Show HN: Using LLMs to Research Reddit to Help Decide What to Buy

[ammarsafdari]

Shopping online can be pretty tedious if you care about the quality of what you are buying. The time it takes can scale pretty proportionally to some combination of the value, relative importance, and complexity of the purchase.

I think LLMs can help expedite and personalize the online shopping experience to a degree marketplaces just don't currently provide.

I don't think anybody really wants to read the product descriptions of a bunch of products, read reviews, do pairwise product comparisons, and find the best deals across different websites? Or am I wrong?

That's why I think this shopping assistant idea is pretty cool. Would appreciate any feedback on it. ty

[anon373839]

This is neat! I like how it shows its intermediate work steps. For the test searches I ran, it did recommend products I would have ended up buying (or already bought!).

A couple of suggestions. One, I think the UI needs some adjustments. The interaction design is good overall, but there are some minor issues like certain touch targets being too small, inconsistent text sizes, inconsistent or arbitrary spacing/padding/margins. Some stuff at the bottom of the page is unclickable on iOS because it’s too close to the bottom of the viewport and can’t be scrolled up.

The second suggestion is that there is a business/legal risk in pitching this as “using Reddit”. You might broaden to include other discussion fora and downplay the mention of a specific site.

[jdawg777]

I know you probably don't want to give away the secret sauce, but how does the LLM use the reddit threads to decide which products are best? Is it the comment with the most upvotes?