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

• Bologo 6y ago
  Kind of reminds me Boop Bop, the fictitious startup that the modern-day Seth Rogan character is working on in the movie An American Pickle.
• hubraumhugo 6y ago
  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.
  • githubalphapapa 6y ago
    You should try accessing your site with cookies disabled.
  • dmcbrayer 6y ago
    I love this concept. I share this same problem and I will definitely be checking back here. Do you have plans to monetize this in the future? How do you expect to sustain it?
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      I'm a bit careful with monetization since it could harm the trustworthiness and independence of the platform, but once it gets more popular, I will definitely think about it. I could imagine a Buy For Life badge/widget that companies could integrate on their website.
  • rileyteige 6y ago
    > average cost per month of ownership 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.
    • newsclues 6y ago
      As a poor person this is so valuable. Cheap boots are more expensive....
      • SamBam 6y ago
        The Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
      • godot 6y ago
        Are they really though? On the topic of boots, let's say we're talking about high-cut hiking boots. I'm not an avid hiker. I do casual hiking sometimes so I just wear regular shoes to those. When I do slightly more strenuous hiking, I wear a specific pair of high-cut hiking boots that I own. I get a chance to do this maybe once a year, or less. I bought a pair of Denali ones from Big5 for $40 for this purpose. It has been with me for 10 years now with barely any wear. If I don't use it often enough, it makes almost no difference to me to get a $400 "more durable" pair. The $40 pair is not going to get worn out in another 20-30 years at least. I probably won't go through more than say 2 pairs of these in my lifetime. Is that an uncommon example? Maybe, but I'm not sure it's as uncommon as one would think. How about a travel backpack? I used to travel multiple times a year. Now that I have a young kid, I don't anymore. I go with a $20 backpack that I've used for a number of years that is still in decent enough condition to keep using. I'm probably not going to get much use out of it for the next 10 years before my kid is old enough to travel around the world with me. How about a cast iron pan? They aren't dishwasher safe, and as a parent, I save time whenever I can. I don't own a cast iron pan, but even if I do, 99% of the time I'll pick up one of these non-stick sauce pans I bought from Costco as a set for a decent price of good quality that is dishwasher safe, when cooking. I've only owned these for a year but based on my experience with past sauce pans, one usually last me a good ~10 years, and that's with very regular home cooking. The iron handle skillet on this site costs $180. The set I got from Costco costs about that much, for a set of 4 pots and 4 pans. Overall, I'm not sure I buy this entire idea of "buy expensive durable things because it'll cost less in the long run". That just hasn't been my experience in most cases, other than some very specific examples.
  • julius 6y ago
    Good idea. Thanks for making that site. 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?
    • msluyter 6y ago
      This was the first question that occurred to me. Just a couple of days ago I needed to buy another iphone USB-lightning cable. If you want to get a sense of just how broken Amazon reviews are, try searching for one of these. It's a nightmare minefield of 4.7+ rated products that have these highly dubious 5 star ratings, but with a telltale sizeable chunk of recent 1 star reviews.[1] So I ended up having to also check various meta-review sites or other product review sites just to to buy a stupid cable. For certain product categories, reviews have become mostly noise. [1] I tend to discount really effusive, highly detailed 5 star reviews for basically mundane products. "This ethernet cable was both highly attractive and yet lighter than others I've bought in the past. I plugged it in and it immediately started working! I was amazed!"
      • 0xffff2 6y ago
        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.
        • TT3351 6y ago
          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 times I've complained about shipping problems (as you suggest you've seen) they also removed those.
  • redshirtrob 6y ago
    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.
    • aidos 6y ago
      The batteries absolutely fail before the tools do. As long as you stick to a range (for me, Makita Lxt) you’ll just need a few working batteries between all your tools as a diyer. At least that’s what I’ve found. They slowly fall apart, but you still get fairly good value from them. I started “collecting” tools a year ago and my first batteries are starting to go now. They’re actually still plenty good enough good enough for my impact driver (best tool ever) but they die too quickly in my chainsaw. Couldn’t say how many hours they’ve given me but it’s a lot.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        Yes. Sometimes a manufacturer will switch battery types but I've seen this more with real consumer grade products than prosumer/pro ones. (Have a couple Black and Decker products I've had to throw out because batteries died and couldn't get replacements even online.) But it's pretty much a given that anything like a cordless drill will have the batteries give out long before (and even multiple times) before you need to replace the tool itself. Batteries are consumables in any mis- to high-end product with a long lifetime, like it or not. (Same with cameras.)
  • masukomi 6y ago
    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 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.
    • scrollaway 6y ago
      Man, I want people like you reviewing and qaing everything I release. Quality feedback.
    • sharkmerry 6y ago
      what do you do about amazon changing products but using same SKUs? or counterfeit products in 1 shipment and 1 in not. Amazon is the biggest offender in the buy it for now category i think
    • quacked 6y ago
      I disagree with your input about adding affiliate links, because I think that they would end up working contrary to the goal of this project. Sellers constantly reuse listings to sell updated versions of their products, with variable results. This is a huge issue with Amazon listings. OP lets you add an affiliate link to order Graeter's ice cream. There's 20 years of 5-star aggregate reviews and a link to go buy it, so you do. But in year 21, Graeter's changed their all-sugar formula to corn syrup, and now you falsely believe that the aggregated five-star rating is supposed to apply to the corn syrup formula. If one is designing for a lasting product review, the information needs to be snapshotted at a certain point in time- ie "In 2020, this part number from this company was constructed well." Modern listings may reflect the 2020+ product, rather than the 2020 construction that got the good reviews.
  • rimliu 6y ago
    > the longer you own something, the longer you own > something, the more you save Unless the newer model can do the same while using less resources. Or is generally safer. Or does not use toxic materials previous models did. Etc.
  • dumbfounder 6y ago
    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.
    • fbn79 6y ago
      I agree with you. It's more like metacritics than rotten-tomatoes
      • tupputuppu 6y ago
        Even metacritic focus is/was aggregating professional critics' scores, although nowadays they have plenty of community reviews as well
    • donmcronald 6y ago
      > because you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products outdoorgearlab.com looks like a professional review site to me in the context of being an affiliate marketing / review site. IMHO almost all reviews online are affiliate marketing these days, so what I'd really be interested in is a site that hosts reviews and doesn't allow _any_ affiliate marketing or external links. IE: No incentive to game the system with inflated review scores. And if you pay attention to those affiliate marketing sites that are disguised as review sites, note how they never give anything a bad review. "Poisoned my dog, caused my house to be condemned - 4.0/5.0 stars." Getting you to buy _something_ is the only goal.
      • skratlo 6y ago
        outdoorgearlab.com ? you must be kidding me, in their reviews, they leave out ~50% of competition, and their sorting of best product in category is apparently a bidding game, shifted just right to make the results believable. I do spent lots of time on researching outdoor products for my own needs, and outdoorgearlab.com is a joke
  • topsycatt 6y ago
    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?).
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      Same here, but using FireFox on MacOS.
      • voidmain0001 6y ago
        Same for me, but FF and MS-Edge on Win10. I disabled uBlock Origin, and also tried a private window to no avail.
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      Could you try again? I made some changes and tested it on Chrome and Firefox.
      • topsycatt 6y ago
        Looks to be working now!
  • ekanes 6y ago
    Add patreon so people can support/fund it!
  • acd 6y ago
    Great idea! 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.
    • tsm 6y ago
      > Stainless steel frying pan instead of nonstick frying pans where the non stick coating wears off. Cast iron even better. They're called nonstick for a reason; stainless steel does not compare. You'll have more sticking problems cooking eggs on a steel pan drowning in butter than on a (new) nonstick pan with minimal grease. I do own an 18th-century cast iron pan and it has pretty good seasoning. I use it for many things, almost daily, but I'm still glad I own nonstick pans too.
      • SamBam 6y ago
        Stainless steel frying pans have their place, so I'm not sure why you're saying they "don't compare." Sure, they "don't compare" for a non-stick scrambled egg, but there are more things that get made in the kitchen. For me personally, my most-used pans in order are my 12" cast iron, my 10" cast iron, my 12" All-clad stainless steel, my 6" cast iron, and my 6" non-stick is last, mostly for eggs. Stainless is excellent for anything like a pasta sauce where you're starting with sautéing onions and such.
