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Are these sites really that useful? I checked a couple of products on stackshare that I have used. Shallow content. And got prompted immediately with a signup p

by akudha 6y ago

Are these sites really that useful? I checked a couple of products on stackshare that I have used. Shallow content. And got prompted immediately with a signup popup, just like Instagram does. According to similarweb, the site gets 1.4M pageviews per month. So I guess the demand is there, I just wish the information was better.

hobofan 6y ago
I use them mainly for discovery, and do my own evaluation on the tools, as the crowdsourced reviews are mostly crap. Stackshare was great in the beginning, but as is the way with every site with crowdsourced reviews, business motives (incentivized/fake reviews) or personal motives (writing shallow reviews for "clout") took hold after 1-2 years (around the same time the added the signup popup).
- akudha 6y ago
  I tried a semi popular product, it wasn't even listed. And that giant login popup irritated the hell out of me. Why do they need me to login? Are they aggregating this data and selling it or something like that? Lets say we build a better version of stackshare. What would be the things you would look for, as a user (other than honest reviews)? It is near impossible to do a good job of comparing features, even having up-to-date pricing data is hard. So what else can be added to make it useful?
  - hobofan 6y ago
    I've actually spent some time working on a Stackshare derivate focused on Marketing SaaS product for a friend of mine (tough that never ended up launching). For a pure generic SaaS & OSS tools site like Stackshare is, I'm not sure if there is a good business model that doesn't compromise the product. A few possible improvements over Stackshare: - Honest & in-depth long-form reviews. Quality matters so much more than quantity. Even a single in-depth blog post every few weeks would provide more value than the crowdsourced ones you currently find on the site - Openly accessible, and no social/gameification features that nobody needs - Better categories and making it possible for a tool to be in multiple ones (and being able to see it). The structure of the current ones is a mess. E.g. CMake is in "Java Build Tools" but the "C/C++ build tools" category is basically empty with 2 tools. - Better searching/filtering. Kind of connected to the previous point. They have the data (don't know of which quality) of "Tool1 works with Tool2", so you could possibly have a more generic "Build tools" category and then filter by "works with Python". - I don't care much for automatic comparison features, as they often don't yield good results. E.g. Jira often looks good in such comparisions, but you'll still want to bang your head against a wall every time you have to wait for it to load one of it's pages. A good alternative would be a quick overview of key metrics and category-dependent badges, which you can use to form your own opinions. RubyToolbox[0] does a fairly good job of that. [0]: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/pagination https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/pagination
    - akudha 6y ago
      Thank you for the detailed comment and for the ruby-toolbox link. All good ideas. Though keeping the reviews up-to-date might become a full time job in itself, as software changes often. I use a service called clickup, they add features constantly and quickly. How does ruby toolbox do the categories? All other data they show can be automated, but I wonder how they do categorization. They probably use the topics feature from github, I still think it is hard to automate it fully. Edit: Ah, never mind. Found this https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog

by akudha 6y ago

hobofan 6y ago

I use them mainly for discovery, and do my own evaluation on the tools, as the crowdsourced reviews are mostly crap. Stackshare was great in the beginning, but as is the way with every site with crowdsourced reviews, business motives (incentivized/fake reviews) or personal motives (writing shallow reviews for "clout") took hold after 1-2 years (around the same time the added the signup popup).

akudha 6y ago
I tried a semi popular product, it wasn't even listed. And that giant login popup irritated the hell out of me. Why do they need me to login? Are they aggregating this data and selling it or something like that? Lets say we build a better version of stackshare. What would be the things you would look for, as a user (other than honest reviews)? It is near impossible to do a good job of comparing features, even having up-to-date pricing data is hard. So what else can be added to make it useful?
- hobofan 6y ago
  I've actually spent some time working on a Stackshare derivate focused on Marketing SaaS product for a friend of mine (tough that never ended up launching). For a pure generic SaaS & OSS tools site like Stackshare is, I'm not sure if there is a good business model that doesn't compromise the product. A few possible improvements over Stackshare: - Honest & in-depth long-form reviews. Quality matters so much more than quantity. Even a single in-depth blog post every few weeks would provide more value than the crowdsourced ones you currently find on the site - Openly accessible, and no social/gameification features that nobody needs - Better categories and making it possible for a tool to be in multiple ones (and being able to see it). The structure of the current ones is a mess. E.g. CMake is in "Java Build Tools" but the "C/C++ build tools" category is basically empty with 2 tools. - Better searching/filtering. Kind of connected to the previous point. They have the data (don't know of which quality) of "Tool1 works with Tool2", so you could possibly have a more generic "Build tools" category and then filter by "works with Python". - I don't care much for automatic comparison features, as they often don't yield good results. E.g. Jira often looks good in such comparisions, but you'll still want to bang your head against a wall every time you have to wait for it to load one of it's pages. A good alternative would be a quick overview of key metrics and category-dependent badges, which you can use to form your own opinions. RubyToolbox[0] does a fairly good job of that. [0]: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/pagination https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/pagination
  - akudha 6y ago
    Thank you for the detailed comment and for the ruby-toolbox link. All good ideas. Though keeping the reviews up-to-date might become a full time job in itself, as software changes often. I use a service called clickup, they add features constantly and quickly. How does ruby toolbox do the categories? All other data they show can be automated, but I wonder how they do categorization. They probably use the topics feature from github, I still think it is hard to automate it fully. Edit: Ah, never mind. Found this https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog