Show HN: ThingsOnReddit – Products linked to on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ThingsOnReddit – Products linked to on Reddit

thingsonreddit.com

153 pointsbrudolph68 comments

Hey, this is awesome! You literally built a product I specifically asked for here in a thread here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002985 (it’s idea #2).

Great job! If you put a Massdrop-style portal here I think it could become an amazing way to find crowdsourced products and displace e.g. Google Shopping.

So here’s what you should do next:

1. Crawl every subreddit that can be mapped to a hobby and then crawl all product recommendations.

2. Use NLP and sentiment analysis to map recommendations to coherent products.

3. Rank products according to the sentiment across the subreddit and aggregate the feedback into a few key pros/cons.

4. Sort by ranking and return the products to the user.

If you nail this I would use it for everything. I constantly search reddit for product recommendations on places like /r/coffee. You can capture entire communities like /r/mechanicalkeyboards to appeal to those who trust real user reviews online instead of places like Amazon.

Here’s an example flow for this functionality: you arrive on the site and the interface prompts you to select interests. You do so and you’re then presented with products matched to that interest derived from crawling the relevant subreddit(s). You can see the most commonly expressed pros and cons for each product (for less functional products like watches: what users most commonly liked and most commonly disliked).

Based on my own personal experiences shopping like this I am convinced there is a startup here for the right execution. There are a huge number of people who use social media like reddit, Twitter, etc to do their shopping and this could become their shopping homepage.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to iterating. The suggestions you lay out are great. I'll hopefully be adding features / changes as time goes on. This was an initial MVP in order to get feedback quickly, and it worked! Appreciate the thoughtful response.

While the commenter above me has much more insight, I second.

This is really well done! I personally hadn't thought of this. I collect resources from HN all of the time and pile them up in an Instapaper account, but I organize haphazardly and poorly.

That said I'd add that if you can offer for registered users or anybody a regular caching or hard-copy option. To double up on that, offer pipelining of a cached data dump to a file on Google drive or Dropbox or any other redundancy endpoint. You could grow from there in usability. Or somebody could write a middleman service for that... fun's fun.

Great work, anyway.

Reddit Search can do a similar trick: "subreddit:gadgets site:amazon.com", sorted by "top"[1]

It finds only posts, not comments. That's a good thing. Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it? Post karma is a bit better in this respect.

Reddit Search supports any domain. So you can search any shop. Like vat19.com and etsy.com.

Reddit allows browsing by domain. Like https://www.reddit.com/domain/amazon.com/top/

Secondly, some subreddits are specifically devoted to product recommendations:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/

* https://www.reddit.com/r/IdBuyThat/

* https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated/

And Reddit has a JSON output: https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.json?sort=top&...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Agadgets+site%3Aa...

> And Reddit has a JSON output.

I did not know that. Very cool. I tried this for AmazonTopRated => https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonTopRated.json?sort=top&t=all and got a forbidden / 403 error. Turns out that subreddit is "Private" / Invite-only.

However, google cache still has links. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.red...

Reddit can also send RSS:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney.rss?sort=top&t...

AmazonTopRated is invite-only. Hence, no 403.

> Comment karma accounts for a comment's entire content. What if the comment gets upvotes for something other than an Amazon link inside it?

Case in point: I was just looking at /r/malefashionadvice on the submitted site and found a lot of comments that were upvoted for mocking other users with joke products.

Is this a awesome! Is there a resource page on Reddit listing these different kind of queries?

Search docs[1], Reddit Wiki in general and their API docs.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/search

https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/wallstreetbets?order_by=...

Yup, pretty much what I expected.

I'd probably get downvoted for the comment I wanted to write. But nice to see WSBers on HN. The product list is exactly as expected.

I'd be curious to see the success of this with Amazon Affiliates, since it is nearly a direct copy of a site I made 2 months ago (that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content). The site is https://fastandes.com (currently at limited functionality).

> that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content.

Not clear from your wording so asking.

Did you Amazon shut down your website, or did they close your affiliate account? What do you mean by 'lack of original content' ? Was the site an almost replica copy of the amazon page product details? or was it a copy of some other affiliate site?

Thank you!

Their wording is "lack of original content." Affiliates is geared towards bloggers who write posts (such as reviews) about linked products. Mine was nowhere close to that. Some sites skate by with alternatives, but I can see how I need to revise in order to comply with the program.

Edit: for example, http://hackernewsbooks.com/ is a site that has been successful with Affiliates. Amazon tends to be a bit moody with that program.

Thanks. You are right. The only difference I see between your site and the hackernewsbooks.com site is that the latter also links to a source, like the comment on HN thread that the book reference was scraped from...

That was on my to-do list for future features. I shipped it very early, and Amazon demonetized me pretty soon after that, so lots of things I wanted to do became useless.

Have you tried something like skimlinks/viglink? I think you could use either as a medium to amazon associates and still get paid.

I'm using skimlinks with my project and it seems to work pretty well, though it does take a while to get paid.

I'd looked into it as an expansion in the future. Currently my data set was built strictly on Amazon links, so expansion would mean a rebuild/reindex of all reddit posts.

The skimlinks JS code automatically rewrites any links within their affiliate system, including amazon. I only suggested it because you'd only need to copy/paste a few lines of code to rewrite everything.

This is not nearly a direct copy of your product. This one features a well designed UX that immediately engages and encourages further exploration. Yours made me bounce in 2 seconds.

Agreed entirely. Amazon search is better than this one.

A product can still be copied in functionality without being copied in design. The general premise (product recommendations from Reddit) is the same. I also agree my UX is bad. I have been meaning to pivot with all the data I already have but haven't gotten there yet.

Not complaining, competition is good. Just giving warning and bringing up discussion.

