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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

I'm building buyforlife.com, a platform to overcome cheap products and keep corporations accountable - the Rotten Tomatoes for products.

Have you ever been annoyed about an Amazon review saying "Package arrived flawless after one day, 5 stars"?

I want to change the way people review products. I'm now introducing "Recurring Reviews". After every year, the reviewer will receive an automatic reminder to assess the condition of the product and if the reviewer is still happy with it. This is how we can follow the whole lifecycle of a product.

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I can guarantee you that the customers who actually care about quality are the ones you'll lose first.

We're in general interested in items that are built-to-last, not in being annoyed for each purchase on an annual basis. If you would like to make an impact in the "buy for life" arena, I suggest you carefully select your vendors to actually produce items that are worthy of that label. Quality builds a reputation over time via word of mouth, not via online reviews.

(This might still be a workable approach if you can give trusted reviewers a platform to highlight what they consider the best & most reliable, but you'll still need to vet those reviewers carefully)

I've had a similar idea for a "Metacritic for products" so I love this idea.

It'd be interesting to collect reviews from established reviewers (rtings, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc) and create an average score too.

That's what I plan to do :) Although I realised that creating a meaningful "score" from all the different sources is quite hard. Have you ever started working on your "Metacritic for products" idea?

What about things that are intentionally built (in a good way) not to last for life?

e.g. clothing built with more sustainable and/or more performant materials may not be 'buy it for life', but to some may be a better item.

How do those get reviewed over time? For example I have a few different wool sweaters - my favorite one I've bought twice and yet falls apart more rapidly than others.

One example of this brought up is https://www.econtalk.org/elizabeth-pape-on-manufacturing-and... - where in the interview she states her clothing items aren't built to be 'for life'.

There seem to be filters for several ethical labels (vegan, fair trade, …)

If you filter by those and still find that this product has a shorter lifespan than comparable products then idk.

Wonderful idea! As others have pointed out already it’s getting more difficult to find items that are still available for purchase. When they are still available they might not be built to the same specifications as before. I’ll swing over to the site and upload a few products I’ve been happy with that are still built to the same specifications. There is a thread somewhere over in the mrmoneymustache forums where you can likely attract some interest if the mods allow you to post. Best of luck!

Congratulations on your launch! I like this idea a lot.

On your about page you say:

>> Part of our solution is the automatic scraping and aggregation of data from all over the web. In addition, we are partnering with different organizations that provide us with verified sustainability data.

I don't understand how scraping the web is useful to you. Can you explain?

I also don't understand how partnering with orgs will provide you with verified sustainability data. What type of organizations are these?

That is indeed a very confusing text paragraph, I just changed it to make it more understandable.

With your edit, at least to me, you've made this even more interesting. Feel free to disregard these questions because at this point I feel I'm prying.

>> We want to help you finding products and brand that reflect your values. That's why we collect a lot of information about a brand, i.e his manufacturing practices, certifications, warranty or repair service.

How do you suppose you'll match a user to a brand (or to a collection of brands)?

>> We are not in a position to assess such data, so we are partnering with different companies and standardisation bodies that assess sustainable production standards.

That sounds like a deliciously hard problem to solve. Are you hiring? Or are you looking for tech partners?

This paragraph might also just mean they use data from an organisation like Oxfam for example.

I really like this idea. How do you stop it descending into the cesspit that is Amazon reviews? I trust my opinion on things, but less so random internet strangers.

In the Uk I use Which? to get an idea of what’s good and what’s not.

Funnily enough on your homepage I saw the Miele vacuum that I have had for 12 years. Just yesterday I was marvelling at it as it wound up the cord flawlessly after all these years, 6 house moves and zero maintenance.

We are working hard to prevent spam and fake reviews (as discussed in another comment). I might write a blog post about this challenge soon. By the way: I would love to read a Buy For Life review about your loved Miele vacuum :)

Bit of a nit but it often puts people off a service/product if something appears deceptive, even unintentionally:

Have you ever been annoyed about an Amazon review saying "Package arrived flawless after one day, 5 stars"

Amazon doesn't allow that kind of review, I'm sure some slip by but they do have policy against this and enforce it.

I am annoyed by those on every single Amazon product I look at (frequently, as I'm a generally happy customer).

It happens and is annoying, regardless of policy.

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