        • criddell 6y ago
          Stuck on bits can be a feature rather than a problem. Deglaze with some wine and make a sauce!
      • 6y ago
  • freeopinion 6y ago
    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?
    • mongol 6y ago
      Something that would be cool is if users uploaded pictures of their old gear. That would add genuinity and would also hint how well it holds up.
      • FrojoS 6y ago
        Best suggestion of the whole thread! Optional addition of the posters face in the picture would make it even harder to fake (see for instance TIL Threads on Reddit).
    • zucked 6y ago
      This is real - lots of previous BiFL brands/products have gotten significantly diluted over time as the company cuts materials costs, etc.
  • rwcarlsen 6y ago
    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_value_of_a_stream_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.
    • maerF0x0 6y ago
      Some people do things for reasons other than cash. For example I'll buy a TV that lasts rather than a new Vizio one each year because I cant be bothered and dont want to generate the waste.
  • hyh1048576 6y ago
    Is it brand based, or product based? In the URL I see /brand/ and /product/. I have trouble finding reliable floor lamp like [this](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/c38e8535-2ee2-477d-9e9a-836b20fefa27_1.7f30636db35fcff157ee24a0de659680.jpeg 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.
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      It's both, you can search for products or brands.
  • gravypod 6y ago
    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/ 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.
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      Interesting idea, just added this idea/feature to my backlog :)
      • buttersbrian 6y ago
        looking for contributors?
        • Serious_Cheese 6y ago
          Exactly! We can help out. Please let use know if you need any contributions from the community. Myself and (I'm sure) others are willing to help with this. I am sick and tired of wasting money on buying products that last a year or two. It's also very bad for the environment. It increases the pill of trash that we're going to have to deal with someday.
      • gravypod 6y ago
        Thank you! Do you have some way to sign up for notifications for those sorts of releases? I'm partially interested in this product and also very interested in the TK-01. I'd really love to have that machine but I don't want to pay $800 for a lemon.
      • smichel17 6y ago
        When you get there: Consider allowing people to say they own the product, without writing a review for it. Then, allow people to request reviews for that product, along with specific questions they have about it. Send an email to the people who said they owned the product including the prompt from the requester, and publish their responses as reviews (with question as context). On the reviewer side, I'm much more interested in reviewing a product if I got a note from an actual human asking about it. And maybe a little harder to game, since generic review text can't be copy-pasted as easily.
  • billars 6y ago
    I really like your idea, pushing sustainable products of every day use is essential for our society.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    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.
    • canada_dry 6y ago
      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.
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      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.
      • kexx 6y ago
        That's not really enough. Any kind of credibility system can be hacked. You should ask two images, mandatory, and one of them should be 'my product', like a some kind of an actual clue, that the reviewer purchased it at least. If you add some basic checking, like a reverse image search on your own db and in the internet to vet out low effort tries, this would be the minimum to prevent hijacking the system. I had somewhat similar idea for a site like this, but only for negative reviews. This kind of a site stops the incentive of forging fake review, like who wants to forge a bad one, but this still has to be protected from defamation attempts. That's why I was thinking of making the post somewhat complicated, but not impossible to make the system enough hard to protect it low efforts, which is at least 90% of the attempts, and the rest would be up for a moderation team. The credibility system could work only over protection
  • milofeynman 6y ago
    Consumer reports tries to grapple with this problem by capturing brand reliability by long term surveying their users. I really appreciate your attempt and wish you the best because I want this.
  • irrational 6y ago
    Are you, or will you, including information from Consumer Reports?
    • shaklee3 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure CR doesn't let you do that. They don't even allow you to advertise with their name saying they recommended it.
  • fataliss 6y ago
    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 :)
  • arendtio 6y ago
    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.
    • yourapostasy 6y ago
      Durability in a class of products has a tendency to correlate with the realms of quality I personally care about in my experience. YMMV of course. My selection attributes are invariably different from yours. Personally, I assign a higher "durability" to a product if it is easily repairable. Parts and schematics/instructions are readily available, at reasonable cost for generations. Ideally seven generations or engineering blueprints released once parts are discontinued. If necessary, I can Ship of Theseus-repair such products over time, which I'm okay with as long as the time between repairs is roughly about the time for less-durable products to break into irreparable junk (without an extensive fabrication shop, which I'm oh-so-ever-slowly building up but could never justify the cost of on that repair capability basis alone). Most products I select on this durability basis tend to have been in the market for a long time and have a lot of thought refined into their design over that time. I suspect durability raising the cost means the manufacturer has to compete on other axes like usability, functionality, listening and incorporating customer field/operational experience, and overall value by marketing uses it can be put to. Functionality tends to take a hit, especially with commercial-grade gear (compare a commercial restaurant microwave to a consumer model), so I go in with that expectation; sometimes more features is just more fiddly bits to break. Mostly I do this because I'm utterly fascinated by the shape of design decisions that stand the test of time, and I'm compensated sufficiently to pay for it. Partly I do this because our species faces an energy cliff within an absurdly brief blink of geologic time, and I wish we could keep increasing amounts of stuff out of landfills.
    • kag0 6y ago
  • emodendroket 6y ago
    I guess a problem it'd be interesting to think about is sifting false reviews from real ones.
  • yourapostasy 6y ago
    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.
  • smichel17 6y ago
    > 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".
  • baebeegeezus 6y ago
    Love it. Great idea.
  • sizzle 6y ago
    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. Thoughts?
    • hubraumhugo 6y ago
      Helpful inputs, thanks! The degrading quality problem is one of the top-priorities on my list. I could imagine a timeline where you can see when products were launched and how they were rated over time.
  • fredguth 6y ago
    It reminds me a little of epinions.com ... a long forgotten startup that I liked very much.
• isuckatcoding 6y ago
  There’s actually a subreddit for just this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/
• artembugara 6y ago
  Nice! I'd add dr martens made in UK series
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    You can submit it by using the brand-submission form here: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/submission/brands https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/submission/brands
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    Most shoes made in England will last a lifetime with proper upkeep. Going rate is £400-500 a pair. They'll require new soles from time to time which will cost you £100-200 as well for professional refurbishment. Rubber soled boots will require a new heal every 1-2 years but if you keep on top of that the rest of the sole should last 4-5 years. Shoes will require new laces from time to time. You'll also need quality leather cream polish which you'll apply regularly.
• akerro 6y ago
  I would change shipping to "Availability" which is a list of country tags. Great idea, bookmarking it
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Great idea, I will add this improvement to my backlog.
• HissingMachine 6y ago
  Great site, I'm a big fan of products that last long and are user serviceable, I recently bought a Dissim lighter because it's refillable and has a lifetime warranty.
• blakesterz 6y ago
  I wish I had some helpful feedback, but the site works and I didn't have any trouble finding what I'd expect. Looks pretty good and it's a neat idea.
• CabSauce 6y ago
  How do you plan on keeping out fake reviews?
  • throwaway287391 6y ago
    Yeah this is cool, but if it gets any traction I'd expect the fake reviews to quickly make the site useless without a ton of investment into spam detection. Given that Amazon sucks at this as a trillion dollar company with purchase data, I don't have much hope for a new startup or personal project (not sure which it is), but I'd really love to be proven wrong. To be honest I was hoping it was even more like RottenTomatoes, focused on aggregating credible professional reviews of products (like RT focuses on professional critics, though they do also have user reviews).
    • culopatin 6y ago
      How does having a "professional critic" only prevent you from getting fake reviews? It could easily be manipulated by companies paying reviewers for biased reviews. Same as sponsored YouTube reviewers. I think there might be some value in keeping it a niche community with known usernames and maybe moderators. Amazon reviews are not a community, and I think Amazon might not want to fix the issue as bad as we think. In Amazon all the reviews are anonymous and it's not clear at a glance what kind of buyer is giving a review.