I searched for laptop (as suggested) and got webcams and other stuff, doesn't really seem curated at all?

The keyword searching was really bad, agreed. Akin to trying to search on Craigslist with ads having a giant list of keywords in them.

our site was also rejected from amazon affiliate a couple times due to the same problem, eventually we changed the content and get passed, I wrote a medium post for that, https://medium.com/@guohuang/how-we-got-rejected-from-amazon...

so don't give up, just keep trying

I think I've mostly decided that with ThingsOnReddit's new found success, and my loss of interest in my project, I may throw in the towel on it. We'll see if I still feel the same in a few weeks to revamp it in a different manner.

there is a long way to go, i don't think "ThingsOnReddit" is a success yet, don't give up so easily, it is all about your determination.

Smart way of making money through referral links. I'm not even mad, that's amazing!

It really is, especially for books and music, wow. Out of curiosity is searched /r/bitcoin...

https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Bitcoin?order_by=score

I don't fully understand the psychology behind this. Would someone be more likely to buy an item just because is it mentioned in a forum. There are similar sites that mine HN for the books that are mentioned here. Can some ELI5 to me?

Just another affiliate scraper, nothing more, or less.

It also links to the posts, so this seems like it be nice for hobby related subreddits to see what the usuals recommend. Think calligraphy or cooking. Or even scholarly subreddit a like math and see some interesting books that people have brought up.

Reddit has narrow, highly specialized communities where product mentions, while not necessarily recommendations, are very useful for researching, shopping, and understanding a niche consumer market.

As someone who frequents /r/watches, I appreciate this. But it would be great to see prices more easily highlighted.

There is a roll of ducktape in 5th place by karma :)

Social Media product links are the new ToDo App:

http://hackernewsbooks.com/

http://www.dev-books.com/

http://toptalkedbooks.com/

http://reddittopbooks.com/tech/

Huh, looks like it is time to install NoCoin.

http://www.dev-books.com/

Includes a coin-hive mining script.

The first link I clicked on was from a comment where the author was giving an example of what _not_ to buy because it's wildly overpriced for what it does. Hopefully that's not representative.

https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/AmazonWTF/

This is stinkin' amazing. Great idea and nice implementation.

Multiple products in a post should be grouped. There's a few pages where all the products are from a single highly upvoted post

Congrats to OP for shipping. I tried to do something not so similar to this and failed miserably :-( https://hnpicks.com . I guess I just got busy and stopped half way at implementing the NLP and sentiment analysis. It was an interesting weekend :-)

Great idea and execution. You're probably building a nice passive income product.

The user experience on mobile is a bit clumsy. I would recommend putting some work into that. For example it's difficult to switch to a subreddit beyond the default five displayed at the top (without an overflow: property).

This would be interesting if it wasn't just live. Eg, if I could select a time period to show the most popular stuff from. Also a better way of discovering subs to browse, rather than having to know exactly what you're looking for. Perhaps an r/all equiv, but products ?

Those just sound like feature requests to me, rather than criticisms. I think the idea and execution are clean and effective. Not that you're wrong. Those are good ideas.

Something to fix - sub names are case-insensitive. Also, reddit automatically redirects to the correctly capitalized version, so it's easy to learn what it is.

That is, /r/Books and /r/books should be treated as synonims.

Some other similar sites with niches:

books- https://takcek.com

laptops- http://www.laptophits.com

Another for books: http://hackernewsbooks.com/

(Not affiliated, just where I took some pointers from)

http://toptalkedbooks.com is another one for books

This is a clever site. Nicely done!

I can't help but laugh at London's best, though: https://i.imgur.com/HWgujDq.png

Clicked link. Second item was a sex toy. Was not disappointed. Hit the link 10x more, always sex toys on first page. Yup, it is unfiltered!

In the age of product placement I'd be extremely worried about redditors gaming the site to promote their products. Cool site though.

Does this link are of amazon products only?

Yes, amazon dominates the product links, so it was easiest to start with that. In the future though, I'd love to add more.

Amazon provides the affiliate revenue, so Amazon products are what gets linked. I'm not opposed to the business model, I use affiliate links to monetize my site, too. But it does seem silly to shy away from admitting that this is trying to make some money from the links.

I don't think they are shying away from it - it's pretty clear in the about page. Seems like a totally reasonable way to get some revenue for the site.

I was referring more to OPs answer in this thread.

The whole point of the site is to make money via Amazon's affiliate program.

Very nice idea and execution.

Btw, how do you get the main product image url to display on your site? Is there an api for that?

great idea, while we were doing toptalkedbooks.com, my partner and I were thinking about doing the exact same thing for our next project. Nice UI, good execution, good luck!

just one friendly note: our site was rejected by amazon a couple time,(due to content issue), I hope your path is smoother.

The top product on cooking page [1] shows the folly of using reddit for product recommendations...

[1] https://thingsonreddit.com/things/r/Cooking?page=1&order_by=...

You may not have a need for a duck press now, but that looks like a good one if you did.

This is pretty much tailor made for the subreddit /r/INEEEEDIT

Your pagination has stopped working

Very cool! Congrats on shipping!

What's your tech stack?

How long did it take you to build this,starting from the idea to build and launch i.e. deploying code to thingsonreddit.com ?

Thanks, this project uses Ruby on Rails 5 with Webpacker (React). I've found making websites quickly with Rails is very effective. The data can be found on Google BigQuery and I then used Scrapy to scrape Amazon pages for further product info. It's deployed to a DigitalOcean node and connects to an Amazon RDS Postgres instance.

The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday, and I felt ready enough to post.

Thanks for the details.

> The conception of the idea was Tuesday. The next thing I knew it was Saturday.

That's amazing! You turned your idea into an MVP in 5 days. Very impressive.

Agreed this is amazing and inspiring. Well done!

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