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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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.

Reddit is the biggest player in this space right now. "[xyz product] reddit" are very popular search terms.

I think because without Reddit every result is an affiliate blog trying to sell the product. Reddit feels like the reviews come from real people.

How to build the next Google: all good results these days are within communities, and Google search has become useless for most of these searches.

So don't build a search engine: build a "rotten tomatoes for X" where the sources for each X are "the top N subreddits/communities/editorial-sites/forums for X".

For example, supplements: examine.com, reddit /r/supplements /r/nootropics (long tail ones), wikipedia, etc.

Then, final piece: make this aggregator site also a community (ala reddit/hn) where people vote on the results rankings, but also vote on how other people comment on them. Because you can lock down user accounts quite a bit (have high bar for registration with lots of verification for voting permissions), and you have a quality indictor for the users themselves (users voting on users), you may get much better results over time as the community sorts out who are legit and who isn't.

I'm not saying any system is immune to optimization/spam, but it feels like Reddit, HN, SO, Wikipedia at least prove that if you want good quality content, rely on a community. Why not extend the model to search itself?

I think wikipedia, HN, etc. are less suseptible because people don't use those sites as heavily to make purchasing decisions. Any community that helps with purchasing will be targeted by those interested in sales who figure out how to meet the "high bar" no matter what that may be. Even purchase verification isn't high enough these days (see recent unsolicited package scams such as the seeds from China).

I agree with you: It's a numbers game. There is a cost associated with driving up good reviews for a (bad) product. A website such as this has to cause higher costs for fake reviews than what they can reap via it.

However, at some point the whole review process might become unusable for legitimate users, resulting in too few reviews, rendering the whole endeavour futile.

E.g. if a shitty product earns a seller 20US$, and they expect to sell exactly 100 more over a site like this, then they can easily invest 1000 US$ into trying to make their product seem good, even if it isn't.

Thinking of this, by that reasoning a non-negligible part of the high cost of good quality products might also stem from the fact that advertising genuinely good quality must be expensive like hell (I guess).

I had a similar idea: build a kind of "stackexchange" of search engines. You start with a "generic" search engine infrastructure, and each community runs its own instance, tweaked accordingly. This would mean:

* The community chooses what goes in the search database, the rules for the crawler etc.

* People in the community can vote on stuff, etc.

* The engine can be customized to have some "semantic" understanding of what is scraped (i.e. on a math-oriented instance, it would understand latex, in a cooking one, it would be able to parse recipes if they respect schema.org).

I really believe in this kind of concept of "user curated, community oriented" search engine, since this means taking pretty much the opposite approach to what google does, thus:

* this wouldn't compete on google's own ground ==> higher chances of success.

* you could keep more control on the data

* the engine wouldn't pull any tricks on you by trying to overfit what you meant

* lots of customization options, etc.

But I never had the energy to try and start something with the idea…

Yep! Well put too. You should reach out, I don’t see contact info for you but I’ve been exploring a version of it I believe has potential to work.

And then Google surfaces that data in their results so no one even needs to go to your site...

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

Different problem because your value is in the index not the content.

companies must be paying for positive comments on reddit communities at this point.

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

OGL used to be great. They didn't get to where they are because of scumminess. However, the quality has dropped in the last few years, and they do seem to be more influenced by affiliate marketing these days.

There's big money in affiliate marketing and very little in reviews so this gradual erosion is unfortunately universal in review sites.

So, basically just like car & driver?

Where are the best places to find good information if not outdoorgearlab?

> No incentive to game the system with inflated review scores.

There huge incentives from the companies who make the products to influence the ratings, regardless.

Is there any way that this site can prevent fake reviews?

Straight up paid astroturfing is probably more lucrative and less obvious than affiliate links - It just requires more co-operation between the marketer and the salesman.

In your ideal version, how would the site get paid for?

> you aren't aggregating professional reviews of these products

They are: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/9

Wirecutter, Good Housekeeping, GearLab

Wirecutter is a pay to play setup. Give them a referral code or your product is not the top pick anymore after careful consideration.

I think it really depends on: (disposable income * time to evaluate reviews - fakespot review adjustment)

Reddit has been a good resource lately as someone else mentioned. They have a buy it for life subreddit. Camelcamelcamel for price history.

