](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/c38e8535-2ee2-477d-9e9a-836...). The base is almost always coming off after using for a few years so the whole thing is unstable.
[+] [-] rimliu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acd|5 years ago|reply
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 batteries instead of lithium cobalt chemistry. Cobalt is a conflict mineral mining that puts out dangerous pollutants. Lifepo4 can take more recharge cycles than cobalt chemistry and are safer.
Reasoning is if the product last for life it’s more environmentally sustainable.
Cell phones are on the opposite end of the last for life spectrum.
[+] [-] fataliss|5 years ago|reply
Seems like you only take the photo here? So that's a good mitigation of point #1. What about point #2? Curious to know if you have a good plan to deal with that :)
[+] [-] milofeynman|5 years ago|reply
I really appreciate your attempt and wish you the best because I want this.
[+] [-] dmcbrayer|5 years ago|reply
Do you have plans to monetize this in the future? How do you expect to sustain it?
[+] [-] smichel17|5 years ago|reply
Would you be open to pressing the content cc-by-sa? That would make me more interested in contributing reviews.
Also, I went looking for your terms of service (to see if they mentioned licensing already), and all I found was a link to some Google page, even when I clicked to sign in "by email".
[+] [-] billars|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] driverdan|5 years ago|reply
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 has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It's a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn't full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.
This is a common issue with "BIFL" discussions. People overrate something because they don't understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn't repairable, or they don't have experience with a higher quality item.
Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?
[+] [-] floatrock|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] noxToken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j4nt4b|5 years ago|reply
Of course it's much easier to buy this year's model of something hyped & shiny without thinking and then post on a site like this to prop up your ego and mislead everybody else. I'd venture to say that if something hasn't been in production for the length of a lifetime, there's no justification in labeling it as "Buy it for life"
[+] [-] snowwrestler|5 years ago|reply
The carousel is simultaneously too slow and too fast. The visitor has to sit and wait to see a brand they recognize, and then when they do, they only have a second to recognize and click.
Scroll works well on all modern devices and empowers the visitor. There's a reason so many landing pages are tall.
[+] [-] ndavis|5 years ago|reply
I've found a huge problem with products is that their quality changes over time. So, a product may be named the same but the SKU changes or the products from a couple of years back were much better made for whatever reason while the company has gutted them and continues to sell on reputation. I've wondered if there's a way to track product changes (user reported maybe?) between revisions of products on a wide scale. Can you convert the "years owned" to a purchase date somewhere? Are you tracking SKUs?
How will you handle fake reviews?
[+] [-] stiray|5 years ago|reply
I dont know if the reason is that site isn't compatible with firefox or some other "measure" but those are the urls that were blocked, if it helps you fixing it.
https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-154925745-1 (blocked by ublock origin)
https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.... (blocked by ublock origin)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,500,6... (blocked by LocalCDN)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&display=sw... (blocked by LocalCDN)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cookie (blocked by LocalCDN)
[+] [-] tumblerz|5 years ago|reply
But, how do we deal with product model or component changes?
A couple examples:
"Earthquake" impact wrench from Harbor Freight. Purchased ten years ago, used a lot--for an amateur (maybe a couple thousand high torque automotive bolts, sunk some cement anchors). This product is currently sold by HF, but is much changed.
The site's example of Lodge cast iron. I cook on cast iron 90% of the time and my older lodge pan is much better than a newish one. The newer one has a more coarse surface, is strangely lighter.
[+] [-] loughnane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0goel0|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030451
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804573
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22717494
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523434
And more
[+] [-] pineyboi|5 years ago|reply
When I'm looking to purchase something, the concerns are usually something like.
1. Minimizing the shared cost of throwing the thing away.
2. Maximizing durability.
3. Maximizing the actual efficacy of the thing.
4. Maximizing worker benefit - economical and political.
5. Minimizing animal suffering.
Not everyone is going to have the same mix of goals or order of goals and many have just one overriding goal: Minimizing up-front consumer cost.
So, for example, a "smart-fiber" shirt might be far more durable than a 100% cotton shirt, the throw-away cost is much higher so I'll pass. I'm not saying your site should account for this, but things are complicated, especially among conscious consumers which is an increasingly niche market anyway due to both preference and circumstance.
Edit: Oh I should also add somewhere in there
#. Maximizing ease of repair/cleaning.
eg. MacBook vs. Pinebook or Carpet vs. Hardwood etc.
[+] [-] rapind|5 years ago|reply
This is probably on your TODO list, but I wanted to make sure you were aware in case it isn't.
Your terms of service and privacy policy are:
a) Not linked to anywhere except the login screen in very small text. Seems to be part of Google sign in?
b) Clicking them goes nowhere. I suspect you setup Google login and didn't provide links to a terms / privacy screen.
If you're going to be collecting logins (maybe all you store is an email address?) you should probably throw something basic together. Kind of surprised Google doesn't require it when using their sign in.
I personally won't login / enter information on any website without knowing their terms of use and privacy policy.
[+] [-] kareemm|5 years ago|reply
I expected the review to be posted. If it's in a moderation queue I'd expect to see a message indicating that's the case. And if the review didn't get saved I probably wouldn't leave another one.
[+] [-] sails|5 years ago|reply
This brings to mind some considerations for you:
1. Professional tier tools are often much hardier than consumer, and often a pro tool would last a lifetime for a consumer user, but only a few cycles professionally
2. Warranty and replacement is very important here. Example is Osprey who _had_ an incredible no questions replacement, but they've changed it while keeping the "all-mighty-guarantee" name.
Elements to consider. I'll try add a Leatherman review.
[+] [-] zargon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TehCorwiz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CabSauce|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imdsm|5 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, this was the review:
> No logo on the hat, because the design is iconic.
There are logos on some of the hats, at least on my T3 wanderer there is. Mark Symons says no frills but, well, there are some. They're not cheap, which "no frills" tends to imply. They're pretty good quality, and overall, the best
[+] [-] blakesterz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] arh68|5 years ago|reply
I think Rotten Tomatoes is not the site to copy here, but rather Criticker: if I can rate items and compare my ratingset to similar ratingsets, that would be valuable. It's more of a cornucopia of the commons [1], if you will, where contributing even a little will reward you epsilon (and everyone else, too).
[1] http://bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm just read about this guy a la the Visicalc thread, never thought I'd use the phrase