4 ms·

I definitely agree there is a market for that, but the increasing problem is how consumers discover your product and sort through the trash heap of cheap altern

I definitely agree there is a market for that, but the increasing problem is how consumers discover your product and sort through the trash heap of cheap alternatives. Google is useless these days for finding product reviews, Amazon largely just shows you keyboard-smash Chinese brands unless you already know what brand you're looking for, and legitimate review sites like Wirecutter have a hard time keeping up or covering all the products (also you can't find them unless you already know they exist). I actually wonder if this will drive at least higher end consumers more towards the pre-Internet shopping word or mouth or personal experience approach to finding good products. For a while there the Internet allowed you to more easily discover and sort through new products and brands with a reasonable level of confidence so your horizons could broaden beyond products your friends and family recommended. Now the zone is so flooded with crap that the Internet seems less useful than it was 10 years ago for that task, which may lead to a reversion to more pre-Internet approaches to products, even if you might still buy it online. The real untapped market could be a curated version of Amazon, with reviews you could trust and a high proportion of the products being legitimate brands you could rely on.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
YouTube used to be a decent place to get product reviews but then the company took away the Dislike count for ideological reasons, making automated scrape-and-publish trash impossible to filter out of search results.
Matrixik 4y ago
Usually I spend time searching and reading comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/ Till now it worked really nice for me.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11. When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.
Eisenstein 4y ago
Try specialty forums and subreddits for the thing you are looking for. Need a scooter? /r/escooters on reddit would be where I would start hitting the search box. Cabinets? Search for a woodworking forum. You get the idea. There is almost always a group of incredibly experienced and knowledgeable people on the particular thing you need that have found a place to hang out with each other. Find them and ignore the rest of the noise.
ornornor 4y ago
> keyboard-smash Chinese brands I’m stealing that!

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

YouTube used to be a decent place to get product reviews but then the company took away the Dislike count for ideological reasons, making automated scrape-and-publish trash impossible to filter out of search results.

Matrixik 4y ago

Usually I spend time searching and reading comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/ Till now it worked really nice for me.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11. When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.

Eisenstein 4y ago

Try specialty forums and subreddits for the thing you are looking for. Need a scooter? /r/escooters on reddit would be where I would start hitting the search box. Cabinets? Search for a woodworking forum. You get the idea. There is almost always a group of incredibly experienced and knowledgeable people on the particular thing you need that have found a place to hang out with each other. Find them and ignore the rest of the noise.

ornornor 4y ago

> keyboard-smash Chinese brands I’m stealing that!