Ask HN: Why is not there a Rotten Tomatoes for shopper electronics?

Phil Tadros · February 20, 2024

2024-02-20 12:02:59

It’s easy to review entities that all exist in a single database.

Consumer electronics products are far harder to find categorized in a single place.

You also have to contend with the fact that movies are essentially immutable – if you watch the same edition as someone else you are seeing an identical product. Consumer products might be damaged, might be counterfeit, or might be incorrectly classified. All of these makes it really hard to build a single source of truth for reviews.

The bigger issue though, IMO, is the duration of the experience. A movie lasts for 1-3 hours. That’s the extent of the experience, and thus all reviews are fairly constrained. Consumer electronics can last for decades, so it’s very hard to know when a review should be left, how long a person needs with a product to feel ready to leave a review, whether it should be a “long term” review, etc.

> You also have to contend with the fact that movies are essentially immutable – if you watch the same edition as someone else you are seeing an identical product. Consumer products might be damaged, might be counterfeit, or might be incorrectly classified. All of these makes it really hard to build a single source of truth for reviews.

There’s also things like the vendor replacing parts but keeping the same product name/SKU, or technically giving it a different ID but hiding it so far down the marketing materials that you’re unlikely to be able to find it. This comes up a lot in the aftermarket ROM communities when you have to say things like “this image works on SomePhone 6a+ but only the 2022 model!“. Granted, movies also can have sometimes silent edits that are presented as if they’re the same thing (looking at you, Star Wars) but I would argue that it’s less pervasive and there are fewer versions to keep track of.

Well, consumer reports is still kicking. I don’t think an aggregate review service does much good though.

Reviews for physical items are super inaccurate. The average consumer doesn’t have the money to buy 10 laptops and compare them, so they buy one and hold a biased opinion about it. In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn’t interested in reviewing it.

Besides, a ton of reviews are fake these days. You just can’t trust them anymore. And for many products, the manufacturer cheapens them oven time without telling the public. So a review from 2 years ago may not reflect the quality of today.

The internet used to be filled with nerds and people that are interested in things enough to seek information on the web. Now, internet is a marketing tool, filled with corp influence and mostly garbage.

I really miss the old days of niche forums, gaming communities with own servers and forums. You were actually able to get decent and reliable information, now internet is mainstream.

I suspect part of it is because movies and other forms of media are more likely to be ‘shared’ experiences than consumer electronics are. Like okay, some systems are probably popular enough with the population that this sort of review setup could work well (iPhones/iPads/Apple devices, video game consoles*, high end Android devices, maybe certain leaders in their market niches), but a lot of the time the market would be spread too thin to provide a reliable set of reviews for every product. Like, how many toasters exist on Amazon right now? Apparently about 740 from a quick check.

Add that to however many other brands and models aren’t listed there, and I’m not sure you’d find enough reviews to make such a site worth it. Especially not professional ones, since even the likes of Which don’t review every single device ever released.

It might also be surprisingly hard to find said products in such a database if it existed too, since often only the model number is slightly different, with the core name being identical across variations. So I suspect it’d be significantly more challenging for users to use than Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, where looking up something like ‘James Bond’ or ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ will get a bunch of easy to understand results.

Because there’s more money interested in subverting or eliminating such efforts than there is in seeing them run well.

Ideology won’t even save you there: it doesn’t matter if you want to run such a site with editorial integrity and all the trimmings. The folks who want you silenced outnumber you and have more resources than you do.

Rotten Tomatoes worked because there was a major regionalized media industry (newspapers, magazines, and TV stations) that sponsored film critics, which created a rather large pool of dedicated expert film reviewers, a significant fraction of whom were sort of inherently credible.

Are there enough dedicated consumer electronic reviewers to bootstrap the same kind of thing in that space?

And of course, another problem you have is that with the collapse of the local news industry, Rotten Tomatoes has lost enormous amounts of credibility.

Unlike video games and movies, there’s just not much overlap to aggregate for any given consumer product because there are just so many devices in every category.

The best case scenario seems like it would be PC gaming gear, for example, since there’s so much coverage. But consider “best gaming mouse”: the first handful of google links all cover different mice. I’m not sure what that UI would look like if you tried aggregating this. And I think your aggregator would feel like a shallow passthrough rather than anything independently useful like those low-effort made-for-adsense spam sites.

If you’re fishing for ideas, I think first-party curation is far more useful and in line with what people want. Consider how https://www.logicalincrements.com/ works for PC elements, one thing I exploit each time I wish to purchase one thing PC associated.

I do not wish to examine a bunch of choices. I would like somebody to filter down the choice for me.

Because you can’t release the same movie under a different title at each theater to avoid comparison shopping. This is exactly what happens with consumer electronics and mattresses.

The Wirecutter served this purpose for me for a long time. But I also check the Amazon reviews.

With any kind of purchase, I do the same thing as I do with news – I survey all of the sources and look for the outliers and also the common threads. Then I form my own opinion.

Once upon a time, Amazon was that review site. But as someone else pointed out, if you’ve got money and want to subvert reviews, you can do it. Also Amazon is so flooded with weird junk brands nowadays it’s hard to find anything. Hey, want to buy a XOOTUSX phone? Me neither.

in the uk there is a organisation called “which” (which.co.uk) who run a battery of tests on all sorts of things from phones, cars, insurance, ovens and chairs. They then give ratings.

You haave to pay a subscription, but that in theory keeps them on the straight an narrow, and at least avoids them being a advertising system for amazon or some other large conglomerate

They only review the initial experience with the product. If a car has an engine that explodes in a few years, or an electronic device loses updates in a year from purchase and turns into a brick – CR will not capture this.

That’s not exactly accurate. Have you seen the pages and pages of red and black circles? They track the reliability of vehicles over time (5-10 years) broken down by problem area (transmission, electrical, etc). That’s where the real value is.

What do you mean? I have been a member for a number of years and they ask me either yearly or semi-yearly if I still own the product, if I would still recommend it and about any new major purchases.

Products I have been asked about more than once:

Heat Pumps

Cars

TVs

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