I haven't heard that about Wirecutter, and I think that would devastate their brand (and maybe hurt NYT's) if true.

There was some drama about it [0][1] a while ago about standing desk reviews.

[0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StandingDesk/comments/69npx4/drama_...

I keep on seeing this link pop up. Since no one is replying, I'd like to point out that I think the Wirecutter is actually in the right here. Another HN member did some investigation and found that Xdesk is stretching things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144078

In general, having been able to talk with some of the people there, I'm convinced that WC was focused first and foremost on truth-seeking and quality at this point in their life (pre-acquisition) — however, the consensus seems to have been that after the NYT acquired them, they started becoming more incentivized to grow revenue, and started to jump the shark.

I do not see a mention to kickbacks which is the main issue NextDesk raised with multiple emails then wire cutter responded then deleted the response.

It’s hard to find a product recommend without an affiliate link. Many recommendations have several comments about why they did not bother to review X cheaper or well known item.

My bad, I had clicked on several products (5 or so) that didn't have pro reviews. I went back and was able to find some with pro reviews. Seems like they need to beef this end up considerably if this is going to be a differentiator.

As mentioned below, I'm indeed aggregating professional reviews from different sources like Wirecutter or Gearlabs, there is just not that much data yet.

However, this should not be the core focus. After getting enough product submissions from users, I will focus on the cost per month metric. As you said, this could be the true differentiator.

If you could talk about TCO as in service costs associated, that would be amazing. I.e. A PS4 costs $300.. but after PS+ service costs (to use the features they give you).. that's something like $5/month extra.

I agree with you. It's more like metacritics than rotten-tomatoes

Even metacritic focus is/was aggregating professional critics' scores, although nowadays they have plenty of community reviews as well

Another thought is comparing its durability with just buying more of a cheaper version.

If I have a 500 shoe, does it last the same as 5 similar shoes in a row?

> I don't think the comparison to Rotten Tomatoes makes sense...

That went a totally different direction than I was expecting.

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.

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.

> 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.

In theory, that’s what the dates next to Amazon/App Store reviews are for. The problem with making them immutable though is: say you write a 5 star review, but the next day, the device craps out (inside the warranty). You contact the manufacturer who informs you that they can’t help you because it was caused by “user error” or whatever (basically, you can’t return/replace it). So you’d like to amend your review to mention that it crapped out, but you can’t. There also is the point of reviewing the product, not the company, but if a product and company sucks, why not warn the other consumers?

> In theory, that’s what the dates next to Amazon/App Store reviews are for.

There's no way to chart the average review score over time, though, is there? If people saw several years of 4.5-averaged scores and then a sudden drop to 3-average, that would tip them off, but looking at dates next to individual reviews doesn't help because any single review by itself varies wildly with the knowledge and opinion of the reviewer.

As for immutable reviews- that's a good point, although it seems like you could get around that by leaving reviews editable through at least the listed warranty period of the item. Or add a separate set of reviews that only become active after a certain period of time after you left your first review, but now we're getting into anal-retentive nerd territory that no average user is incentivized to venture into. ("Why, of course I'd like to log back on to a review site I used once six years ago and talk about how my washing machine is functioning!")

Edit: Actually, the type of person who would seek out and help populate a "reliability rating site" might be the type of person who would respond with details to a six-year-later email that asks for commentary on a product, especially if you can enter the review straight from an email reply.

Steam has a system where you see a score for recent and one for all time reviews.

Interestingly they only allow for recommend / not recommend instead of stars.

Steam also offers a graph of positive/negative reviews over time. But the more prominent recent reviews vs all time reviews usually conveys all the information needed

A popular ratings site around here shows the average rating of the past 6 months and an all time average. Very useful for detecting declining quality.

Man, I want people like you reviewing and qaing everything I release. Quality feedback.

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

Super valuable feedback, thank you! I will definitely work on all the things you mentioned to make the submission-process way more intuitive and frictionless.

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?

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!"

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.

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.

Amazon is correctly removing your reviews, because neither of your examples are things that belong in product reviews.