      • throwaway287391 6y ago
        > How does having a "professional critic" only prevent you from getting fake reviews? It could easily be manipulated by companies paying reviewers for biased reviews. Same as sponsored YouTube reviewers. It doesn't of course, but (going back to the RT comparison) it would be a major scandal if it were ever discovered that a well-known professional movie critic were being paid off by a studio for biased reviews. A website that focused on this could keep track of and remove the special status of reviewers caught doing that. Given that obtaining the "professional reviewer" status is quite expensive (relative to making an RT account) and such people have much more to lose than a random user, I tend to trust the RT critic score much more than the user score. If it's possible to establish a similarly robust reputation system for user reviews with no external source of validation (e.g. a newspaper/journal hiring someone as a reviewer) I'm definitely all for that! That seems much more difficult to me though. But maybe if it continues as a niche community as you say, it could work. I hope it does.
• umvi 6y ago
  It says this site is 100% free. Is your plan to run it as a public service like Wikipedia or something?
  • catsdanxe 6y ago
    I think it is more likely he plans to stuff it with affiliate links like all the other garbage product list websites.
    • umvi 6y ago
      "The biggest asset of this site is credibility and trustworthiness. That's why we will never take money from advertisers or corporations."[0] [0] https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/about https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/about
  • giarc 6y ago
    Likely affiliate commission for products. Many of the products are available on Amazon (or other platforms) that will share a piece of the profit if you send them customers.
• mwill 6y ago
  This seems handy, I used to like checking out /r/buyitforlife, but rather than product recommendations, it seems to be plagued by old products that are still working, and you cannot buy anymore, a running joke on the subreddit is "Lasted until now" instead of buy it for life. The links to company pages and storefronts is big bonus for this site over that community
• krm01 6y ago
  Durability is highly underrated and doesn’t get the attention it deserves. This is a wonderful idea. If there are more resources about building durable products and lasting companies, please share. I’m very interested in this.
• cloogshicer 6y ago
  Great idea! Search bar at the top isn't working for me (Chrome on macOS). When I hit return, nothing happens.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    It currently doesn't show results if there is no match. I.e. if you start typing "Pata" it will suggest "Patagonia". But I must admit that this is a bad user experience, will improve it soon :)
    • otherworldly 6y ago
      Heya, just thought I'd let you know that this isn't the case for me either. I'm using Firefox and no outgoing requests are being made; nothing whatsoever happens.
      • kasbah 6y ago
        Same here, see an error on console: TypeError: t is undefined onSubmit https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/app.9d69a04f.js:1 ie https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 n https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 ie https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 $emit https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 handleSubmit https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:532 t https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:532 ie https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 n https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553 _wrapper https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/static/js/chunk-vendors.a4f280db.js:553
      • hubraumhugo 6y ago
        Could you try again? I made some changes and tested it on Firefox.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  Any plan for handling fake/compensated reviews?
• kareemm 6y ago
  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.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Did you add a review or just a comment? Signup is indeed required for write-operations, but it should bring you back to the product page with the pre-filled comment. Will look into that later, thanks for reporting :)
    • kareemm 6y ago
      I don't know the difference between a review and a comment. I reviewed a product in the box under "Discussion" here: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37 https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37 BTW for SEO juice you might want to change URLs to include the product slug. E.g. something like: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37-icebreaker-base-150-reviews https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37-icebreaker-ba...
• sunnyam 6y ago
  Would be great to be able to sort by number of reviews. A lot of the products right now only have a single review. Also, I can't see any place to submit a new product
• TehCorwiz 6y ago
  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.
• snowwrestler 6y ago
  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.
  • mleonhard 6y ago
    Yes. Move your current home page to an About page. The home page is the product so it should have a big search box, a list of categories, and then some top items. Ideally, all three of these will fit above the fold on mobile and desktop. Don't do infinite scroll. At the bottom, have a bigger category list, another search box, and a site map footer. Later, you can use session recording to see how strangers use your landing page and then make it really good. Make your call-to-action button "Add Review" bold. Show ownership costs in meaningful units: $/100-washes for clothing, $/100-miles for footwear/socks/cycling gear, $/year for business equipment, $/100-meals for kitchen equipment. Put the ownership cost on the search results page and product page, not the item cost. When receiving a review, ask how many times/miles/washes the person used the item every month, when they bought it, and when did it break. When showing the review to others, show the calculated ownership cost as a single number. Some products are so good that they take many years to wear out. Reviews for products that haven't broken can be misleading. For these kinds of products, your review submission page can explicitly ask if the product wore out or not. Another problem to solve later: Companies sometimes change a product without changing its name or version number. Usually they make it cheaper. The cheaper version is a different product. The review site should list it as a different product and separate the ratings & reviews. You could use year numbers, eg. "DrTung's Smart Floss (2006)" and "DrTung's Smart Floss (2019)". People give wildly different responses when asked for star ratings. So don't do that. Instead, ask a concrete question and use that to calculate a rating. Examples: "Will you buy this again when it wears out?" "Would you recommend that your family/friends buy this?" "Do you use other products that do the same thing as this?" Most folks can't keep track of their purchases & uses so here's your paid product idea: Make an app that lets me record when I bought something, how often I use it, and how much it's costing me. Give me the option of sharing my anonymized usage data with others. Make it super easy to add an item, for example, let me forward order confirmation emails to your service or copy/paste chunks from an email or a product page. Sell the app super cheap: $5/year, $1/month. It'll be a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports. I pay for Consumer Reports now because I think they really help society. They just need to modernize. Now is your chance!
• DrPhish 6y ago
  Any thoughts for adding good TCO commercial grade things? As an example, after I got upset throwing away my 5th coffee maker in a row, I found myself a Bunn pourover coffee maker on craigslist. They are made for huge duty cycles and every part is hard wearing, replaceable and easy to get ahold of via commercial coffee distributors. Now every time I have something needing replacement I look at commercial options, but I'm never sure what the actual cost/lifespan/repairability is vs consumer options.
  • owenversteeg 6y ago
    Coffee makers are some of the few devices where this makes sense. While commercial things can occasionally save money, they usually don't. Furthermore, the TCO calculation has to take into account what you would have done with the same amount of money. Let's pretend you buy a $2000 commercial grade widget instead of the $500 consumer grade widget. Over ten years of use, your commercial grade widget cost $100 in parts, running and maintenance costs, and depreciated to a value of $1800; during the same time, the consumer grade widget would have required about $50 in parts, running and maintenence but would have depreciated to a value of near zero. So, you might think, your TCO of the commercial grade widget is $300 and the consumer grade is $550. Easy win for the commercial widget! But then factor in the potential uses of that extra $1500 upfront. Assuming you were earning an average of 3% on your cash during that period, you would have made $515 on 10 years' interest on $1500. Now, put your money into an index fund, and your returns would be (historically speaking) thousands of dollars. (Before the inevitable comment, there are plenty of ways to earn a return on money that don't involve an index fund. Investing in your home, high interest savings accounts, Treasuries, paying down any debt, etc etc.) So you can easily see that for most things - where maintenance is cheap - it's not worth it. This includes most white goods, almost all electronics, etc. Where maintenance is expensive, though, you can save a lot by buying commercial. The classical example is the Isuzu crew cab trucks: if you do need to haul a lot of stuff, they're far cheaper in every way than comparable consumer options.
    • Lio 6y ago
      I like some of this argument. It reminds me of the story of Warren Buffet not wanting to buy a $20K car because he said with discount to present value the opportunity cost would make it cost him $100K. On the other hand all things are not equal. Take laptops. You might think that a cheap one that costs a quarter of an expensive model would mean that you change it more often for the same cost. By the end of the upgrade cycle you'd probably have a faster cheap laptop than the original expensive one and that might be true but you'd also have to live with the cheap keyboard and the cheap screen and the cheap build quality of the case. So you have to make the trade off I guess.
• christianB1212 6y ago
  Nice idea, technically it works great!
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Thanks, glad you like it :)
• loughnane 6y ago
  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!”?
