Help me by drinking Beer | Hacker News Reader

Help me by drinking Beer

localbeer.me

1 pointdholowiski3 comments

I'm not sure I follow the point of this site. You've the idea of well respected reviews & resources of a site like Rate Beer or Beer Advocate and put it into a location aware environment, yes. But I fail to see the usefulness of this over looking through the beer available by my local breweries on those sites. They do have indexes of breweries by locale which provide the same functionality with a few more clicks. The only thing I see here is a really obnoxiously styled page competing with two juggernauts of really good content.

The idea is, most beer drinkers have no idea who their local breweries are - this site presents them right on the front page. Even if you know where your local breweries are, if you visit another city you might not know what their local breweries are.

I'm not trying to 'compete' with Rate Beer or Beer Advocate. I would rather use their reviews, but they don't make their information available via an API, so I had to add my own reviews.

I understand on the API issue, I've looked through that sort of thing too. The problem with that is if you invent any sort of beer site, you automagically have to try and compete with the big boys.

The usage problem I'm seeing is that if I search 'beer louisville ky', I get pubcrawler (which does put location first, but for argument is a horrible website) followed by all of my local pubs. If I were to search for 'hoptimus' which is a very likely query after visiting one of our local pubs, I get BA & RB followed by the pub's website. What use cases do you have that somebody would find your site useful over Google? Remember: these people have to be actively looking for pubs in the area already or they wouldn't have been interested in your page to begin with.

To me, you have many fronts of competition all better stocked with information here. You need more compelling reasons for use than just location information. One thought I've had (not to give away my own million dollar ideas) is crowd sourced beer stock information. Knowing where I can find that last bottle of Lucky Bastard would be pretty awesome. Not that I'd ever voluntarily fill in information to help other people find rare beers I want to buy on my next paycheck! ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com