Do not leave price related reviews. The prices change daily. You may leave a bad review because you think the price is too high. Tomorrow the mouse may cost $10, but your one star review is still there ten years later.

Shipping problems do not belong in product reviews. The listing is for a PRODUCT, shared by any number of amazon sellers. Amazon provides seller reviews to comment on seller's shipping problems. (If you are leaving these as seller reviews, then I apologize for assuming, and you are correct)

Well, you're not actually reviewing the product. Sure, I wouldn't mind a time series of the price history of an item esp in cases with large jumps. But, generally the point of reviews is to tell me about the product. I can do my own evaluation of what I am willing to pay.

Hijacked product pages and price swings are two of Amazon Shopping's biggest vulnerabilities from my view. Do you know of a price history website/app like you're describing? Sounds like a very good idea.

camelcamelcamel [0] tracks price history for Amazon listings

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

If I’m reading your review of a mouse, I want to know how well the mouse worked. If I want to know the price history, I’ll go to camelcamelcamel.

You telling me the mouse was cheaper before doesn’t help me decide which mouse to buy today.

I've taken to running all my amazon purchases through fakespot dot com first. It's highly discouraging.

> Amazon automatically provides you with the cheapest version of the product you’re looking at,

Nice; thanks, Amazon.

> even if it’s potentially fake.

Yikes! Hope I don't get one of those!

> Most of the time you cannot even return these items!

That's just rubbish though, Amazon returns are so easy, if the price is only marginally lower elsewhere I'll order from Amazon just because - if necessary - returning is easy, third party or not.

I'm not sure if I get the point of it, if I can't tell if the product's a 'fake', aren't I happy? If I can (and I'm not happy with it anyway) I'll just send it back?

They have a chrome extension FYI that shows their data/status on a product page on Amazon.

I think the ship has sailed on the trustworthiness of online reviews from rando people. Pretty much every store or review site that aggregates user-submitted content has done a poor job of removing spam and fake reviews, and people are finally starting to realize how worthless the ratings are. Even if someone does crack this nut and figures it out, they won't be believed because of how fake everything has been for the last 20 years.

I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage.

Well, there wasn't a huge incentive for the biggest players to actually fix the problem. As long as Amazon was able to push the cost of returns to others, they only cared just enough that it didn't hurt their brand. This goes for both bad products and poorly advertised products.

Now that there have been some recent rulings that Amazon is liable for defective products they sell[1], we might see a difference as they put actual effort into it since it's more directly related to the bottom line of their e-commerce business.

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/court-rules-amazon-liable-de...

I have found that the best method is to just add "reddit" to my search of the product name. While it is most certainly gamed, you still see mostly real content as well as descriptions and pictures of issues.

Seeing 4 posts with pictures of the same failure on reddit is a pretty good sign the product has a problem.

>I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage.

Yes, in order to re-start, but what then? The whole user reviews concept is bonkers, I would add that there are - besides "fake" reviews - "real" ones BUT written by clueless people (in good faith, but completely disconnected from an objective rating), and in this it is also way off the "5 star" rating where 4 stars are already "not so good".

I think the "restart" goes back to trusted reviewers/companies offering reviews as their business. E.g. Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc.

Then it's entirely how much you trust the reviewers, and whether you agree with their matrics/tastes.

Maybe there should be leagues of reviewer companies that can get promoted and relegated, based off of how well their reviews align to purchasing boosts and complaints. That's probably a horrible idea.

I really like wire cutter but they convinced me to buy an awesome convection toaster oven that takes seven minutes to lightly toast a piece of bread on its highest setting.

My "favorite" useless review is the "I just got it and unboxed it. I haven't used it yet, but I know it's going to be good!" five star review. How I hate those.

>How I hate those.

Exactly, and rightly so.

But as well the "negative" ones like (I swear I have seen more than one of these) "The item arrived but it is a darker yellow than what seen in the pictures on the site." which may have some meaning if you order - say - a scarf to match a coat (but you'd better go to a shop with the coat and find a matching colour scarf) but doesn't really apply to - still say - a chainsaw or a power tool.

Loosely related, but flickchart is a moving ranking site whose tagline is: "If they're all 5 star movies, which one's the best?" I wonder if something like that could be adapted for product review sites? I suppose that would require you to have purchased 2 different cast iron pans, for example, to pick a favorite though.