  • stinos 6y ago
    Had roughly the same question - was actually a bit disappointed when seeing some products. There should be a reallybuyforyourwholelife.com :) I mean cast iron skillets are spot on, but I don't see most fridges, shoes or socks last a lifetime (though obviously there's going to be huge differences between brands and types in durability). Then realized it's hard to come up with a mechanism forcing users to really post only this particular 'last a lifetime' category. Except goodwill. Though on the other hand if the site gets used enough, the reviews sort it out automatically.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    The weight of the rating will be weighted based on the "years owned" of a review and the trustworthiness score of the reviewer.
    • Shared404 6y ago
      > and the trustworthiness score of the reviewer. Out of curiosity, how resistant is that score to being gamed? I love the idea for your platform, and would probably be willing to pay some amount for access, if there's a good way to verify that it's not being manipulated.
    • Frost1x 6y ago
      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 creator/retailer/etc. who have obvious conflicted goals. The best efforts seem to be information sites that are successful enough to gather enough data to represent something accurately from a user base but not so successful it becomes a target for corporate advertising and marketing groups. Reddit communities still provides some of this but have become a target for advertising as well and also are more difficult to extract useful information from. Amazon has "verified purchase" which is still gamed using other techniques. I've found the best model is still Consumer Reports for fair product assessments but they only speculate on durability since it would be incredibly difficult for their product assessment model (new products rolling out frequently, modified/re-released/etc and limited staff/personal time to keep up with).
• Otek 6y ago
  I want to be able to sort by number of reviews
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Thanks for your input, will add this feature to my backlog.
• siltpotato 6y ago
  A lot of BOSS pedals probably belong here. Meanwhile, the keys on old keyboards make you wish MIDI existed in the 70s. Once saw a Farfisa in a guitar store. Its keys died of lung cancer. Even if the keys were restored the sound was weaker than hot water with a single coffee bean floating in it.
• schwartzworld 6y ago
  looks great. The one thing I would recommend would be some sort of footer at the bottom of the page. I thought scroll wasn't working until I just realized I was at the bottom
• RankingMember 6y ago
  Any plans for browser extensions to dynamically add these ratings when, say, browsing Amazon?
• YPCrumble 6y ago
  Looks awesome! I would love to have an RSS feed for new "highly rated" products from this site.
• tomcat27 6y ago
  How did you handle difference in personal scale. An A- from two people are not always on same scale. If a person looking at these reviews has an internal scale different from the existing reviews, they may not be making an optimal choice. Sometimes the issue is minimized by simply very large number of reviews..
  • CWuestefeld 6y ago
    A million years ago, during the "Netflix Challenge", I built a purely statistical model that briefly scored high enough to go onto their leader board. The (temporary) success of that model was large due to handling this question reasonably. I theorized that reviewers would have their own scale, both in median (maybe they only give 4s and 5s), as well as range (a lot of people only give 1s and 5, losing all the resolution of the middle). My solution was to continuously keep each reviewer's ratings normalized both to the centerpoint (each review would have a delta added to it to re-center) as well as to standard deviation (each review would be scaled so that their overall stdev would be 1.0). The result is that everyone would look like a nice normal curve around 3.0. This has a nice side effect of diluting ratings spam, too. If somebody spams 5s, they wind up being just average 3s. Even if they spam 1s and 5s, they're at least normalized to a lower spread.
    • tomcat27 6y ago
      Did I correctly understand: You are converting everyone's internal scale to a common scale. The conversion is parameterizing by additive delta such that overall distribution remains normal with std 1. Cool.
• raspyberr 6y ago
  This is great project. Especially now when there are talks of rights to repair, digital ownership, and planned obsolensence. My only gripe is that the website/service is chock-a-block full of Google stuff which puts me off using it.
• ndavis 6y ago
  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? How will you handle fake reviews?
• 0goel0 6y ago
  Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22717494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22717494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523434 And more
  • irjustin 6y ago
    I'm impressed at the tenacity. OP finally got the pop s/he was looking for!
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    I constantly tried to get feedback to validate the idea. As I mentioned before, it started as a simple list of brands and has now evolved into a full platform, thanks to feedback from users :) It seems that HackerNews user want a certain maturity of a product/website.
    • Reedx 6y ago
      There's also just a huge amount of randomness involved. It's common for a story get posted a bunch of times, all ignored, then on the nTH submission it happens to get traction and hits the front page.
  • Aachen 6y ago
    The most recent of these is 5 months ago, that's fine to do a few times in my opinion (especially if the owner improved it!). Those four are submitted much closer together though (span of 2 months it seems), it shouldn't be a repetition of that now...
• creimers 6y ago
  I have been meaning to develop the exact same thing (I was going to call it lastsforever.store), but just never found the time. Thanks for putting this out there. I'd say it's still a little rough on the edges, but should have potential. What I honestly dislike, however, is to see all the google tracking going on there... is that really necessary?
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Thanks for your feedback. Google is just the easiest tracking to integrate, will consider a more privacy-friendly solution in the future.
• blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  Interesting, I hope you are onto something! How would you prevent me from taking some $ from Corporate to write a genuine sounding but heavily biased review? I am not trying to be snarky, but in my understanding that is exactly how micro-influencing on Instagram etc. works and IMO its very dangerous for your value proposition.
  • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
    See my comment above for a model that seems to be working really well for a similar site.
    • 0xffff2 6y ago
      Comments orders shift over time, making this reply rather useless. Please provide a link if you're going to cite another comment.
      • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
        Thanks for the tip .. here's the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24708473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24708473
    • frogpelt 6y ago
      If you're going to plug a site that works well, you should link to the site, I guess. I want to see it... maybe.
      • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24708473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24708473 :)
• Super_Jambo 6y ago
  I attempted to signup with my google account. Firefox pops up a window briefly which then closes. I'm running on ubuntu, firefox with umatrix & ublock origin.
  • Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Problem persists with addons turned off so perhaps you've been HNs DOSed.
• jayrwren 6y ago
  Looks great. How do I create an account?
• king_magic 6y ago
  This is a really great idea. Good job, it looks great. What kind of privacy can I expect if I sign in with my Google account?
• twiclo 6y ago
  I wish there was a link to take me to buy the actual product
• rapind 6y ago
  Looks great. 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.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    You are right, I totally forgot to add ToS and privacy policy. It's still an early prototype, but I will definitely fix that soon and give this task the required priority!
    • adventured 6y ago
      You're at least six months into the service being public and you forgot to add a privacy policy or terms of service? And you posted it numerous times to HN in the past. That's really strange overall.
  • alanbernstein 6y ago
    Really? How much time do you spend reading ToS and privacy policies?
    • kortilla 6y ago
      A couple of hours a week.
    • rapind 6y ago
      Doesn't take long, maybe 15 minutes per if they aren't massive (massive being an immediate red flag to me). Usually skimming and looking for certain things since they are usually very similar / boilerplate. I don't sign up for a new SaaS every day though so it's not a huge inconvenience for me.
• xyproto 6y ago
  I found socks on the site. Even if people buy socks for life, they most likely won't pass them on. I wonder how different the end result is from regular socks, environmentally speaking.
• muxl 6y ago
  I'm glad to see more sites giving visibility to long-lasting products. This reminds me of https://buymeonce.com/ https://buymeonce.com/ but I like the community driven aspect of this. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
• lucky8675 6y ago
  Great site! Seeing durability over time would be helpful, maybe a graph or recent rating trend indicator. It’s very frustrating to buy in late to a quality product/brand just to find that have cut costs and it’s not as durable as it used to be. Would also be great to correlate that to source establishment to help me know where it’s best to buy or find used.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  Applauds the initiative, in the days of faked online reviews to buy very frail products.. we need a counterpoint :)
• avree 6y ago
  Am I doing something wrong? I clicked "Product Reviews" and it took me to https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/blog https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/blog where there is only one review, for socks.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    That's actually confusing, I changed the menu-item in the header to "Blog". Thanks for reporting.
