| 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. |
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.