How about, for someone to post a review, you have to take a picture of yourself with the product. But before you take the picture, you get randomly assigned a number. You must post a picture with that number in the photo. Then either do magic machine learning to check, or have a review process. Better, have it be manual. Get more people in the process, not less. I think this is an awesome idea, which would be completely ruined by fake reviews, but I'd feel much safer if there were like 1/10th the number of products but knew with certainty that a real human vetted and cared about that specific review.

How does this prevent shill reviews?

"I am a competing asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 1 star review from Amazon to make your good product sound bad."

Fake reviews are certainly a big challenge. 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. As mentioned by others, people trust reviews on Reddit, I try to achieve the same.

I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.

> I introduced a credibility system for every user, similar to Reddit's karma so people can see how trustworthy the user is

But theres a problem with that: people create an account, build up their reputation for a while posting credible reviews then when they're large enough and have a good rep/trust, start taking money for their reviews.

A similar thing happens on Reddit -- people build up an account to have lots of karma (sometimes they're literally just bot accounts reposting tons of posts), build it up for a few months, then sell the whole account off for money after the account has 100s of thousands of upvotes/karma.

Ever try fakespot?

It might be my cynicism talking, but I've started distrusting these meta-review platforms as well. I've used fakespot quite a bit, but I don't have the time to investigate them and figure out where exactly the money is coming from to power the website and company behind it. Could it not be easily used to distort perceptions of listings based on who pays Fakespot more?

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.

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.

I mostly stick with corded tools. Over the past 17 years I've managed to collect:

- A Milwaukee right angle drill. I don't use it much, but when I need it, it's invaluable

- A Porter Cable circular saw. I get a bit more use out of this. Circular saws are so versatile.

- A hand-held power planer. I used this a lot fitting doors to irregular door jams. I've loaned it out quite a bit too. Like the right angle drill, I don't reach for it often now, but when I need it, I'm damn glad to have it.

- Just purchased a Makita track saw. I'm anticipating a lot of long rip cuts in the next few months. I could do this with a circular saw, but I really like the simplicity of the track saw.

- Power drill. I've had it forever. I rarely reach for it, but it's nice to know it's there.

For battery powered tools I have:

- Power drill. This is a must-have for battery. The convenience is worth having to get a new one every so often. I'm on my second one now. I started with a Craftsman a long time ago. I replaced the batteries once and now I can't get new ones.

- I'm considering a jig saw. I'm not sure. It feels like this would be more convenient w/o a cord, and they're cheap enough that I wouldn't worry about replacing it. Still undecided.

For yard tools, I can totally see going with battery powered as well. I'm considering an edger. I hate dealing with two-stroke engines, and a cord would be a huge PITA. I'll probably get a battery powered one and try to stay in the same brand for leaf blower and chainsaw.

A resource I found useful when I wanted an impact wrench was a breakdown of which manufacturers are behind the different brands[1]. I knew not to waste time comparing a Black&Decker to a Porter-Cable since they're most likely the same thing. I also weighed the reputation of the manufacturer by averaging reviews from multiple brands. Getting lost in the illusion of choice is part of what makes online shopping problematic.

[1] https://www.protoolreviews.com/news/power-tool-manufacturers...

Just bought a lot of yard tools and picked Ego as my battery platform. Same reasons you outlined: I hate dealing with gas engines, cords are annoying and get you stuck. I can now start a job, pause half way do something else and continue again without dealing with starting engines etc.

The blower is fantastic and quiet at that too. Much more relaxing than a gas one making noise all the time. The edger is phenomenal but probably too much for my needs.

Thanks. I borrowed one of their chainsaws from a neighbor back in the spring. It worked flawlessly. That's the brand I was considering so glad to hear another positive review.

Can’t speak for Ego but I love my Makita battery chainsaw. I was on the fence about it, but now I have it, I’m glad I made the leap. You’re obviously not going to spend all day using it as a professional, but for DIY it’s perfect. Does a good job, not too expensive and requires little maintenance.

I have been circling around a battery-powered set of lawn tools (mower is the most important) and Ego keeps coming up. I suppose I should bite the bullet.