• jordanmarshall 6y ago
  When you describe it as a "Rotten Tomatoes" style platform, I think of only having a handful of trusted people/experts giving reviews for items (IE established movie critics). It looks like anyone can leave feedback on an item, which is a little different. RT started as (and still is) just an aggregator of movie critics, not a community review site. As others have pointed out, once you gain traction, fake reviews are going to be a big problem. It seems like the solution to that is moving towards a more "Rotten Tomatoes" style system, where only the established experts give feedback. This might start as having two ratings - "experts" and "community", but I expect you would quickly find the "expert" rating to be much more useful to people.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Interesting concept! I left a review, tried to click the stars on the right side but it wouldn't let me do so.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    Did you fill out the review-form or just tried to add a comment?
• bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
  How will you deal with the whole Pyrex vs. pyrex thing?
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    Similar problem with other brands that have been "diluted" over the years. Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned Dr Martens who now make shoes in China that are complete garbage quality.
    • Lio 6y ago
      That's true. The original contract manufacturer for Dr Martens, Solovair, is still making their own shoe designs in the same factory in England though. If you want a nice pair of monkey boots, Solovair are the guys to go and see not Dr Martens. These are exactly the sort of small manufacturers I like to know about and this is an interesting project to find them. If you're going to get something once it's nice to find a firm that actually does both the design and the manufacture in their own factories even if you pay a small premium over a generic knock off.
      • globular-toast 6y ago
        Indeed. I didn't know about Solovair, although I'm not really into that style. But I have bought all my shoes from factory shops of Northamptonshire shoes companies. They keep the lasts for all of their shoes so they can continue to repair and refurbish old models.
• vvoyer 6y ago
  I love the idea, I once had the same idea and never knew how to really turn it into a project. Congrats! First thing I would request as a feature is a way to be notified when new durable products are added. Another feedback: the name did not catch my memory yet. After going to the site I could not even remember the name of it when I wanted to go back once the tab was closed. Maybe show the website title in big letters or go fo a different name? (durable-products.com is available and maybe good SEO wise for example). AND we also know that "buy for life" will only match a very few products (like pans, but not socks most probably), durable might be more accurate. Final feedback: I understand it's not a commercial project, but why not? I think you can totally create affiliate links while still maintaining a high level of trust and independence. Plus the fact that many times I searched on your site where to buy the products. I had to open a new tab and google them :) Good luck!
• dandare 6y ago
  The yellow on yellow butons have such small contrast I first thought they are disabled. Good luck!
• gui64 6y ago
  Great idea! Congrats on shipping, that's the hardest part! Site looks great. Just something I noticed, images from the blog took a bit to load, and they could be optimized (will also save you bandwidth). I recommend doing this for all images though. Search for tinyjpg or similar free sites, it will compress the images without losing much on quality. Keep it up! :) Edit: there are some great libraries to compress images too. e.g. https://github.com/semiromid/compress-images https://github.com/semiromid/compress-images
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• known 6y ago
  http://www.justbuythisone.com/ http://www.justbuythisone.com/ and amazon.com/bestsellers are very close
• mikepurvis 6y ago
  The Wirecutter and The Sweethome used to be this for me, though at this point I think they've mostly succumbed to paid placement. But I'm very pleased with the Bosch dishwasher I bought some years ago on their recommendation, and my Archer C7 wireless router (now on OpenWRT) that I bought in 2015 has been a beast.
  • driverdan 6y ago
    Most of the stuff listed on Wirecutter isn't tested for longevity or real quality. For example, they recommended headphones that sound great but have plastic bands that crack and break from normal use.
  • GloriousKoji 6y ago
    The more recent problem with wirecutter is a lack of discovery on their part. They select most of the products they review based on amazon reviews, which have gotten highly unreliable in recent years with all the fake reviews.
• Ninjinka 6y ago
  I love finding more BIFL products, and used to go to the subreddit for inspiration. However, it became mostly one person saying that X product lasted them a really long time with little corroboration. Hopefully this takes off and can get some group consensus on products. I wrote an article about when BIFL is worth it and when it isn't here: https://medium.com/the-minimalist/thesearchfortheoneproduct-ea4d8278533e https://medium.com/the-minimalist/thesearchfortheoneproduct-...
• textman 6y ago
  You might want to replace the image of the old style Nalgene bottle with a newer Nalgene because the old ones with the whiteish color had BPA whereas the newer ones do not. A lot of people, including myself, replaced the old ones when the media pointed out the BPA danger.
  • garrettmoon 6y ago
    I think this a picture of the soft HDPE Nalgene bottle. I think some of the hard ones had BPA but never the soft one (it’s a plastic hardener after all). Nalgene now says they don’t use BPA in any of their bottles.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• driverdan 6y ago
  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?
  • tumblerz 6y ago
    Not to nitpick, and I dont know those boots in particular, but the wildfire hiking boots owned by myself and friends have glued soles and local cobbler has resoled at least a couple pairs. Your overall point, however, is important. I find reviews of outdoors gear (even professional reviews) especially tilted toward light-use buyers, which is frustrating.
    • driverdan 6y ago
      That's interesting. I didn't realize there were cobblers who resoled glued hiking boots. I guess it depends on the sole being available for purchase?
      • FrojoS 6y ago
        It’s a very common practice for climbing shoes, whether for mountaineering https://www.scarpa.com/mountaineering https://www.scarpa.com/mountaineering or rock climbing https://www.lasportiva.com/en/man/footwear/climbing https://www.lasportiva.com/en/man/footwear/climbing The former cost in the ball park of 200 USD to resole, the latter about 30 USD. Unfortunately, I don’t think sneakers, running or approach shoes can be resoled.
  • 6y ago
• metalliqaz 6y ago
  I don't like the front page. Sign up button shouldn't be front and center. It should be up at the top next to login. Content should be front and center. The front should be very similar to clicking "discover". Most of what is now on the front should be on a dedicated signup page.
• GuB-42 6y ago
  I didn't try to post a review, but is there a way to edit reviews at a later time? Not only it is essential for reviews that focus on durability but it should be actively encouraged. A review can easily go from "nice, solid-looking all-metal construction" to "the hinge just broke, upon closer inspection, it is actually quite flimsy and impossible to replace".
• tumblerz 6y ago
  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.
  • ahelwer 6y ago
    Yeah. This happens everywhere. Five years back I bought an expensive and sturdily-built couch. Liked it so much I bought a second (after a series of moves during which the first one was given/long-term-loaned to a friend). Same brand, price, etc. The new one was complete shit. The back of it was close to cardboard; I put my knee through it while nudging it around! And this is something in the several thousand $ range! Don't buy Gus Modern furniture.
  • hedora 6y ago
    Maybe rating by brand would be better. Harbor Freight is known for high variance. If they added a “no really, not destined for a landfill” brand line that was 99% unbreakable, then that would bubble up to the top. The problem with trusting brands is that manufacturers (like whirlpool and frigidaire) intentionally rotate which of their sub brands is garbage every few years to prevent people from avoiding planned obsolescence. Better then, to go off of manufacturers / holding companies / design houses, but that varies by industry. (In computing, counting all the name brand computer companies as design houses would make sense. But then, what about ikea appliances? They’re mostly rebranded whirlpools...) The other problem is that internal politics can tear down a reliable brand in less time than it takes their old stuff to fail. Various shoe brands in the late 90’s come to mind. They went from reliably lasting years to lasting 6 months (there was a trend where the hiking or leather tongue bottoms were replaced by tennis shoe style material).
    • tumblerz 6y ago
• tornato7 6y ago
  Awesome website! I'll add it to the sidebar on https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ I approved a post of this website, but I would recommend making a self post describing your journey if you want more visibility on the subreddit.
• racl101 6y ago
  Cool idea. Really cool. Quick suggestion: the search could maybe return a results not found message when it can't find anything instead of doing nothing. Otherwise people may think it's broken.
  • restingrobot 6y ago
    I think the search is actually broken, I can't get it to retun anything, Chrome on Mac.
• mindslight 6y ago
  I like the buy it for life concept, but it's been morphing into basic wanton consumerism. Some examples just from browsing this site: Kitchenaid Refrigerator - Unless it's a lemon, any refrigerator should last at least 10 years. Although all are at risk for the coolant leaking, but all can be repaired. I don't really see what would set a "BIFL" fridge apart. Nalgene - I had a few Nalgenes that I thought would last forever, then the harm of BPA was discovered. I'm now wary of any water bottle made of plastic. I've got a stainless canteen, but I still don't consider this "for life" as they can get dented, you might need to buy more for trips etc. Socks - No matter how sturdy they look when new, eventually they're going to end up worn through. Buy yourself nice socks, especially for hiking. But they're a wear item, not capital equipment.
