How do you manage trustworthiness? This is an issue I've been thinking about for quite some time and haven't found a satisfactory solution to.
I like this idea and a lot of
similar information sharing sites but I find in today's environment, anything successful will be targeted by misinformation and gamed which makes it difficult to determine if the information was provided in an uninfluenfed manner from the product creator/retailer/etc. who have obvious conflicted goals.
The best efforts seem to be information sites that are successful enough to gather enough data to represent something accurately from a user base but not so successful it becomes a target for corporate advertising and marketing groups. Reddit communities still provides some of this but have become a target for advertising as well and also are more difficult to extract useful information from.
Amazon has "verified purchase" which is still gamed using other techniques. I've found the best model is still Consumer Reports for fair product assessments but they only speculate on durability since it would be incredibly difficult for their product assessment model (new products rolling out frequently, modified/re-released/etc and limited staff/personal time to keep up with).
A strong community of invested users is achieving these goals of trustworthiness on a bargains aggregator site I use.
Any bs is quickly shot down by the users, typically within minutes. It is a hard crowd for someone not posting a true bargain!
Sockpuppets are detected nearly instantly as some blessed members check the post history of accounts and flag and suspicious or new accounts that are posting things that don't pass the sniff test.
The site also tends to provide insight as to quality, longevity, issues etc of products .. I had a quick browse of OPs site and I applaud the idea but I will personally be sticking to ozbargain as it fulfils the same need for product info, plus many more such as bargains, discoverability, and a great laugh from time to time like https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/569582
I've found them to be great for getting up to speed on quality of products like snow blowers, some kinds of cars, etc. Their model seems like the only way to provide a service that good, outside of embedding with a community of enthusiasts enough to make yourself an expert consumer.
I wish there was some way to provide their service for free, but I don't think we should discount the possibility that there literally isn't a way to crowd-source here -- that the only options that work well are (a) their current model, consumers buy subscription to consumer reports, (b) some huge-enough-to-benefit-from-ecosystem-level-effects patron foots the bill for ConsumerReports or something like it.
Long shot, but maybe someday a marketplace like Amazon could be a patron. They struggle with lots of sub-par products being sold, so maybe being the patron of such a service could be rationalized as a PR move as well as a practical benefit to buyers/a way of providing stronger-quality signal.
I know that if I could see a pop-up link to Consumer Reports' info on a product when buying -- or, better yet, choose to restrict my buying only to things that are confirmed to be awesome by CR when I'm buying a BIFL type product, so I don't waste my time -- I'd buy BIFL stuff on Amazon more frequently.
I think even the CR model has drawbacks - users on this thread talk about degradation of product quality from a manufacturer over time. It's hard to imagine that even a CR model could handle that. Their comparisons are a snapshot.
I still turn to Wirecutter or Outdoor Gear Lab first when I'm trying to understand the landscape and feature set of major purchases because you're right, that's the only way to make a broad comparison.
Amazon does sponsor several review sites via their Onsite Associates program[1]. The bigger challenge for me with buying BIFL from Amazon is that they seem to have real problems with counterfeit goods[2]
I like this idea and a lot of similar information sharing sites but I find in today's environment, anything successful will be targeted by misinformation and gamed which makes it difficult to determine if the information was provided in an uninfluenfed manner from the product creator/retailer/etc. who have obvious conflicted goals.
The best efforts seem to be information sites that are successful enough to gather enough data to represent something accurately from a user base but not so successful it becomes a target for corporate advertising and marketing groups. Reddit communities still provides some of this but have become a target for advertising as well and also are more difficult to extract useful information from.
Amazon has "verified purchase" which is still gamed using other techniques. I've found the best model is still Consumer Reports for fair product assessments but they only speculate on durability since it would be incredibly difficult for their product assessment model (new products rolling out frequently, modified/re-released/etc and limited staff/personal time to keep up with).