I used to have a cordless Craftsman drill/light set that I loved, then the batteries inevitably died. I shrugged off cordless tools for years, but recently went back. With Li-ions, it seems that the battery packs should be easily rebuildable.

I've got too many corded tools, so my decision isn't generally choosing between cordless or corded, but rather deciding whether adding a cordless version will help me. My metric is that cordless tools are useful for short jobs where reducing the setup time helps (eg pick up a driver and use it). Corded tools take less maintenance and are adequate for jobs where you're already setting up a work area... which is most things involving a jigsaw. Not having to manage the cord during long cuts would be nice, but doesn't seem like it would make any task significantly easier. Then again if I didn't already have 2+ jigsaws I'd probably feel different.

porter-cable quality has declined significantly now. it's not the same company it used to be. just in case anyone else is curious.

power tools have changed dramatically in the last 20 years. what was good then is no good now due to greed. Makita has stayed someone consistent as they only have the same brand, same for Bosch, Hitachi and Metabo (although not going forward), but their individual product lines have drifted. eg Bosch jigsaws are still excellent, their circular saws are whatever, some makita impacts have a design flaw, etc.

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.)

> because batteries died and couldn't get replacements

Search for “battery repack”. The batteries inside are always a standard size, and can be replaced by cracking the case. There are specialist companies that do it, but you have to find them.

You can do it yourself if the tool is worth spending the time on - basic soldering skills, and glue the case back together after you break it open to replace the cells (ugly, but works).

One I threw out many years ago. The other one (a hedge trimmer), the main problem is that I don't have the charger (or can't find it) and I couldn't find a replacement anywhere. In any case, I bought a (better) substitute that works with a tool that lets me switch out heads.

I never liked battery powered tools, because I tend to use them rarely. The battery is almost always dead when I want to use one. Then I have to delay whatever I want to work on to charge one. Assuming that they still hold a charge, which they may not.

A corded tool, I can leave in a box for 3 years, then pick up, plug in, and run it all day if I need to, then put it away for another few years, and never have to worry about it.

We have a battery-powered drill that my girlfriend brought with her when we moved in together over 7 years ago. We use it very rarely, probably once every 4 months. We don't even have a charger, and the battery has never been changed. Still enough charge to screw into particleboard. I hope someone here can explain how this is possible :D

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/ 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.

Interesting idea, just added this idea/feature to my backlog :)

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.

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.

looking for contributors?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think you're missing half of the point. It's a _review_ site for durable products. Presumably the reviews will tell you if it is good.

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?

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.

> 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.

Probably the first time this occurred to me was when I bought my first wireless headphones (bose qc35, FWIW). It hit me like a ton of bricks that I wasn't buying them, I was renting them:

* They will not last forever. Batteries die, wireless specifications change; some day I may buy a phone that uses GreenTooth instead of BlueTooth.

* In the event that I like this new (to me) product category (I had never owned noise-cancelling headphones before), I will always want to own such a thing, that does what this does, and is compatible with my device.

Because it has a limited lifespan, and the product may be something i want to continue to own for the rest of my foreseeable life, I am now signing up to pay a certain amount for life to own such a thing!

I always find the monthly cost hits me hard. Its weird to think that buying something is going to cost me $20/month when I would instantly reject subscribing to a $20/month service normally.

As a poor person this is so valuable.

Cheap boots are more expensive....

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.

I think part of the problem is that price doesn't dictate quality. It can be an indicator, but it's no guarantee.

And for occasional-use things, higher quality doesn't help as much, as you've seen.

Finally, having an item that fits you well can be better than an item that'll last longer. 10x so for occasional-use items.

For instance, I had a spatula that I loved. I have never found an better one, and every spatula that I've owned since then has been quite inferior. I bought that spatula at Walmart on impulse for just a few dollars. Someone broke it, and I've been searching for a replacement for it for years.

Bingo. If price was a good enough indicator for quality there would be no need for OP‘s website.

The "boots" analogy comes from a time when boots were a daily-wear item. You're right -- for infrequently used items, daily cost of ownership isn't as relevant of a metric. For for something you actually use daily or almost-daily (laptop, headphones, shoes, cars, etc) it makes sense.