• codecamper 6y ago
  Solving first world problems. ok.
• acheron 6y ago
  If I could actually know "durability" before buying something I would love that info. It's just hard to really know that in advance, because products change so much. E.g., my vacuum cleaner is still working fine after 15 years. Great, but that just says that if you bought one of these vacuums 15 years ago it probably would have been a good idea. But it doesn't actually tell you much about what to buy today, because the models and designs and manufacturing processes and quality control have all probably changed since then. Nonetheless this site looks great for getting what info we can. Nice work and I'll be saving it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• jonnycomputer 6y ago
  What is your approach to screen out those trying to game the product review system?
• starpilot 6y ago
  Also see https://www.shitredditbuys.com/page/17 https://www.shitredditbuys.com/page/17 This is a new category of websites that are frontends for Reddit content. A year ago someone made a jobs website that compiled interviews with people in different occupations. All were from Reddit and uncredited.
• zargon 6y ago
  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.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    That's one of the issues I try to solve with this platform. I want to find durable products that are still on the market with a similar quality for years. Have you ever looked at the BIFL subreddit? One user explained the problem with the BIFL community very well in his post: "I joined this sub for the purpose of buying stuff like lifetime warranty backpacks (osprey), great tools, camp gear, kitchen wear ect. Yet this sub has basically became an Instagram for the old shit people find in they're grandparents house which offers no benefit to me now. I'm not going to buy, nor could I even find a kitchen aid mixer you grandma still uses from the 70s. Most stuff back then was made to last, we know that. I want stuff thats still made today with quality."
• stiray 6y ago
  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. https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-154925745-1 https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-154925745-1 (blocked by ublock origin) https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.... (blocked by ublock origin) https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,500,600,700,800&display=swap https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,500,6... (blocked by LocalCDN) https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&display=swap https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&display=sw... (blocked by LocalCDN) https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cookie https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cookie (blocked by LocalCDN)
  • encom 6y ago
    Same here. This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/lrI3y7j.png https://i.imgur.com/lrI3y7j.png
  • jiscariot 6y ago
    Yea, I'm running Firefox 78.2 and none of the product images are displaying.
• djklanac 6y ago
  Love the concept. I find it nearly impossible to buy products that are made well and intended to last longer than a year. Any plans to lead a movement, because I’m in.
• pineyboi 6y ago
  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.
• moneywoes 6y ago
  Seems similar to the wire cutter no?
• ksd482 6y ago
  The search doesn't work.
• noscript 6y ago
  The website does not work and it is a malware. >We're sorry but buyforlifeproducts doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. You ask me to run your proprietary computer code in order to display text and images. HTML technology does support displaying of text, images, forms. The only reason to add JavaScript is to: * record user mouse movements and keystrokes * spy on his browser fingerprint * use 0-day exploits on user * add trackers, ads
• noscript 6y ago
  What happens if your website gets popular, someday you lose your job and money, then some entities offer you a bribe to influence something on your site?
• camkerr 6y ago
  Fun idea, looks interesting. My only note of feedback would be to make the images bigger on the discover & product pages. You've got a lot of negative space there. Let people see nice big images of the products.
• beprogrammed 6y ago
  Love it
• hellokaushik 6y ago
  The review system could be improved, some weight should be given to products with larger number of reviews.
• kpt 6y ago
  Yes. Thank you.
• pcdoodle 6y ago
  YES! I LOVE THIS IDEA!
• thedrake 6y ago
  Would like to have a category for Toys. After having four kids it is clear what toys have stood the test of time in durability as well as playability
• simon_acca 6y ago
  Very cool concept, the altruistic spirit of the site made me feel compelled to write a review. Small feedback: all the newlines from my review went missing once it got published! If this is intentional (like in HN) perhaps put a link to formatting guide next to the editor.
• summitsummit 6y ago
  TOS goes to google.com
• imdsm 6y ago
  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
• Dig1t 6y ago
  This is awesome! I love that the country where it is manufactured is listed as well. One thing I have a concern about: is the country of origin related to the specific product or the company itself? An example is the KitchenAid refrigerator. I think KitchenAid does make a lot of things in the US, like their mixers, but the refrigerator listed (according to other websites) is made in Mexico. This might be a little confusing as the listing makes it look like the fridge is made in the US. Also the "made in" drop down specifically keeps the fridge in the list when set to "US".
• darepublic 6y ago
  Are there bad products (rotten) on here too? I might not always have access to the recommended products but it would be good to see if a particular product is a dud
• bargl 6y ago
  Suggestion: To me this would be much more useful if it was available where I purchase my items. Like in Amazon, I see this as a web extension that could be super useful like honey. I wouldn't use honey nearly as much if it didn't integrate with Amazon, but it does so I don't have to worry about it. I know that's a ton of work, not a minor suggestion but it would be super cool.
• skratlo 6y ago
  Consider removing Google Analytics to protect your visitors' privacy, there's self-hosted open-source alternatives.
• ajb 6y ago
  When I am most engaged with an item is when I just bought it. How about a way to register when bought an item, and a reminder to review it 1, 5 and 10 years later? That way you will know how durable it really is. Also, I have zero interest in "following a brand". What I want from a site like this a way to research items when I am thinking of buying one, and to contribute back my knowledge on the few occasions when I have some. I don't want yet another content stream attention suck - please think seriously about how you can make a great site while using as little of everyone's attention-budget as possible. I signed up based on your HN comment, but just going from the site I would never have done - it looks like either marketing or a content farm.
• skratlo 6y ago
  Search doesn't work, it autocompletes but doesn't search
  • offmycloud 6y ago
    Yeah, same here, Firefox 81 on Linux is throwing a "type error" on the console when I try to search.
• blondie9x 6y ago
  Good stuff just needs repair ability score but that ties into ifixit
• Zelphyr 6y ago
  I love that the home page is clear, concise, and simple while still being stylish. The current trend of a massive hero image pushing most/all of the usable content below the fold is getting really, really old to me.
• Unsimplified 6y ago
  The cost of a product is not only replacement price but also replacement time. Replacing with an alternative is more cost than an identical. High-quality long-life products have excellent value efficiency. The key to online review info is convenient centralized interfaces and accurate-trustable reviews. Curation is the future.
  • gillesjacobs 6y ago
    It would be a great feature to log replacement time and adjust life-time price as a product property.
• leptoniscool 6y ago
  Durability is one of the reasons we shop at Costco
• SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  Excited to see this! Comment: looking at the Lodge Skillet, I can easily see how this is not going to scale well for products with many, many reviews. The page is already cluttered and hard to navigate with just a few dozen comments. Do you have a plan to collapse the UI into something more of a summary that can be expanded?
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    I will certainly work on the UX/UI in the coming weeks. Right now, I'm just overwhelmed by all the submissions and comments.
• crorella 6y ago
  This is a great idea! I love it.
• Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  Looks great, but seems to be DOA outside of the US? Shipping is a binary choice between 'US' and 'worldwide' (what about companies that only ship within Europe?) and there's no way to display prices in other currencies.
• lilbuilds 6y ago
  This is super useful. I've definitely spent countless hours trying to research answers to the question "What is the longest lasting x to buy?" because it seems like any other shopping strategy tends to fill my life with garbage that constantly needs replaced.
• yellowfool 6y ago
  Kitchenaid is made in china, at least the ones you can get in europe.
• mtnGoat 6y ago
  Great idea, but it needs more data, currently it almost comes off as biased. For instance this product: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/18 https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/18 why were only a handful of glowing 5 star reviews pulled in? Sure, most of the reviews on Amazon are positive, but a fair mix would be nice.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    It undoubtedly needs more data! That's why I posted it here with the hope of getting a lot of product submission.
