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Show HN: ThingsOnReddit – Products linked to on Reddit
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- techaddict009 9y agoDoes this link are of amazon products only?
- brudolph 9y agoYes, amazon dominates the product links, so it was easiest to start with that. In the future though, I'd love to add more.
- codingdave 9y agoAmazon provides the affiliate revenue, so Amazon products are what gets linked. I'm not opposed to the business model, I use affiliate links to monetize my site, too. But it does seem silly to shy away from admitting that this is trying to make some money from the links.
- dack 9y agoI don't think they are shying away from it - it's pretty clear in the about page. Seems like a totally reasonable way to get some revenue for the site.
- codingdave 9y agoI was referring more to OPs answer in this thread.
- mynewtb 9y agoThe whole point of the site is to make money via Amazon's affiliate program.
- sajthom 9y agoSmart way of making money through referral links. I'm not even mad, that's amazing!
- QAPereo 9y agoIt really is, especially for books and music, wow. Out of curiosity is searched /r/bitcoin... https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score
- kilroy123 9y agoAs someone who frequents /r/watches, I appreciate this. But it would be great to see prices more easily highlighted.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eps 9y agoThere is a roll of ducktape in 5th place by karma :)
- kfriede 9y agoI'd be curious to see the success of this with Amazon Affiliates, since it is nearly a direct copy of a site I made 2 months ago (that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content). The site is https://fastandes.com https://fastandes.com (currently at limited functionality).
- justboxing 9y ago> that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content. Not clear from your wording so asking. Did you Amazon shut down your website, or did they close your affiliate account? What do you mean by 'lack of original content' ? Was the site an almost replica copy of the amazon page product details? or was it a copy of some other affiliate site? Thank you!
- kfriede 9y agoTheir wording is "lack of original content." Affiliates is geared towards bloggers who write posts (such as reviews) about linked products. Mine was nowhere close to that. Some sites skate by with alternatives, but I can see how I need to revise in order to comply with the program. Edit: for example, http://hackernewsbooks.com/ http://hackernewsbooks.com/ is a site that has been successful with Affiliates. Amazon tends to be a bit moody with that program.
- justboxing 9y agoThanks. You are right. The only difference I see between your site and the hackernewsbooks.com site is that the latter also links to a source, like the comment on HN thread that the book reference was scraped from...
- kfriede 9y agoThat was on my to-do list for future features. I shipped it very early, and Amazon demonetized me pretty soon after that, so lots of things I wanted to do became useless.
- yitchelle 9y agoI don't fully understand the psychology behind this. Would someone be more likely to buy an item just because is it mentioned in a forum. There are similar sites that mine HN for the books that are mentioned here. Can some ELI5 to me?
- overcast 9y agoJust another affiliate scraper, nothing more, or less.
- jonesetc 9y agoIt also links to the posts, so this seems like it be nice for hobby related subreddits to see what the usuals recommend. Think calligraphy or cooking. Or even scholarly subreddit a like math and see some interesting books that people have brought up.
- terrble 9y agoReddit has narrow, highly specialized communities where product mentions, while not necessarily recommendations, are very useful for researching, shopping, and understanding a niche consumer market.
- chillydawg 9y agoThis would be interesting if it wasn't just live. Eg, if I could select a time period to show the most popular stuff from. Also a better way of discovering subs to browse, rather than having to know exactly what you're looking for. Perhaps an r/all equiv, but products ?
- 52-6F-62 9y agoThose just sound like feature requests to me, rather than criticisms. I think the idea and execution are clean and effective. Not that you're wrong. Those are good ideas.
- terrble 9y agoThis is stinkin' amazing. Great idea and nice implementation.
- arjie 9y agoThis is a clever site. Nicely done! I can't help but laugh at London's best, though: https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png
- dsacco 9y agoHey, this is awesome! You literally built a product I specifically asked for here in a thread here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002985 (it’s idea #2). Great job! If you put a Massdrop-style portal here I think it could become an amazing way to find crowdsourced products and displace e.g. Google Shopping. So here’s what you should do next: 1. Crawl every subreddit that can be mapped to a hobby and then crawl all product recommendations. 2. Use NLP and sentiment analysis to map recommendations to coherent products. 3. Rank products according to the sentiment across the subreddit and aggregate the feedback into a few key pros/cons. 4. Sort by ranking and return the products to the user. If you nail this I would use it for everything. I constantly search reddit for product recommendations on places like /r/coffee. You can capture entire communities like /r/mechanicalkeyboards to appeal to those who trust real user reviews online instead of places like Amazon. Here’s an example flow for this functionality: you arrive on the site and the interface prompts you to select interests. You do so and you’re then presented with products matched to that interest derived from crawling the relevant subreddit(s). You can see the most commonly expressed pros and cons for each product (for less functional products like watches: what users most commonly liked and most commonly disliked). Based on my own personal experiences shopping like this I am convinced there is a startup here for the right execution. There are a huge number of people who use social media like reddit, Twitter, etc to do their shopping and this could become their shopping homepage.
- brudolph 9y agoThanks! I'm looking forward to iterating. The suggestions you lay out are great. I'll hopefully be adding features / changes as time goes on. This was an initial MVP in order to get feedback quickly, and it worked! Appreciate the thoughtful response.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoWhile the commenter above me has much more insight, I second. This is really well done! I personally hadn't thought of this. I collect resources from HN all of the time and pile them up in an Instapaper account, but I organize haphazardly and poorly. That said I'd add that if you can offer for registered users or anybody a regular caching or hard-copy option. To double up on that, offer pipelining of a cached data dump to a file on Google drive or Dropbox or any other redundancy endpoint. You could grow from there in usability. Or somebody could write a middleman service for that... fun's fun. Great work, anyway.