FWIW, that particular cast iron pan seems to have some sort of ceramic coating, which.. makes it more nonstick or easier to clean, or something? I'm not sure. If you don't care about that, go for the $20 lodge cast iron pan, which will also last a lifetime.

But I agree with sibling comments, you don't need to buy quality for the stuff you rarely use. And/or, you may be able to not buy it at all. A high quality set of basic knives (chef+paring+serrated) and the acquired skill to use them can replace many kitchen gizmos.

The Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

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?).

Could you try again? I made some changes and tested it on Chrome and Firefox.

Looks to be working now!

Same here, but using FireFox on MacOS.

Same for me, but FF and MS-Edge on Win10. I disabled uBlock Origin, and also tried a private window to no avail.

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?

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.

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).

This is real - lots of previous BiFL brands/products have gotten significantly diluted over time as the company cuts materials costs, etc.

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_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.

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.

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-836...). The base is almost always coming off after using for a few years so the whole thing is unstable.

It's both, you can search for products or brands.

  > 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Stuck on bits can be a feature rather than a problem. Deglaze with some wine and make a sauce!

100% -- I never use my stainless frying pans because they are such a nightmare to get food to release and clean up afterwards.

We use a cast iron and a nonstick - that's it. You can cover 95% of use cases with that.

These are the only pans I use at the moment but I've been thinking about adding a stainless pan. How do you handle dishes where you're frying something, but then need to add some vinegar, a tomato base, or a cup of water to boil into the pan after frying? I use my cast iron at the moment because these dishes start with a lot of frying and then go straight in the oven near the end, but they're pretty hard on the seasoning in the pan. I've been thinking the stainless pan might be good for these so it can still go in the oven and I don't have to worry about the vinegar destroying my seasoning.

I wonder about that too - a bit of white wine or vinegar to deglaze the pan, that seems to unstick anything.

We gave up on nonstick - we never found a good one that wasn't ruined within a year. With the right balance of a bit of olive oil and a bit of butter, I can fry and scramble eggs in my cast iron without it sticking.

No way. If you use a soft plastic or wood spoon it should last much longer than that. My 10 CHF frying pan is still good after 8 years.

What's CHF? I found a CHF pan company but I only saw cast iron.

And my wife won't use cast iron because it's too heavy and hurts her wrist.

Each of these (non-stick, stainless, cast iron) are great for the appropriate application, while also having downsides (like ANY tool). Knowing what to use, and when, comes from experience.

> They're called nonstick for a reason; stainless steel does not compare.

Cooking eggs in a stainless steel pan is a bad example because you shouldn't do that. They are useful for different jobs. Stainless os great for other things, like cooking a piece of meat (try getting that fond in a non-stick pan!), or frying some potatoes... etc

Not sure about nonstick skillets. Put a little grease in one - it doesn't stick, just floats around. Put in the egg- sinks under the grease, adheres instantly to the skillet surface like paint. Never had a 'nonstick' skillet work. Just me?

I stay with cast iron, for decades now. No problems.

>Stainless steel frying pan instead of nonstick frying pans where the non stick coating wears off. Cast iron even better.

that's misleading if not outright wrong.

the counterpart to nonstick is not cast iron or stainless steel -- it's carbon steel. carbon steel pans compare well to nonstick when seasoned (good woks are still carbon steel, and you can still find good carbon steel skillet pans, just not by lodge).

Which pans would you recommend? I have found non stick ones to be garbage because the coating gets scratched. I have a SS pan but its super sticky even with oil. My cast iron one works well and is fairly non stick but a pain to clean.

check out America's Test Kitchen's review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suTmUX4Vbk

These interesting comparisons could even be included in the Buy For Life score for each product or brand.

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 :)

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.

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?

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.

> 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".

I really like your idea, pushing sustainable products of every day use is essential for our society.

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.

Are you, or will you, including information from Consumer Reports?

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.

Add patreon so people can support/fund it!

I guess a problem it'd be interesting to think about is sifting false reviews from real ones.

It reminds me a little of epinions.com ... a long forgotten startup that I liked very much.

You should try accessing your site with cookies disabled.

Love it. Great idea.

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