• K2h 6y ago
  By definition, if a product has a lifetime warrenty wouldn't it get ranked very high? as long as the company reputation is not too bad. I went to buyforlifeproducts.com to submit a few suggestions but was disappointed to see I couldn't make any submissions without an account. I understand accounts help keep out the rif raf, but for me, too high of a barrier to contribute at this time.
• ryanSrich 6y ago
  Curious how you would handle brands that build multiple lines. Some durable, others not. For example, I love my stitched sole made in America Danner boots. However, the glued sole boots made in China style will break apart after a few hundred hikes, and unfortunately they aren'r repairable.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    I think it comes down to the degrading quality problem for brands and products. One thing I have in mind was suggested by another user: To combat brands changing over time as they often do, graphing the rating over time may let you see when/where the brand went from quality to cashing in on the recognition. I could see such a feature eventually evolving into more, like allowing people to highlight major points on the timeline (like an acquisition or change in manufacturing location) or letting you filter reviews to a certain period. But that's quite a big feature, something for the future :)
• lanius 6y ago
  Is the site down? Nothing seems to happen when I enter text into the search bar.
• hiidrew 6y ago
  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.
  • hubraumhugo 6y ago
    As I mentioned before, moderators and a trustworthiness/credibility rating for each user can probably tackle this issue. Have you ever posted some bs in a niche subreddit? It quickly gets deleted/downvoted.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• arh68 6y ago
  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). [1] http://bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm http://bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm just read about this guy a la the Visicalc thread, never thought I'd use the phrase
• noscript 6y ago
  Your website does not work, it is JavaScript malware. >We're sorry but buyforlifeproducts doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. You are trying to run your proprietary computer code on my machine, in order to display text and images, even though it is not necessary. HTML technology supports text, images, form. If someone requires JavaScript it is in order to: * track user mouse movement, keystrokes * track his browser, read browser fingerprint * display ads and trackers * use 0-day exploits on user THIS COMMENT IS CENSORED BY HACKERNEWS. SAVE IT QUICKLY
• desertblues 6y ago
  The desire for minimizing possion subject to max utility is a tribe I'd aspirationally want to be in. A tool like this would decrease research effort sig. I'd personally trust the masses more than a pro. Biggest risks are obvious: manipulation of scores, minority voices on niche products, etc.
• no2script 6y ago
  Your website doesn't work, it is JavaScript malware. >We're sorry but buyforlifeproducts doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. You are trying to run your proprietary computer code on my machine, in order to display text and images, even though it is not necessary. HTML technology supports text, images, form. If someone requires JavaScript it is in order to: * track user mouse movement, keystrokes * track his browser, read browser fingerprint * display ads and trackers * use 0-day exploits on user THIS COMMENT IS CENSORED FROM HACKERNEWS, SAVE IT NOW
• giancarlostoro 6y ago
  What's nice about this is you could probably contact some of the good brands and advertise under the terms that you would link to their reviews on the site, just find the top quality brands and contact them. I am all for advertising that's contextual on content and not invasive, as long as it stays and never leaves the website.
• mNovak 6y ago
  Nice concept. I had an idea a while back to make a reviews site where the prerequisite was having owned the item for something like 5 or 10 years.
• JoshTko 6y ago
  The key challenge for any reviews site is how to maintain quality over time. As a site gains popularity, the incentive for malicious actors increases and the site will eventually fall prey to them. How will this site avoid this fate?
• steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Without some constraint for how people review things under the BIFL umbrella, it's hard to trust ratings. Most people don't understand what BIFL means for a certain products because they don't use it frequently, understand its breadth of use cases, understand its construction, etc. Things like knives or cookware require a decent understanding of the materials used, construction process, and potential use cases to really guage if it's BIFL or not in all common contexts. You'll wind up with most people rating it based on two things I think: How long they've personally had it, and how much they like it. You'll also get people adding items like an iPhone because they just like it. But a phone is essentially a disposable electronics device. It doesn't really belong on a BIFL website. Perhaps a series of parameters need to be defined in order to enter a review at all. Try to determine the attributes that comprise a BIFL product and have reviewers define how the product meets these criteria. How is it durable? Why? What is repairable about it? Is it easy to find repair services? How long do you think it would really last for a typical owner? Just trying to help - I'm a major fan of BIFL items, but over the years I find I'm routinely disappointed by what others believe fits in the category. I essentially don't pursue BIFL items on the internet through any social means anymore because it tends to be pretty bogus.
• j4nt4b 6y ago
  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"
  • disprofuse 6y ago
    Another example is e.g. original England-made Dr Martens shoes (the China-made ones are held in poor regard, apparently). Apart from highly durable and long-lasting, for me an important factor is repairability. You can take such a shoe to a generic repair shop and replace parts if e.g. you walked on glass and it cut through the sole. Meanwhile my SO bought some fashionable expensive sneakers that broke in the sole after a few days of wearing. SO took them back to the shop and they just gave SO another pair. That’s just sad.
    • kokey 6y ago
      I've had the same experience with old stock Dr Martens bought from a bunch of cockneys at a shop near Brick Lane, the longest a pair of shoes of mine ever lasted until then. Years later I ordered some from Amazon which I suspect may have been fake since it got damaged very quickly and after a long walk I ended up with a foot injury. I've since discovered Rieker shoes by accident and it's looking like it's lasting at least as long.
    • sdfkkksdfsdff 6y ago
      If it's all just plastic, you can melt the broken thing and make something new from it. It doesn't have to be such a bad thing.
• kbenson 6y ago
  While on some level I knew there must exist $120 T-shirts (and more expensive ones too, I'm sure), it's still kind of surreal to be presented with one.[1] 1: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/33 https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/33
• abhiminator 6y ago
  Great idea and decent implementation. The concept sounds great and I hope the site grows. Also I'll put in a little plug here for /r/BuyItForLife/ -- great subreddit for talking/sharing about products that aren't engineered with planned obsolescence in mind.
• FrojoS 6y ago
  Love your German username which I would loosely translate as petrol head Hugo.
• writimov 6y ago
  Good prototype. To achieve your goal of best products in categories and subcategories, you will need a few things: * Universal equations that can be applied to all products or major categories of products for what is 'best' durable for long term use, including adjustments for value/price. Have to evaluate for self-repair vs pro repair. Availability and price of spare parts. Account for geographic location. * To help sell the 'best' recommendation for subcategories of 'best', you could show other products that were close but are not the best. But to help users see 'best' in specific categories (ex. not best durable fridge, but best quietest fridge) you will need many custom filters. Some ideas to copy are the extensive filters on Digikey for say, an alum. electrolytic capacitor: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/aluminum-electrolytic-capacitors/58?s=N4IgTCBcDaIMYEMAOC4EsAuB7ATiAugL5A https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/aluminum-electrol... or on McMasterCarr for a screw: https://www.mcmaster.com/screws https://www.mcmaster.com/screws * A good test of 'best' durable in my mind, is answering the question: Would this product be the one chosen to go with the Mars colony ships? Is it fairly cheap, durable in all environments, easy to repair, easy to make spare parts, lasts a long time, low maintenance, etc?
  • writimov 6y ago
    One other thing I haven't seen anyone tackle is to evaluate 'best' durable via first principles equations and engineering. Ex of a fridge: * Define the physics of how the product performs over its life: physics of door opening and effort to lift the door, compressor energy to turn on, vibration life cycles and wear, power converter wear, etc. * Define theoretical best performance for the product for each use case in fundamental physics. * Get performance data for real test units. * OR if testing real units is too expensive and time consuming. Put modeled fake units in a physics simulation engine (like https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PhysicsSection.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PhysicsSection.html) and stochastically seed millions of virtual units with minor differences and virtually test to failure. This would result in a much stronger measure of 'best' durable, that then, the crowd-sourced reviews would, hopefully, reiterate.
