I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and filtering by depth and building a decent search around them and a good community would work better. Than after all this, a video would be very useful.
Ah, and one more thing - try to filter out the bullshit apps, the ones without much value on product hunt. "A dating app where you can only date 1 guy"? and other stuff like that. Sorry but i have much better ways of wasting time.
But let's think about an ideal service. Such a service would have 2 forms:
1. It gathers in some form, all the "jobs" i need to do, and how well they are done today, and how much i pay for them - and than from time to time offers me concrete recommendations how to improve my life: "you could save $X each month , if you'll use this new money transfer startup". Or "you could use this recipe book, to save a lot of time and get similar level of food you're making now". etc.
Amazon does that to some extent, but it has still has some ways to go.
2. Another successful mechanism is create a RICH and DEEP tagging system for each product and search/browse through those tags - jinni.com once did it for movies - and it was a phenomenal movie discovery tool. Far better than anything we have today.
Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.
The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
The main impediment to your goal, tbh, seems the quality of the data.
For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource.
For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google.
> Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.
> The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to:
A) Switch
B) Be that detailed.
C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.
I don't think that's a fair representation of what the mods concluded.
'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
Thanks a lot. I'll definitely do my best to read most (or all) of these. I am seriously interested in HN's official position on political posts.
I am not in an extreme position -- namely to deny that political posts don't have any relevance. That's not true. But I feel those discussions have either rarely been productive, or have way too many comments for somebody to extract a useful gist, or both.
A common occurence these days, with the rapid rate of innovation. It's like we're missing some efficient product discovery tool.