- justboxing 9y agoVery cool! Congrats on shipping! What's your tech stack? How long did it take you to build this,starting from the idea to build and launch i.e. deploying code to thingsonreddit.com ?
- brudolph 9y agoThanks, this project uses Ruby on Rails 5 with Webpacker (React). I've found making websites quickly with Rails is very effective. The data can be found on Google BigQuery and I then used Scrapy to scrape Amazon pages for further product info. It's deployed to a DigitalOcean node and connects to an Amazon RDS Postgres instance. The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday, and I felt ready enough to post.
- justboxing 9y agoThanks for the details. > The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday. That's amazing! You turned your idea into an MVP in 5 days. Very impressive.
- czue 9y agoAgreed this is amazing and inspiring. Well done!
- waiseristy 9y agoMultiple products in a post should be grouped. There's a few pages where all the products are from a single highly upvoted post
- chatmasta 9y agoGreat idea and execution. You're probably building a nice passive income product. The user experience on mobile is a bit clumsy. I would recommend putting some work into that. For example it's difficult to switch to a subreddit beyond the default five displayed at the top (without an overflow: property).
- kruipen 9y agoThe top product on cooking page [1] shows the folly of using reddit for product recommendations... [1] https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=score https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=...
- rhizome 9y agoYou may not have a need for a duck press now, but that looks like a good one if you did.
- msnangersme 9y agoSome other similar sites with niches: books- https://takcek.com https://takcek.com laptops- http://www.laptophits.com http://www.laptophits.com
- peteretep 9y agohttps://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/AmazonWTF/ https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/AmazonWTF/
- ben_jones 9y agoIn the age of product placement I'd be extremely worried about redditors gaming the site to promote their products. Cool site though.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoThis is pretty much tailor made for the subreddit /r/INEEEEDIT
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoThe first link I clicked on was from a comment where the author was giving an example of what _not_ to buy because it's wildly overpriced for what it does. Hopefully that's not representative.
- guohuang 9y agogreat idea, while we were doing toptalkedbooks.com, my partner and I were thinking about doing the exact same thing for our next project. Nice UI, good execution, good luck! just one friendly note: our site was rejected by amazon a couple time,(due to content issue), I hope your path is smoother.
- KhalPanda 9y agohttps://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/wallstreetbets?order_by=score https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/wallstreetbets?order_by=... Yup, pretty much what I expected.
- skinnymuch 9y agoI'd probably get downvoted for the comment I wanted to write. But nice to see WSBers on HN. The product list is exactly as expected.
- eps 9y agoSomething to fix - sub names are case-insensitive. Also, reddit automatically redirects to the correctly capitalized version, so it's easy to learn what it is. That is, /r/Books and /r/books should be treated as synonims.
- anton_tarasenko 9y agoReddit Search can do a similar trick: "subreddit:gadgets site:amazon.com", sorted by "top"[1] It finds only posts, not comments. That's a good thing. Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it? Post karma is a bit better in this respect. Reddit Search supports any domain. So you can search any shop. Like vat19.com and etsy.com. Reddit allows browsing by domain. Like https://www.reddit.com/domain/amazon.com/top/ https://www.reddit.com/domain/amazon.com/top/ Secondly, some subreddits are specifically devoted to product recommendations: * https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/ And Reddit has a JSON output: https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&... [1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aamazon.com&restrict_sr=&sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aa...
- justboxing 9y ago> And Reddit has a JSON output. I did not know that. Very cool. I tried this for AmazonTopRated => https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated.json?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated.json?sort=top&t=all and got a forbidden / 403 error. Turns out that subreddit is "Private" / Invite-only. However, google cache still has links. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FAmazonTopRated https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.red...
- anton_tarasenko 9y agoReddit can also send RSS: * https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t... AmazonTopRated is invite-only. Hence, no 403.
- faitswulff 9y ago> Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it? Case in point: I was just looking at /r/malefashionadvice on the submitted site and found a lot of comments that were upvoted for mocking other users with joke products.
- bastijn 9y agoClicked link. Second item was a sex toy. Was not disappointed. Hit the link 10x more, always sex toys on first page. Yup, it is unfiltered!
- kidproquo 9y agoVery nice idea and execution. Btw, how do you get the main product image url to display on your site? Is there an api for that?
- madradavid 9y agoCongrats to OP for shipping. I tried to do something not so similar to this and failed miserably :-( https://hnpicks.com https://hnpicks.com . I guess I just got busy and stopped half way at implementing the NLP and sentiment analysis. It was an interesting weekend :-)
- awb 9y agoSocial Media product links are the new ToDo App: http://hackernewsbooks.com/ http://hackernewsbooks.com/ http://www.dev-books.com/ http://www.dev-books.com/ http://toptalkedbooks.com/ http://toptalkedbooks.com/ http://reddittopbooks.com/tech/ http://reddittopbooks.com/tech/
- Pyrodogg 9y agoHuh, looks like it is time to install NoCoin. http://www.dev-books.com/ http://www.dev-books.com/ Includes a coin-hive mining script.
- Giorgi 9y agoYour pagination has stopped working