• RocketSyntax 6y ago
  Why not put Amazon affiliate links on your page to purchase the item? Mad commission
• scottlocklin 6y ago
  Great idea; one I had considered myself, because I'm sick of buying garbage. There are two kind of rocks I saw it foundering on; one is luxury goods. Davok umbrellas; marketed as a luxury good -really, it's just a badass umbrella -maybe last one I ever need buy; very well made -almost worth what they cost. The other rock it could founder on is green. I mean, if you buy something once, that's pretty green, but so often this sort of thing turns into sackcloth and ashes or absurd high fashion sackcloth and ashes that cost too much. The green variety is already a sort of consumer preference in Germany, but I think their idea has some "well made" meaning as well (nachhaltig? I dunno). Here were a couple of places like that my German pals sent me early this year when I was thinking about it in earnest: https://www.manufactum.de/ https://www.manufactum.de/ https://utopia.de/bestenlisten/onlineshops/ https://utopia.de/bestenlisten/onlineshops/ https://www.biber.de/ https://www.biber.de/ https://www.torquato.de/haus-wohnen/ https://www.torquato.de/haus-wohnen/ Anyway, it's just a bunch of disconnected thoughts in my mind. Good on you for taking it further. I had thought the sibyl problem would make a rotten tomatoes type thing too difficult if it ever got juice (even if it didn't; bots are everywhere linking trash products). I had also thought it would be very difficult to scale as a manually proctored catalog of carefully assessed things, and it would be real easy to corrupt if you don't scale to the right kinds of reviewers. The world does need more stuff like this. People who make shitty products should be punished.
• miguelmota 6y ago
  > Free Forever What's the plan for monetization in the long run?
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  Cool. I wish there were durable computers. E.g. I've got my Dell E5500 about a decade ago and still totally enjoy it. Since then I've just replaced the HDD with an SSD, replaced the RAM once and clean the fan every now and then (super easy!). It really seems built for ease of maintenance/upgrading as a top priority. Everything works perfectly. The only thing it can't do is modern 3D gaming (which I don't want). I'd don't mind buying a modern analogue which would last me the next 10+ years but I don't know which modern model can be expected to be nearly as durable and pleasure to maintain.
  • loco5niner 6y ago
    (As I look down and see E5540 on my laptop. Great device, going strong.)
• bgdkbtv 6y ago
  Great website idea spawned from a Reddit subreddit. Similar to what I did back a couple years ago with Roast My Site (no longer active) after seeing /r/roastme subreddit
• DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
  I selected the "Backpacks" category and the top 5 results consisted of "dungarees", water bottles and shoes. In fact, only 7 of the 43 results shown were backpacks. Just a datapoint!
• herpderperator 6y ago
  Just curious: I can't seem to figure out where the data used on this site is coming from. Is it hardcoded in the app and encoded differently? I can't see an API being used that references any of the products. When I refresh, it seems the data loads at the exact same time as the app which makes me think the data is hardcoded somewhere. Example: There is a product with the word Dungarees in it, but I can't find any reference to it in the Network tab.
  • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    It appears that the data is coming from a Firestore database, due to the request to https://firestore.googleapis.com https://firestore.googleapis.com
• dancemethis 6y ago
  Not a good idea to get inspiration from Rotten Tomatoes, unless it's a parody website. come on, look at its name. Rotten Tomatoes is obviously meant to be a joke website.
• l0b0 6y ago
  Some issues after using for a few minutes: - 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.
• thedogeye 6y ago
  This site is a great idea. If you work at it I believe you can make it a financial success.
• zaroth 6y ago
  Great work Adrian and congrats on launching! Some design feedback which you can feel free to consider or totally ignore, I am by no means an expert; I’m not a fan of the horizontal slider on a short page with almost no vertical height. I also don’t like how each tile doesn’t even fill the width of the screen. It’s much easier and faster for me the scroll vertically than horizontally. This really made the landing page not work for me visually and functionally to the point where I might bounce. I don’t understand why you’re showing me a cast iron pan, socks, a jacket, a water bottle, a pocket knife... It seems very random. It made me think those were the items that were on sale? On the landing page tiles, the way you show the score on the tile, was visually confusing for me. At first I thought it was a price, then I thought maybe a count or a timer or a bid or something? I’m still not quite sure what it is. If it’s upvotes and you’re trying to show hot products this month, consider stealing some design elements from ProductHunt - you’ll see how they make the count an obvious upvote, and they label the section so you can understand why those 3 things are being shown. Now, your Discover page layout on the other hand is a lot stronger in my opinion. The information layout was a lot easier to understand, it was easy to scroll through, and although I’m sure you have some algorithm for what order they are shown it didn’t feel like specific ones were being pushed. You might strongly consider just making the Discover page your home page and and just leading with that! I wonder if you measured percent of unique visitors that performed a search, or average number of items viewed, you would see a huge boost for new visitors who arrived directly on the Discover page versus the current landing page. If you did this A/B test and wrote about it you’d probably get another shot at the HN front page too. I think your biggest challenge will be crowdsourcing more product entries. You’re probably well below critical mass where visitors are likely to find something in a given category they’re looking for. But the core idea of buying specifically for longevity and quality in order to appreciate long term value I think is a great concept. Just thinking off the top of my head I’d want see products in all of the following categories; Electronics (Charging cables, rechargeable batteries, maybe data storage) Tools (Essential tools everyone should have 1 of) Household items, from pillows and blankets to fans and trash bins, to personal care like quality brushes and beard trimmers. I could go on and on, somehow you need to entice or fund the buildout of the database. I assume you monetize through Amazon product links?
• Larrikin 6y ago
  When it comes to clothes and worn garments I'd really like a fashionable rating as well. If I'm not in a life or death battle against the elements I'd consider something less durable if it looked significantly better.
• mastrsushi 6y ago
  This is pretty much a blog listing products with reviews that you can find on other major established sites.
• fouc 6y ago
  Seems broken for me in safari, I get "Unhandled Promise Rejection: Error: Loading CSS chunk chunk-54a39790 failed. (/static/css/chunk-54a39790.cfd47c5e.css" The only thing I can guess as being the issue is there's a strict dependency on google fonts?
• bussiere 6y ago
  Thanks a lot for this, it will be very useful.
• bussiere 6y ago
  May i suggest you to add a tip button ? It's a very useful project and i will not be against tip you for this.
  • loco5niner 6y ago
    There is a "Support Us" link (top, left) that sends you to buymeacoffee.com
• sails 6y ago
  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.
• Theodores 6y ago
  You need to start with a niche and a community. That means a geographical restriction and product restrictions. Good candidates for a niche include things that people only buy once or intend to buy once where the cost is high and people can afford the time to do their research. You also need your niche to be something people are passionate about and therefore willing to put in the effort writing reviews. Once you have momentum in your niche you can then accept reviews for a wider range of products. Then, if that goes well, you can go to other markets, for instance open up in the rest of the English speaking world. Facebook started with one college, went on to other colleges, went on to the colleges outside the US and then opened their doors to everyone. Gamification works too. If you can get people in a trade to be motivated to write reviews then you can give them internet points that they might like to have. Also try and work on your own pain points. What have you agonised over buying to arrive at a choice that has worked for you? Products also need the resources to keep them going. Service manuals and part numbers matter. How people use the site matters too, for adding in reviews you almost need a complete product database of every product ever made by barcode with GTIN images magically appearing. If you can engage people to submit reviews, e.g. this week we are looking at toasters, what you got folks? as the topic. Then people could be prompted to help out. As mentioned though, the scope is considerable, larger than an ecommerce project and you need to focus on a niche, get that working and then use the platform for everything else.
• frankzander 6y ago
  Please optimize your website in that way that it works if tracking protection in Firefox is enabled. I also recommend you to build a website that doesn't depend on any third party services if possible.
• T1glober 6y ago
  How do you test if a product is durable or not? I mean what's the time frame?
• sharker8 6y ago
  Cool project and I support it. However looking at this list I am seeing several things I intended to use for life and instead lost somehow.
• interestica 6y ago
  The 'search' is a bit wonky. I can search 'hiking socks' and it works. If I enter 'socks' and hit enter, no response (it doesn't even fail).
• hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  $180 cast iron pan? That’s fucking dumb.
• ozten 6y ago
  I love the idea. Including a $120 T-shirt didn’t make sense for me.
• choicenotchance 6y ago
  It doesn't have Indian products as of now. Is this exclusion by choice or just because there haven't been any Indian contributors?